Last Gasp? Hong Kong Artist Michele Chu in Beijing

Holding your breath for too long, such as when underwater, or on a dare, never ends well. At the very least, it can lead to some form of bodily distress. Likewise, gasping contains the same, if not greater potential for equally severe consequences, given how the act of taking in a deep, sharp, open-mouthed breath, whether in surprise or in pain, will undoubtedly end with one “last gasp” — eventually.

gasp, running from 17 May to 23 August, is also the title of Hong Kong artist Michele Chu’s first solo exhibition at a contemporary art institution. It was co-curated by Yang Li and Zhou Chu for MACA Art Center and opened during the most recent edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing. Housed within a standalone building with a minimalistic industrial style and futuristic design, the non-profit centre can be found among the mostly commercial galleries populating Beijing’s 798 Art District, itself a former post-war military complex and electronics hub that was transformed into an expansive arts and culture zone in the 1990s. As MACA’s website states, the centre provides “forward-looking and experimental content [by] traversing disciplinary boundaries while forging international dialogues grounded in the specificities of a Chinese perspective” — conditions which prove conducive to contextualising Chu’s growing oeuvre. 

What is the sound of grief?

In 2019, after jointly graduating from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College in the UK, not from an art programme but from studies in Global Innovation Design, Chu has incorporated both disciplines into her work. That has led to her being awarded various international residencies including Delfina in London (2023), as well as programme and studio support, such as from soundpocket (2020–21) and HART (2021) in Hong Kong. From early group exhibitions like emo gym (2021) at Tai Kwun Contemporary, to you, trickling (2023), her solo debut at PHD  group, Chu has continued to produce work informed by their installation sites, and in concert with visitors’ ears as much as their eyes. 

These interactive environments have defined Chu’s experimental practice exploring “how the body manifests and adapts in situations of public tension or private introspection,” as her exhibition at PHD Group was described. It also places her among a generation of emerging post-handover Hong Kong artists whose multi-disciplinary and sensorial work, “examines ephemerality and ludic play in relation to intense social change and communal relationships.”

 Featuring three interrelated works on two floors, gasp also seeks to make connections. In doing so, the exhibition reveals how Chu has already established a resonant visual vocabulary whereby stretched fabric, combined with salt, are framed or weighted to form individual or interactive artworks. Inducing associations to other artists like Senga Nengudi and Ernesto Neto, Chu channels her own presence by creating signature, colour saturated works which highlight a visceral sensibility and are shaped by visitors’ movements within the exhibition. 

Nowhere is the implied undertone of gasp proposing how art can be a vehicle for emotional poignancy over immersive spectacle more on show than in “i-iv” (2026), which the artist has described as a “gravestone lullaby.” Comprised of four pod-like structures, the series of participatory sound sculptures each contain Himalayan salt bricks, nylon covered arched wooden frames and feature sonic and incandescent elements. Two are floor bound, “shaped for the body lying on its side” while the rest are “built for crouching and kneeling postures” elevated and accessible via wooden ladders like treehouses.  

 In fact, all of Chu’s work in the exhibition responds to co-curator Yang Li’s query, “What is the sound of grief?” by offering answers both through personages still here and those already lost. The artist, who is influenced by Chinese hauntology and its associated ritual performances in remembrance and respect, connects past and present generations, including the arc of Chu experiencing her late mother’s passing — one reason the exhibition serves as both “lullaby” and memento mori. But the pods’ sonic vibrations can only be experienced individually. This, in turn, enables visitors to comprehend what it means to ultimately expire alone — a lesson the artist extends from herself first, then by way of individuals interacting with her work, and finally through everyone engaging as fellow witnesses within the exhibition.  

Similarly, visitors encounter mass (2026) moving up the ground floor stairwell leading to the remainder of the exhibition. Simulating a church nave complete with a vaulted metal rod framed construction, Chu has used this kind of antechamber in the past, as a “mood palate-cleanser,” as she put it in an interview with Art Review — a sort of in-between state, from the outside world to the space inside the gallery.” This time, multiple netted units fall like droplets forged with salt. As such, their weight and number render it impossible not to bump into them and “become one” with the installation, a lesson the artist reinforces by having the salt leave traces on anyone climbing up the stairs. 

Detail, “gravestone lullaby i-iv” (2026) – Photo by Sun Shi © MACA Art Center, 2026

Weightiness balanced with lightness

Chu approaches other kinetic works in much the same way, by balancing weightiness with lightness, and by externalising interiority of which breathing can be considered its most vital form. This includes past works like “twisting, turning belly buttons” (2022) and “glimmer in your eye” (2023) implying the body and its internal functions. Using everything from cast bronze and menstrual blood, to lace and freshwater pearls, Chu combines these raw materials in ways which belie her abject sensibility, and in works which frame corporeal devastation within elegantly bejewelled armatures.

Scale and proximity also signal how audiences interact with her artworks, and to the interconnectedness between them. For example, Chu’s largest piece, “gasping” (2026) on the second floor of MACA, comprises parallel layers of copper-tinged organza and iridescent nylon. Hung from a steel track, a small gap in-between the layers of curved sheets expose the fact that one is opaque while the other, having been submerged in seawater, contains residual crystalised salt particles, wrinkling in some parts. Taking the shape of a Nautilus shell, the architectonic nature of the soft fabric walls hung from close to the ceiling to just above the gallery floor, echoes everything from Aleksandra Kasuba’s netted tunnels to Richard Serra’s torqued ellipses, to Christo and Jean Claude’s nylon panelled The Gates (1998) in a similar hue. More importantly, “visitors circumambulating the corridor form a ritual circuit through a space that alternates between wide and narrow, expanding and contracting like breath, producing a sense of disorientation in the dim light, with no sense of where it leads,” according to the exhibition brochure.

That said, Chu is part of a generation whose eco-sensitive concern for the future places a different spin on the artist using natural materials like salt and seawater. Even its double layering can be likened to an animal shell or skin, positing the potential for shedding and metamorphosis as people walk through and experience her works. 

gasping also shows Chu’s penchant for the theatrical by mimicking the backdrops and scrims used for changing scenery on stage and screen. However, the exhibition is no optical illusion to be measured from a distance. Rather, it envelops every visitor who enters; first, by the double curtain rippling and reiterating the movement of bodies walking alongside it as if waiting in the wings. Then, by turning visitors into performers “on stage” as they enter the pods; now as is so often the case, they are often photographing themselves in the process. This environment does breed a sense of Chu’s desired intimacy by anthropomorphising the site to render the air of the space tangible. The exhibition also traces the artist’s growing gothic sensibility with a touch of Vanitas, and which can be ascertained while moving deeper into the installation. This process privileges the internal and unseen, or at least the modestly rendered, which Chu likens to the act of breathing in this case. 

Back in Hong Kong, Chu was recently a nominee for the 2026 Sovereign Asian Art Prize, contributing “tracing your veins and blisters” (2026) to the accompanying exhibition. Hung as a row of copper pots and pans, spatulas, and a ladle, all the kitchen utensils show wear and tear, having been transformed through the technique of metal repoussé. 

In other words, their hammered surfaces show patterns outlining, in this case, “the blisters and veins on the artist’s mother’s hands and feet. These impressions [became] tactile records of care, sacrifice, and the invisible work that sustains domestic life,” according to the exhibition catalogue. It’s less Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) than a nod to the regional histories around art and gastronomy, while inviting viewers to consider, “how domestic labour shapes emotional landscapes, transforming ordinary tools into vessels of shared remembrance.” 

Like the earlier seeping (2023), including copper pipes intermittently filling water buckets around visitors invited to lie face down on a massage bed, tactile references to the labour behind other people’s leisure, abound. Both evoke circumstances that suggest our own relationship to what Chu calls an “anticipatory” — but in experiencing her work renders it a “participatory” — relationship to sentience through loss. For those who journey alongside Michele Chu’s most recent works, it’s a reminder, the artist has previously said, “how we might care for each other on a communal level,” and which her MACA Art Center showing leaves us willingly gasping for more.

Michele Chu’s gasp runs until 23 August at the MACA Art Center in Beijing. Click here for more information.