The Torrent & The Fold

On View: 4 - 31 July, 2025
PV: Thursday 3 July, 6 - 8 pm

Curated by Louis Blanc-Francard and Wenhui Hao

Featuring: Amy Hui Li, Dingyue Luna Fan, Freya Fang Wang, Ji Won Cha, Kristy M Chan, Lau Yee Vanessa Fong, Seohyun Oh, Shuang Jiang, Wenhai Ning, Wenhui Hao, Xi Liu, Xiaoyi Han, Xinran Liu and Xuanru Wang. 

Co-curated by Wenhui Hao and Louis Blanc-Francard, The Torrent & The Fold brings together fourteen emerging artists from East Asia. Capturing a distinct moment in abstract painting, and shaped by intercultural exchange, personal narrative and shared context, the show reflects a shared desire to navigate identity, memory and place through form. Many of the artists are recent graduates of the Royal College of Art and part of a broader London-based cohort. Several now work in studios within the same industrial complex beyond the Walthamstow marshes, and a close-knit community has formed - one grounded in friendship, care, and mutual support. 

This exhibition investigates how the accelerated pace of life and technological innovation have defined this wave of abstraction, one that is anchored in gestural and intuitive painting. Examining abstraction not only as its own visual language but also as a philosophical enquiry, it intersects in a dynamic interplay between history and culture, individual and collective, past and present, and East and West.  At its core, The Torrent & The Fold celebrates the cultural richness embodied by artists who create far from their homelands, navigating a contemporary existence marked by displacement and continual movement. Drawing inspiration from Gilles Deleuze’s theory of ‘nomadic thought’ (1973), the exhibition foregrounds the fluidity and instability of identity: it proposes that both individual and collective selves exist in ‘moments of flux’, resisting fixed definitions bound by time or place. While abstraction serves as this group’s common form of expression, each artist brings a distinct visual language informed by their own experience of modernity. They are united by a commitment to abstraction as a way to explore questions of memory, belonging, and what it means to exist in an ever-shifting world.

Writer and academic Miranda Jing Chance offers reflections on individual works in the show:

Co-curator and artist Wenhui Hao works on multiple canvases at any given time, turning to each in short bursts of energy. She folds her lived experience into the numerous underpainted layers of the canvas, creating a rich, jewel-toned and atmospheric emotional landscape. In this transfer of emotion, You are my ever-suspended sharp untouchable mirror (2025) becomes a prompt, a catalyst, a site of transformation for Hao. 

Hao is not alone in constructing the artwork as an active participant complicit in its own creation. Kristy Chan, describes her work as “doing something to you, and you are doing something to it”—these artists treat the surface as more than a passive receptacle, they position the painting as an interlocutor, deeply involved in the transformation of the artist.

Unbetrayable by Shuang Jiang, who labours quietly and slowly over a picture, introduces a different temporality into the exhibition space. Trained in printmaking, Jiang brings her attention to how line can bring relief, creating pockets of vertical depth into which the eye repeatedly plummets in an exercise of vertigo.

The body emerges for these artists in different ways. Lips and tender gazes rise like plumes of smoke from the painstakingly drawn details in I Long to Return to the Golden Field of My Dreams (2025) by Lau Yee Vanessa Fong; Amy Hui Li transforms organza into flesh, tearing and repairing the surface in an alternating cycle of destruction and care; unidentifiable dancing figures glide across the surface of Wenhui Hao’s atmospheric worlds.