Lulu NGIE: Lines of Breath
倪鷺露《線條的氣息》
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19 July - 16 August 2025
Gallery EXIT presents Lulu NGIE's solo exhibition 'Lines of Breath', featuring recent works alongside selected pieces from across her career. Working in Chinese ink and oil painting, Ngie explores minimalist line-making, using single brush strokes that capture her breathing rhythm and emotional state. These gestures bring life and movement to her painted figures. The artist deliberately removes backgrounds, shadows, and textures, making the body itself the space where her figures exist. She focuses on the edges and outlines of bodies, treating them as containers for emotion. Through subtle gestures and poses, she reveals inner feelings of anxiety, fear, and vulnerability. These flowing lines carry traces of past experiences while recording present breath and mental states—the essence of 'Lines of Breath'. Ngie doesn't paint as an outside observer but becomes the experience itself, projecting emotions directly onto canvas and paper. She sees the body as an inner universe full of unknown possibilities. Drawing on traditional Chinese painting techniques—the decisive single stroke (yi bi) and strategic empty space—she reinterprets Eastern aesthetics through a contemporary lens. Her lines shape forms while exploring questions of identity and self-discovery. The exhibition creates dialogues between works from different periods and mediums. 'Streaming' and 'Stirred' are displayed together, using bold lines to express how bodily sensations constantly change, with each feeling becoming a different figure. 'The weight of clouds' explores contradictions between lightness and heaviness, showing liquid-like human forms carrying seemingly weightless clouds. Ngie's practice offers deep insights into human psychology and emotion. Through minimalist brushwork, she transforms the body into a poetic space for expressing inner experience, capturing life's most delicate perceptions and states of being through the movement of lines. Lulu NGIE (b. 1972, Fujian) graduated from Hong Kong Art School in 2006, majoring in painting. Her works have been shown extensively, including solo exhibitions at Gallery EXIT in Hong Kong: ‘The Sensitive Body ‘(2022), ‘Relax Until Distraction Comes’ (2019), ‘ ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair 2016’ (Shanghai, 2016), ‘and Day After Day After Day’ (2013), ’also Fictitious Force’ (Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Los Angeles, 2018), Selected group exhibition participations include: ‘One · Square · Water · Soil’ (Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Hong Kong, 2025), ‘Minding the G(r)a(s)p’ (Parasite, Hong Kong, 2022), ‘In search of absence ‘ (Korea Cultural Center in Hong Kong, 2021), ‘Deep Silence’ (Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, 2017) and ‘To Each, his zone’ (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2016). Ngie’s works have been acquired into the collections of the M+ Museum in Hong Kong and LUXELAKES•A4 Art Museum in Chengdu and numerous private collections based in Hong Kong and overseas. The artist currently lives and works in Hong Kong.
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