EVENT DESCRIPTION
Contemporary By Angela Li is proud to present group exhibition curated by Hong Kong curator, Shirky Chan, Still be-Life, from 15 January to 28 February 2026, showcasing works by seven Hong Kong artists, including Jess Lau, Doris Ng, Natalie Ng, Lukas Tam, Tsang Chui Mei, Annie Wan and Candyce Wong.
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.
ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER
Jess Lau (b.1991, Hong Kong) is a moving image artist working in video, animation, and installation. Her practice centres on narrative fragmentation, embodied memory, and the durational nature of artistic labour, exploring the porous boundary between fiction and reality through layered manual processes that accumulate traces of the body and emotion.Doris Ng’s (b.1987, Hong Kong) practice encompasses participatory performance, visual art, and painting to interrogate relations between bodies, spatiality, and social structures. Mobilizing play, embodiment, and Crip theory as critical methodologies, her work reconfigures notions of connection, temporality and agency while rigorously examining belonging and the production of boundaries.
Natalie Ng (b.2002, Hong Kong) is a Hong Kong artist who primarily creates figurative works using oil painting as her medium. Graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University, Ng is passionate about exploring interpersonal relationships and personal emotions through her art, she focuses on depicting various textures and details to evoke a sense of intimacy between subjects. Ng currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
Lukas Tam (b.1967, Hong Kong) graduated from the Department of Fine Art, University of Reading, UK in 1991, Tam then pursued postgraduate studies (painting studio) at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College of London (UCL) and graduated with distinction in 1995. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Tam works in various media with a special focus on image making, installation and land art.
Tsang Chui Mei (b.1972, Hong Kong) obtained her Bachelor and Master degree in Fine Arts from the department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1996 and 2004 respectively. She is currently the lecturer and subject coordinator (Painting) of Hong Kong Art School.
Annie Wan (b.1961, Hong Kong) obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the Fine Arts Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is a retired Associate Professor of Academy of Visual Arts of the Hong Kong Baptist University. Her work often explores themes such as reality and illusion, history and memory, and the relationship between art and everyday objects. Wan has participated in numerous local and overseas exhibitions, as well as international residencies, arts festivals and biennials.
Candyce Wong (b.2003, Hong Kong) graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2025.. Straddling the line between narrative and non-narrative, Wong’s works are often inspired by fleeting sensations of her daily existence, piecing together images that is full of possibilities. Recent creations emphasize intuitive combinations of images and visual play. On a technical level, she values the materiality and texture of her work, treating each painting as a physical object to add depth and complexity to seemingly simple imagery.
