Elah WONG Tsoi Wai: Wild Awhile

Gallery EXIT presents a solo exhibition by Elah WONG Tsoi Wai, 'Wild Awhile', featuring the artist's latest paintings alongside a series of ceramic works created in collaboration with ceramicist Benny TO Kai On. For Wong, this year has unfolded as an open-ended process of exploration, with her practice attuned to the ebbs and flows of life. Her work evolves alongside life's trajectory, guided by the impulses of the present moment. She approaches the canvas as a space of continual transformation; through layers of colour and repeated gestures of rubbing and erasing, images emerge, dissolve, and re-form. Deliberately relinquishing coherent narrative logic, she allows conflicting imagery to coexist freely—apples become intersecting antennae, while melancholic thoughts are distilled into spare, economical lines. Each mark serves as a truthful record of her thinking. The works in this exhibition reveal a distinctive visual language. A Song, for instance, is a song of blessing: its undulating curves evoke life's journey, which, after its rises and falls, ultimately returns to its point of origin, while the painting itself loops through space like a suspended music player. Tomato is Life, Strawberry is Love Life responds to Frida Kahlo's final 1954 work, Viva la Vida: where Kahlo celebrated life through the image of watermelon, Wong adopts tomatoes to symbolize vitality and strawberries to evoke pleasure, constructing a visual language of her own through intimate, personal symbols. The exhibition also extends into three-dimensional form. Wong and TO's ceramic works depart from conventional ceramic practice, which often involves a single glaze firing; each piece in this series has undergone three firings. The process closely echoes Wong's approach to painting: following intuition, building up layers gradually, and recording the subtle negotiations and exchanges between the two artists. Deliberately left open and unfinished, these works preserve space for continued transformation and interpretation.