HORIZONS: Sow & Tailor Pop Up: Wanchai

Woaw Gallery is pleased to host Sow & Tailor's first Hong Kong pop up, HORIZONS, a group exhibition connecting forty-six artists across multiple backgrounds at varying stages in career, opening Friday 24 March, 2023 @ 4-8pm in Hong Kong. On view through Saturday,15 April, 2023.

The bonsai tree, which Sow & Tailor credits as the conceptual inspiration for the gallery, is a miracle of boundaries: to propagate a flourishing tree within the confines of a pot demands both familial delicacy and a precision to detail. Since Sow & Tailor’s institutional debut in Hong Kong with Hot Concrete: LA to HK at K11 Musea, Karen Galloway’s keen eye for burgeoning talent has grown into a global root system. HORIZONS is her latest experiment in propagation — a mosaic of artists across backgrounds and boundaries in celebration of global community, while emphasizing the gallery’sa core value of intimacy over fireworks.

Hosted in Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district and featuring small works hung salon-style, the pop-up location is the apotheosis of the Sow & Tailor ethos — art made accessible, not just figuratively, but physically as well. The domestic scale of the pieces press up against the viewer, beckoning them to participate rather than merely witness. The artist list reflects a similar non-hierarchical equitability of space, holding equal room to emerging, mid-career, and established artists alike — nurturing space for artists of all kinds to occupy together, as one.

From the lush paintings by Jonas Wood, Freudian slippage of Aryo Toh Djojo, mandala-esque carpet paintings of Kour Pour, and familial histories of Tidawhitney Lek — the exhibition fea- tures wildly disparate artists, steeped in a diversity of personal nuance; it’s a global perspective without the flattening of globalism. Symbology is deconstructed, reconstructed then tossed away altogether. Domestic spaces are warped, cultural and consumer symbols are alienated from context, and the familiar is made wholly unfamiliar. The salon style allows each artist’s practice to be in conjunction and conversation with one another, celebrating the nebulous multiplicity of the human experience in the 21st century.