Exhibition statement

The World Map from Hong Kong showcases Elaine Chiu's latest series of paintings and drawings that explore the post-COVID urban landscapes in Hong Kong. The experience of lockdown towards the pandemic urged an artistic reflection upon unity and balance. Here, Elaine imagines a new order and balance on her canvases, attempting to find solutions by painting a new “world map” from Hong Kong’s perspective.


In her paintings, she looks at how Hong Kong and the world are reshaping and repainting the boundaries this year. Using tectonic-plate-shaped colour blocks, she depicts cityscapes that decode and abstract into grids and pixels, reassemble and integrate into plates. Each unit represents different power and traits, inspired by her five siblings, fighting for space and coexisting in harmony on an imaginary “World Map”.

Presenting together the drawings series Decoding Cityscapes displays the artist's approach to extracting and comparing cityscapes, using squares as rhythm-measuring units. She examines a neighbourhood’s unique frequencies, palettes, patterns and culture through the process. It demonstrates the artist’s attempt to balance abstraction and figuration, Chinese and Modern, which aims to continue the modernist and post-COVID dialogues in Hong Kong.