Chow Chun-fai and Ivy Ma: Together at Gallery EXIT

Description

The Fifth Season at Gallery EXIT brings together new works by Chow Chun-fai and Ivy Ma King-chu, exploring how changes in life rhythm and creative conditions can reshape artistic direction. Their collaboration began in 2023 when Chow encountered Ma’s Bird of Shape series and initiated a conversation that would evolve into a six-month online dialogue ranging from personal updates to conceptual experimentation.

Though their practices differ — Ma working with portable collage during years of travel, Chow based in a studio with a direct, painterly style — the process of exchange opened new territory. As the exhibition developed, both artists experienced reversals in their routines: Chow began to travel, collecting materials and impressions, while Ma settled into a quiet daily life in a European town.

From these shifts emerged two distinct bodies of work. Chow sourced objects from his travels — a stone from Taiwan, a 1901 poetry book from Berlin, a parking ticket from the US — and painted on them, using each surface as a holder of sensory impressions and travel memory. Ma, now rooted in domestic space, responded to subtle rhythms: the tree outside her window, her daughter’s walk to school, borrowed books, kitchen colours. Working within these limits, she returned to drawing and painting in small formats, developing three new series: Square Scenery, Domestic Nature and Still Life Theatre.

Taken together, the collaboration provides a view into how place, time and distance can generate new creative forms – and how quiet transformation becomes its own subject in art.