Woaw Gallery presents: “Around the World, Around the World”

Woaw Gallery is pleased to announce “Around the World, Around the World,” a major painting exhibition curated by co-founder of ATM Gallery, William Leung, featuring new works by artists from Europe, North and South America. The exhibition is on view from 24 September to 23 October 2021 at the gallery’s Wan Chai location.

Despite the current pandemic-related travel restrictions and lockdowns, “Around the World, Around the World” proposes a mobile look at contemporary art, and explicitly painting, from a global perspective. Inspired by Hong Kong’s multiethnic, diverse history, and challenging current realities, the exhibition offers a decidedly transnational dialogue by bringing together artists from various countries, generations, and cultural backgrounds.

All the featured artists share the desire to create and inhabit their own highly distinctive worlds by producing paintings that are entirely unique in style and content. Most of the works centre on figures—sometimes human beings, other times abstracted hybrids or surreal, dreamlike organisms. Some of the pieces are markedly expressive and colourful, while others use a softer colour palette and speak more delicately to the viewer. The paintings communicate a painterly sophistication in constant motion, oscillating between elegance, refinement, and intricacy on the one hand and crudeness, naivete, and ostentation on the other. The exhibition is simultaneously brash and measured, accidental and deliberate, capturing various traits of a city at a moment of stark transition.