CHOW Chun Fai, Ivy MA King Chu 'The Fifth Season'
周俊輝、馬琼珠《第五季》
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19 July - 16 August 2025
Gallery EXIT presents 'The Fifth Season’, a duo exhibition showcasing the artistic practices and collaborative dialogue between CHOW Chun Fai and Ivy MA King Chu across different creative states. This collaboration began in 2023 when Chow encountered Ma's 'Bird of Shape' series created during her travels, leading to his deep reflection on the concepts of 'lightness and weight' in her collage works. The two artists present a striking contrast in their creative backgrounds: Ma has long lived a nomadic lifestyle, developing a spontaneous and portable collage practice, while Chow works from a stable studio environment, maintaining a bold painting style with clear thematic focus. Building on these differences, they engaged in a six-month online dialogue, moving from casual life updates to impromptu conceptual exchanges, deeply reflecting on their respective practices and exploring the limitations and experimental possibilities of their working conditions. This process of this exploratory collaboration generated rich creative outcomes. During the exhibition period, the artists' life situations underwent an intriguing reversal: Chow embarked on travels while Ma ended her wandering to settle in a small European country. In his journeys, Chow contemplated the relationship between place and traveler, believing that one should maintain a 'gentle whisper' approach when describing unfamiliar places, preserving beautiful moments purely in personal 'memory drawers.' Returning to his studio, he reopened this long-forgotten drawer, discovering unexpected creative materials: stones collected during his cycling tour around Taiwan, a 1901 poetry book obtained in Berlin, Germany, and a parking ticket from Pennsylvania, USA. On these objects, he painted corresponding travel memories and local characteristics. During her six months of settled life, Ma gradually adapted to a regular daily rhythm. The scenery on her daughter's school route, English books borrowed with her local library card from limited selections, a frequently passed tree, morning light filtering into her home, and the vivid colors of food ingredients all became sources of creative inspiration. Working within limited spatial conditions, she returned to primitive automatic drawing and sketching, ultimately completing three series of small oil paintings: 'Square Scenery,' 'Domestic Nature,' and 'Still Life Theatre.' The exhibition title 'The Fifth Season' comes from Ma's sketching notebook. Weather and seasonal changes are among the most basic topics in human interaction—seemingly trivial courtesy conversations that can, under special circumstances, carry profound meaning. 'The Fifth Season,' as a concept beyond the four seasons, could represent either a continuation of seasonal cycles or encompass all possibilities of intuitive phenomena, repeated displacements, and imagined imagery. CHOW Chun Fai (b. 1980, Hong Kong) obtained his BA and MFA from the Department of Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chow works primarily with painting and photo installations. He is best known for his ongoing 'Painting of Movie' series, which appropriates cutscenes with matching subtitles from local New Wave movie classics and contemporary international cinema. The series encapsulates local culture and collective memories with a touch of Chow's sarcasm and humor. He also paints to depict the Hong Kong urban landscape, observing and engaging with the current political and social climate. Chow's works often question the transforming localness and cultural identity of Hong Kong. Chow's works have been featured locally and internationally. Recent solo presentations include: 'Interview the Interviewer II' (SC Gallery, Art Basel Hong Kong, 2025), 'Map of Amnesia' (Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong, 2024), 'Always After Now' (Touch Gallery, Hong Kong, 2022), 'Portrait From Behind' (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2020), 'CHOW Chun Fai' (Eli Klein Gallery, New York, 2018), and 'Everything Comes With an Expiry Date' (Klein Sun Gallery, New York, 2016). Significant group exhibition inclusions include 'Venice Meeting Point' (Venice Biennale, 2015), 'Hong Kong Eye' (Saatchi Gallery, London, 2012), and the 'Liverpool Biennial' (Liverpool, 2012), among others. Chow's works are in the permanent collections of the Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong Heritage Museum, M+ Museum Sigg Collection, Shanghai Himalayas Art Museum, and Red Bull Hangart-7, to name a few. He is the recipient of the Grand Prize of the Hong Kong Arts Centre 30th Anniversary Awards and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize. The artist lives and works in Hong Kong. Ivy MA King Chu (b. 1973, Hong Kong) received her MA in Feminist Theory and Practice in Visual Art at University of Leeds in UK in 2002 and Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 2001. She was an Asian Cultural Council Fellow in 2007 and received the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Awards, Young Artist Award in 2012. Cultivating an aesthetic characterized by quietness and stillness, Ma's work becomes a philosophical reflection on nature and history. Looking, collecting, drawing, and thinking, she works her way through history to find what we might call "the human thread" running through everything. The objects she collects, the images she selects, and the occasional photographs and videos she produces all strike a similar chord, one that is at once uncanny, disturbing, and beautiful. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Bird of Shape' (The 10th Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, Xiamen, 2024), 'Ascending and Descending' (Galerie J/, Paris, 2024), 'Poems, days, death' (Lumenvisum, Hong Kong, 2020), 'As Time Folds' (Art and Culture Outreach, Hong Kong, 2018), and 'Last Year' (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2015). Recent group exhibitions include 'Crossing' (gdm, Hong Kong, 2025), 'Alternative Time: Traversing through Mobility' (Mooroom, Hong Kong), 'So and So Private Collection' (Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, 2018), 'Ferry' (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2018), 'Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition' (Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong, 2006), and 'Curiosities' (Para Site, Hong Kong, 2005). Ma's works are part of the collection of the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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