CHENG Ting Ting: Beautiful Corals
鄭婷婷《漂亮的珊瑚》
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4 October - 1 November 2025
Venue: 3/F, Gallery EXIT Gallery EXIT presents 'Beautiful Corals', an exhibition by CHENG Ting Ting, featuring new works alongside a group of paintings created between 2018 and today. Spanning eight years, the exhibition revisits the artist’s evolving journey while reflecting her ongoing exploration of painting as a language of form, image, and space. Through shifts in subject matter and technique, Cheng responds to personal experiences and changing surroundings, shaping a visual language that is both distinctive and personal. The exhibition title comes from Cheng’s 2018 work Beautiful Corals. At the time, she applied leftover oil paint onto a newspaper page printed with an advertisement for household appliances. She was drawn to the depiction of an underwater world on a television screen within the page and chose to preserve the image of the corals in her composition. Years later, revisiting this piece, she still found the image of the corals compelling. Today that image also resonates with her newer works through shared qualities of abstraction and ambiguity. For Cheng, making art is like returning, again and again, to a beginning. Beautiful Corals reminds her that certain images and threads of meaning endure, guiding her along paths that feel both new and familiar. 'Beautiful Corals' is at once a reflection on past works and an exploration of what lies ahead. At this transitional moment—both certain and uncertain—Cheng invites viewers into landscapes steeped in light, memory, and emotion, where traces of time and shifting moods intertwine. Cheng’s practice often centres on suspended moments: unfinished, unsettled, or in between. Through delicate brushwork, she captures the rhythms of daily life and the passage of time, turning fleeting impressions of journeys, spaces, and light into poetic images. In recent years her paintings have grown more abstract, with blurred forms, layered strokes, and soft tones evoking memory and emotion—extending her exploration of the possibilities of painting. The exhibition brings together works from different periods in a non-linear dialogue. This arrangement offers a wider view of the artist’s evolving language while creating a sense of rhythm and flow across time and space. Two new works open and close the exhibition, underscoring the dialogue between past and present while pointing toward Cheng’s upcoming exhibition at Gallery EXIT this November. CHENG Ting Ting (b. 1990, Hong Kong) mainly works in painting and drawing, and print-making. She received her BA in Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2013, and completed her MA in Contemporary Art at the University of Bergen in 2021. Cheng’s works are often informed by her personal memories and ever-changing everyday sceneries. Through responding to the dynamic living environment, she creates narratives that possess inherent fluidity. Cheng’s works has been shown locally and internationally since 2013, including solo shows at Gallery EXIT in Hong Kong: ‘Night Walk’ (2022), ‘Recipient Absent’ (2019), and ‘Fall In Fall Out’ (2017). Other recent solos include: ‘Overnight TV’ (Møllendalsveien 61, Bergen, 2019), ‘Enfante’ (chi K11 art space, Hong Kong, 2017), and ‘The Pendulant Mass’ (Galerie Ovo, Taipei, 2016). Her group show participations include ‘The Floating World’ (Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2023), ‘Before Arrival’ (SC Gallery, Hong Kong, 2023), ‘a little larger than the entire universe’ (Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, 2021), Takeover (Galleri FI4E, Bergen, 2021), ‘Very Natural Actions’ (Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2019), ‘A Tree Fell in the Forest and No One’s There’ (Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2018), and ‘Hi! Houses’ Art Exhibition’ (Dr Sun Yet-sun Museum, Hong Kong, 2016). The artist currently lives and works in Hong Kong. |