Haneyl Choi graduated from Seoul National University's Dept. of Sculpture and received a master's degree from Dept. of Fine Arts at the Korea National University of Arts. He is a represented artist of P21 and currently lives and works in Seoul.
Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong
presents a group show featuring artists profoundly engaged with the cultural
tapestry of Asia and its diasporic narratives, including Luis Chan, Haneyl
Choi, Nicole Coson, Shota Nakamura, Peng Ke, Yeh Shih-Chiang and Hauser &
Wirth artists Bharti Kher, Tetsumi Kudo and Zhang Enli.
《Aura Within》 is
organized by Hong Kong-based curator and scholar Anqi Li and is presented in
collaboration with Clearing, Hanart TZ Gallery, Make Room, P21 and Silverlens.
The exhibition invites the audience to return to the body as ground zero in the
turbulent currents of our time and to explore urgent contemporary topics of
existence and perception, identity and memory, and the interplay between
nature, urban landscape and spiritual dwelling.
London-based Filipino artist
Nicole Coson makes her debut in Hong Kong with two large-scale oil paintings Double
Doors I (2025) and Double Doors II (2025), created
for this exhibition. Coson employs her body to activate the canvas, translating
shipping container doors that symbolize globalization and the ties between Hong
Kong and Manila—her homeland—into heavy, resonant traces.
In Berlin-based artist
Shota Nakamura’s new painting Untitled (garden) (2025), he
draws on art history, personal memory and popular culture to portray figures in
states of rest, meditation, or quiet detachment, delicately intertwined with
their surrounding environments to evoke emotional depth and a sense of
introspection.
South Korean artist Haneyl Choi’s Landscape of Abuse
(2025) and Play: Rhythm of Abuse(2023) are exemplary works
of his ‘trauma-scapes.’ Through the juxtaposition of fragile organic forms and
cold industrial matter, these works reveal a paradoxical symbiosis in which
struggle and resistance, confinement and sanctuary, pain and repair coexist.
Based between Shanghai and Los Angeles, Chinese artist Peng Ke extends her
photographer’s gaze in Begin Again(2024), transforming
mundane urban fragments—such as a bare tree stump or autumn leaves lodged in
concrete cracks—into luminous stained-glass panels, sanctifying a trembling
tenderness beneath the city’s seemingly rational order.
The exhibition also highlights
established names, including the late Hong Kong artist Luis Chan and late
Taiwanese artist Yeh Shih-Chiang. In Untitled (Legend of Goddesses of
the Sea) (1968), Luis Chan, inspired by monotype printmaking, allowed
accidental splashes of ink to evolve into whimsical figures he might have drawn
from people he saw on television or observed in Hong Kong’s everchanging
society.
In Green Sea and White Sail Framed in a Window(2007),
created during Yeh Shih-Chiang’s later years in rural seclusion, the lone white
sail drifting across the water is not a mere scenic depiction but a reflection
of the artist’s grounded inner self.
Based between London and New
Delhi, Bharti Kher will show three iconic works made with bindis—a cultural
symbol linking the real and spiritual worlds, and a recurring motif in her
practice that evokes tensions and questions around identity and belief.
The
works are on view alongside the late Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo’s cages,
where Kudo stages miniature theatres of a pathological allegory of modern
civilization, and Chinese artist Zhang Enli’s abstract and gestural canvases.
