ART CITIES:Hong Kong-Sarah Sze
Sarah Sze gleans objects and images from worlds both physical and digital, assembling them into complex multimedia works that shift scale between microscopic observation and macroscopic perspective on the infinite. A peerless bricoleur, Sze moves with a light touch across proliferating media. Her dynamic, generative body of work spans sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation while always addressing the precarious nature of materiality and grappling with matters of entropy and temporality.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive
Sarah Sze’s exhibition in Hong Kong features new large-scale mixed-media paintings alongside a new series of hanging sculptures. In her latest exhibition, Sze explores how we make meaning from the never-ending stream of images that saturate contemporary life. Woven together from elements of her visual vocabulary, Sze’s new works destabilize the boundary between two and three dimensions, as imagery repeats across media, flowing from painting to sculpture and back again. Through this pictorial call-and-response, Sze prompts meditations on time, memory, and perception. Sze continues to develop her unique approach to painting as an image-making system in this exhibition. In a method that is at once recursive and generative, she uses elements of past paintings as a starting point, layering gestural brushstrokes, colored tape, torn paper with printed images, and other elements into compositions that confuse the digital and the analog, the tactile and the immaterial. In “Rip Tide” (2025), a collaged image of a bird soars over a vibrant sweep of pink, orange, and gold paint echoing a flock of birds ascending toward the painting’s upper register. Sze’s striking compositional methods allow recurrent imagery to appear and disappear, evolve and disintegrate—always existing in a state of flux, much like memory itself. The viewer becomes a traveler through the architecture of Sze’s compositions, which are informed by the artist’s deft layering of traditional Japanese printmaking, Chinese scroll, and Western landscape painting techniques. In “Double Speed” (2025), a small deer anchored at the bottom creates a vast sense of vertical scale above it, while a branch extending diagonally from the lower corner brings the surface forward and evokes a sense of great depth behind it. Sze has long been influenced by such varied art historical approaches to perspective and depth perception, which underlie her ever-evolving exploration of the relationship between two- and three-dimensional space across her oeuvre. The dense, immersive presence of Sze’s paintings is balanced by the relative weightlessness of hanging sculptures from her “Fractured Image” series, in which suspended fragments of pigment prints are imperfectly reassembled. Each floating image appears to be caught in an uncertain moment, a delicate tension in which the viewer is unable to distinguish whether they are pushing toward each other or pulling apart. Unfolding like an archipelago of images across the gallery, the fragmented horizontal picture plane of the torn paper intersects with the verticality of the silver necklace chains from which they hang. These ephemeral arrangements articulate their own space and conflate with views of the Hong Kong harbor outside the gallery windows. In her complex interdisciplinary work, Sze borrows from the physical and digital worlds to produce intricate sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints, videos, and installations that explore the precarious nature of materiality and the elliptical quality of time.
Photo: Sarah Sze, Rip Tide, 2025 (detail), Oil paint, acrylic paint, archival paper, acrylic polymers, ink, dibond, aluminum, and wood, 103 1/4 x 71 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches (262.3 x 181 x 6.4 cm), © Sarah Sze, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 25/3-3/5/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://gagosian.com/
