Tours of Henry Shum 'Vortices'

Empty Gallery is pleased to present Vortices, our first solo exhibition with Hong Kong-based painter Henry Shum.

We’ll be leading guided tours of the exhibition at 2:30 and 5:00pm.

Tours will last 20-30 minutes and be conducted in English, and begin on the 19/F of the gallery.

Drawing its title from an anachronistic term for ‘vortex’ once employed by William Blake and Descartes to describe the spiral-like structure of the cosmos, Vortices assembles a thematically interconnected group of recent oil paintings along with a single wall mural. Shum locates his source materials within the tides of mediated imagery which daily engulf our consciousness, transmuting these eclectic images into paintings which seem to pulse with an oneiric energy. Rendered in undulating lines and diaphanous washes, these haunting compositions (whose fugitive motifs are mirrored and inverted across the show) depict otherworldly scenes which are at once distant and familiar – tenebrous spaces of late-capitalist dream.