We may believe still life is a quiet art. A captured moment. A bowl of fruit, forever fresh; a vase of flowers, eternally in bloom. But if you listen closely, you can hear the hum.
This exhibition, “Still be-Life”, is an invitation to listen. It is the second chapter in a conversation that began by questioning a genre's assumptions. Now, we venture deeper—into the space where objects begin to speak. They tell stories of love and loss, of present and memory, of a world thrumming with life just beneath the surface of the still. The artists here are not arrangers of form, but translators of voice. They stage quiet dramas and give language to the seemingly mute.
Jess Lau listens to the silent rhetoric of diplomacy, animating the staged flowers from summit meetings to reveal how constructed nature upholds a fragile peace. Doris Ng unfolds a cardboard cupcake box into a monumental map, charting the intimate terrain of a birthday and the loving geometry of absence. For Natalie Ng, painting is an act of posthumous dialogue, translating the furniture and artifacts curated by her late father into a shared, enduring visual language between them.
Where daily familiarity breeds numbness, Lukas Tam performs a gentle archaeology of peeling surfaces, uncovering raw nerves and concealed vulnerabilities. Tsang Chui Mei’s paintings treat objects as vessels of time, where wildflower or music stand becomes a “sign of coexistence,” contemplating the fragile threshold between memory and eternity. Annie Wan dwells on the boundary between tangible and fictive, using abstraction to survey not an object’s form, but the inner resonance it leaves in its wake.
Through ritualistic repetition, Candyce Wong engages the iconic apple in a quiet dialogue, each freehand iteration a meditation on order and spontaneity, allowing a universal symbol to breathe with mutable new life.
“Still be-Life” aims to bring out nothing is ever truly still. Life: raw, messy, and resonant; pulses through everything we have deemed static.
Come closer. Lean in.
The objects are waiting to share their secrets.