Chihoi’s “Leeway” and Yooyun Yang’s “With Hands”
By Alex Yiu
Installation view of CHIHOI’s "Leeway," 2024, at Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong,
Chihoi:
Leeway
Yooyun Yang:
With Hands
Blindspot
Gallery
Hong Kong
Jun 4–Jul 13
Unlike most exhibitions featuring two artists, Blindspot Gallery divided its space to separately show works by Taipei-based Hong Kong artist Chihoi and Korean painter Yooyun Yang. Titled “Leeway” and “With Hands,” respectively, this arrangement made side-by-side comparison between the two difficult. Still, one could not help but try to seek connections between them despite their distinct visual languages and subject matter.
Unlike so many artists who are academically trained, Chihoi is a self-taught illustrator and painter. He was born in Hong Kong in 1977, and it wasn’t until 2018 that he began working with oil paint, as well as continued his well-regarded pencil-on-paper illustrations. In “Leeway,” the gallery showcased 12 paintings from 2024 (during which the artist split his time between Hong Kong and Taipei), alongside the animated video The Train (2007/22), which used footage from the eponymous graphic novel.
CHIHOI, My Sky, 2024, oil on linen, 45.5 × 53 × 2.4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery.
CHIHOI, Long Nights, 2024, oil on linen, 38.3 × 45.5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot Gallery.
Chihoi’s canvases are typically small in size, around A3 dimensions, perhaps influenced by his practice in comic drawing. The largest, My Sky (2024), depicts the moment sunlight pierces through the mesh on a bus window, with the monotonous pattern rendered translucently through subtle variations. Another painting, Long Nights (2024), encapsulates the sense of alienation often found in his works, as Chihoi depicts two people seen through a glass-walled interior. In the distance, a man in somber gray looks uncertain, while the figure in the foreground faces away from the viewer, with long gray hair above a red coat that contrasts with the green foliage growing above. Seemingly mundane, Chihoi’s miniatures, with unexpected, popping colors and washed-out grays, capture quotidian moments reminiscent of a cinematic frame that opens a story.
YOOYUN YANG, Attached Piece, 2024, acrylic on jangji, 73 × 61 × 2.7 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Blindspot Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London/New York.
The other exhibition, “With Hands,” a debut solo in Hong Kong for Yooyun Yang, displayed her paintings made between 2023–24 of intricate workers’ hands and objects. Yang studied oriental painting at Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul and developed a process of using layers of diluted acrylic paint on Korean jangji paper, demonstrating the technique of the traditional medium in her atmospheric yet realistic compositions. In Attached Piece (2024), a hand places a screw on a wooden panel at the center point of a laser level. The board dotted with small holes and the neon-green laser are recognizable elements of refurbishment and construction, and the composition highlights the dullness of everyday work.
YOOYUN YANG, With Hands, 2024, acrylic on jangji, 75 × 142.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Blindspot Gallery, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London/New York.
This depiction of individuals and their working conditions is arguably more relatable in the exhibition’s titular work, With Hands (2024), which features a pair of hands bending a spool of copper thread on a pale-orange table. We see the worker’s dark-colored clothes and the light color of the table, before shifting our view to the details of the forelimbs’ segment—wrinkles, nails, knuckles, and a hint of discoloration on the back of the left one. Yang’s focus on hands perhaps suggests a certain solidarity with workers, making the viewer especially aware of the importance of ordinary laborers’ contribution to society.
Moving between the two exhibitions, viewers could easily reflect on their divergent forms of painterliness. While seemingly incongruous (and with differences in their backgrounds), both artists share an awareness of the external world and an observant eye for the minuscule. For Chihoi, these quotidian glimpses are his “leeway” from reality, pulling the audience into his ocean of thoughts. For Yang, her meticulous depictions of manual labor bring us into a space of meditation, as they require thorough inspection. Both of their works capture scenes that are often transient and easily ignored, rendering our indifferent gazes into spaces for reflections.
Alex Yiu is associate editor at ArtAsiaPacific.
