2026.10.06-2026.10.28

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True to Form IV: The Fracture of the Gaze and the Echo of the Real

 

When digital images are available at our fingertips and artificial intelligence reproduces all things with extreme efficiency, what is the meaning of contemporary realist painting? This is the question Touch Gallery has repeatedly posed to our times since the birth of the *True to Form* series. As we step into a new space, we arrive at the fourth iteration of the exhibition. This is not merely a change of venue, but a profound re-initiation of "seeing" and "gazing."

 

This exhibition brings together six contemporary realist artists from different regions, each with a distinct aesthetic voice—Fung Chim, Ryohei Matsumoto, Yu Sheng Yu (Ethan), Deng Xiao, Wang Hao Zhun, and Mak Chung Yan (Grace). The "truth" in their work is never a dry, mechanical reproduction of objective reality, but a series of highly subjective visual interpretations and psychological dialogues.

 

Within their practices, realism unfolds as multiple, three-dimensional facets: Fung Chim wanders with meticulous brushwork through the hidden corners of the city, capturing its overlooked everyday minutiae; Japanese artist Ryohei Matsumoto lets animals serve as storytellers. In his imagined paradises, cats, small creatures, and seasonal flora coexist beyond the boundaries of reality. Through delicate rendering of fur and gaze, he transforms their quiet interactions into a life-affirming gaze, inviting viewers to pause amid daily life and rediscover the beauty found in even the smallest forms of life; Taiwanese artist Yu Sheng Yu deftly sets clouds and wandering figures afloat in a blurring of reality, drifting gently through Hong Kong's distinctive cityscape, generating a fantastical contemporary tension between familiar streets and surreal mist; Deng Xiao re-examines the distance between contemporary visual experience and objective phenomena through a precise painterly language; Wang Hao Zhun adopts classical realist techniques, layering everyday symbols such as "money" to probe, with humor and cool detachment, the desires and struggles of the material world; and Mak Chung Yan, who once stunned the art world with her astonishingly convincing Hong Kong dollar series, now turns her gaze toward a more introspective territory of the body—the hands. Through delicate depictions of skin and gesture, she transforms fleeting moments into tactile memories with warmth, sketching out the physical connection between human beings and the world before language ever enters in.

 

Stepping into Touch Gallery's new space, we are no longer simply viewing paintings of consummate skill, but learning anew, through the eyes of six artists, how to breathe slowly, to gaze, and to anchor ourselves amid the highly virtualized currents of our time in those touches of reality that remain solid and irreplaceable.

 

"Why realism?" The answer lies not in the distance, but in the instant where every brushstroke meets the gaze.