Ticko LIU: Ephemera
廖諱衡《太陽又如雲》
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4 October - 22 November 2025
Venue: 13/F, Gallery EXIT Gallery EXIT is pleased to present 'Ephemera' by Ticko LIU, featuring his latest paintings. Liu treats painting as a collage-like practice—an intuitive weaving together of ideas, inspirations, images, and observations of the world around him. Drawing from daily life, he reimagines the ordinary through vivid colour and wave-like lines, creating spaces that remain grounded in the familiar yet shaded with a dreamlike quality. The exhibition reflects on the interconnectedness of all things, while also dwelling on fleeting, unrepeatable moments that vanish as suddenly as they appear. Liu captures beauty that is as brief yet brilliant as fireworks, using the passage of time and the weight of regret to probe deeper questions of feeling and existence. His works invite viewers into a visual journey that contemplates impermanence, offering both philosophical reflection and emotional resonance. The new works are inspired by the artist’s heightened sensitivity to overlooked details of everyday life: glimpses caught from a moving car, subtle shifts in natural scenery, or the accumulation of seemingly trivial fragments of information. These experiences sharpen his awareness of the fragility and brevity of human existence. Yet it is precisely this sense of smallness that renders every emotion more pure, every moment more precious. For Liu, painting is a way of materialising emotions—his works crystallise fragments of experience, capturing flashes of light as they flicker across the vast cosmos. Building on his earlier practice, this exhibition marks a further exploration of balance between reason and feeling. Drawing from both Chinese ink painting and Western oil traditions, Liu has developed a distinctive style shaped by freehand brushwork and inspired by the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden. Fascinated by how knowledge and emotion transcend time, he also turns to the colour palettes and spatial sensibilities of Japanese ukiyo-e, fusing these influences into a visual language uniquely his own. His paintings often pose speculative what if questions, transforming imagined scenarios into singular, unrepeatable forms. Highlighted works such as ‘5:30am in Ngong Ping’ and ‘Held by Moonlight’ exemplify this approach. They trace the artist’s solitary passage from night into the glow of dawn, where natural elements dissolve into dreamlike landscapes. Merging memory with immediate sensation, Liu turns moments of impermanence into images that feel timeless. Ticko LIU (b.1996, Hong Kong) graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Visual Arts from the Hong Kong Baptist University in 2019. Liu’s surrealistic paintings are collages of his myriad ideas, inspirations, images and observations. His creations are inspired by various daily scenes, flora and fauna in the natural world, the cinema and moving images, his collection of toy models. All these are reimagined by the artist and rendered in bright colours and undulating lines on the canvas, presenting a fantasy space of the everyday that is nonetheless believable and relatable. Participated solo exhibitions include ‘And yet it moves’ (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2024), ‘Nonsensical ways of seeing’ (Square Street Gallery, Hong Kong, 2022), ‘The Mystery Boxes’ (PMQ, Hong Kong, 2021). Group exhibitions include ‘New Gaze’ (Gallery EXIT, Hong Kong, 2023), ‘Sweeping Vistas’ (JPS Gallery, Hong Kong, 2023), ‘Landscape Long March’ (a.m.space, Hong Kong, 2023), ‘FUTURE MEMORIES Utopia Dystopia Nature’ (City University of Hong Kong, 2021), ‘Pathfinder’ (Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin, 2020), ‘HKFOREWORD 2019’ (10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong Kong, 2019). The artist currently lives and works in Hong Kong. |