Deferral | Echo
Launch: Saturday 30 September 2023, 7–9pm
Deferral | Echo is Kwok Tsui's first solo exhibition, comprising of new painting and drawing. It centres on Kwok's personal experience as an immigrant living in Northern Ireland, exploring the theme of displacement and the notion of home.
In the words of Anna Liesching, Ulster Museum curator, who has written a text to accompany the exhibition, "This body of work represents the push/pull between journey and stillness in Kwok Tsui’s practice and life. [...] Deferral, the feeling of missing milestones and moments, has been a constant in Kwok’s experience since he emigrated here in his early teens. The migration process, and the consequent lack of security, has delayed education, professional practice, childhood and even grief."
Born in China and growing up in Hong Kong, Kwok has since spent more of his life in Northern Ireland than China. Kwok's series of large-scale paintings capture moments of stasis and movement, and blend his multiple identities. Many of the works may be read as landscapes that oscillate between isolation and calm, loneliness, grief and comfort - reflecting in part the eye of the beholder as much as the artist's intention.
A series of events will accompany the exhibition and the extended text by Anna Liesching will be available to read with the exhibition guide.
Supported by the National Lottery through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Image: Kwok Tsui, Note, 2023. Oil on canvas, 170 x 105cm
Kwok Tsui (born 1989, China) is originally from Hong Kong, China, and now resides in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Kwok graduated from the Belfast School of Art in 2020 with First Class Honours, and is an active member of QSS Gallery & Studios in Belfast. In 2022, He was one of 11 artists selected to exhibit at The MAC’s 10th-anniversary exhibition 10 Years of Painting Shows – New Exits to celebrate the painting practices that have emerged from graduates of the BA and MFA Fine Art courses at Belfast School of Art since 2012. He was invited to exhibit in Golden Thread Gallery Portrait of Northern Ireland: Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto in 2021.
Future exhibitions include Border | Sky at Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, in November 2023, with a text by artist Joy Gerrard.
Kwok has been awarded the Minority Ethnic Artists and Residency Scheme to support his practice from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (2022), In addition, He has been nominated for the Arts Foundation Futures Awards (2024).
You can download the sensory map by clicking this link here.
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