Searching For Gold Sky

Group Exhibition - 7 March - 12 April, 2025
Outsider Gallery


Searching for Gold Sky brings together six artists exploring the evolving relationship between tradition and contemporary practice in Asian art. Working across painting, drawing, fibre and sculpture, they engage with historical narratives, material traditions and the shifting nature of cultural exchange, considering how inherited forms can be reconfigured and carried into a contemporary visual language.

Chen Gelin, born in Guangxi and trained in oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, stretches nylon thread between steel nails to build luminous fibre compositions shaped by Hakka weaving and Zhuang brocade. South Korean artist Cheolyu Kim, trained as a sculptor, builds dense pen drawings on birch wood from a childhood fascination with flight, where memory and dream dissolve into the fantastical. Beijing-based sculptor Gao Xiaowu turns rounded, cartoon-like figures toward the absurdities of modern life and, more recently, toward themes of ecology and rebirth. He Sen, trained at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, reworks classical Chinese painting in oil, layering heavy impasto with effects drawn from ink wash. Jin Sha reworks Renaissance masterpieces, removing their figures and leaving blank space for the viewer to fill. Balinese artist Made Wiguna Valasara pads and embosses canvas into low relief, questioning the romanticised, tourist image of Bali.

Together, the works show tradition not as something fixed, but as a living source that each artist reshapes in their own way.