Amour Aquatique

Fran Chang Omyo Cho Soyoung Chung Minouk Lim Luis Xertu

Foretold by classical feng shui and Asian astrology, this new era marks a cosmic shift from the element of Earth to Fire—symbols of volatility and upheaval—signaling an urgent call to restore water as a vital counterbalance: an agent of care, adaptability, and healing. In this spirit, during Hong Kong Arts Month, PODIUM presents 'Amour Aquatique'—a group exhibition that pulses with the tensions of presence and absence, attachment and release, drawing viewers into the ebb and flow of aquatic love—at once universal and deeply intimate. Drifting through the protean forms of water as metaphors for the fluidity of love, grief, nostalgia, and memory, this exhibition brings together five artists, including Fran Chang, Omyo Cho, Soyoung Chung, Minouk Lim, and Luis Xertu, whose works are inspired by the continuous cycles of looping, evaporating, pooling, eroding, and flowing, wading into the liminal spaces where personal and political waters entangle.

Water, in its myriad forms, has long held profound cultural, spiritual, and symbolic significance across civilisations—continuously inspiring artistic expression throughout history. It serves as both vessel and veil: a living medium through which artists narrate stories both personal and communal, materialising the intangible currents of longing, loss, and desire. In the exhibition, the river's ceaseless flow reflects the persistence of memory, embodying the way personal and collective histories continue to interweave and cascade throughout time. The ocean's vast, boundless expanse becomes a metaphor for the immensity and depth of human longing—an emotional terrain both beautiful and overwhelming. Likewise, the fog's ephemeral, obscuring haze evokes the elusive quality of nostalgia, where clarity and recollection waver like light through mist. The ice's fragile, crystalline form encapsulates moments of grief, capturing vulnerability and the slow, often heart-wrenching process of emotional freezing and thawing. Beyond its formal qualities, water functions as a political and social symbol in contemporary art, reflecting urgent dialogues around migration, environmental crisis, cultural memory, and identity. Its fluidity challenges fixed boundaries, inviting artists to engage with themes of displacement, transformation, and interconnectedness. In this exhibition, water's protean nature facilitates a poetic meditation on love's fluctuating states—its capacity to nurture, erode, and renew.

Harnessing the luminosity of silk—a medium that ties historically to her Taiwanese heritage, Fran Chang channels her imagined landscape onto the translucent surface, depicting an uninhabited surrounding abundant in water, mist, and vapour, while sparse celestial bodies scatter across the horizon. Veiled with a sense of enigmaticness and dreaminess, Chang's work invites our gaze and contemplation—to delve into a world where the sublime and the melancholic are entangled, thereupon dissolving slowly beyond the silk surface. Her works are collected by Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, and Saint Louis Art Museum. Integrating her practice with biology and neuroscience, Omyo Cho translates nebulous memories and imaginary futures into tangible writings and sculptures, fabricating speculative worlds where human experiences inhabit in evershifting forms. Orchestrating glass and metals as her primary sculptural mediums, Cho intersects their diametrical characteristics—delicacy and resilience—to dissolve the boundaries of materiality, crafting entities that transcend humanity's traces. Her works are collected by Soorim Cultural Foundation, Seoul. Elsewhere, Soyoung Chung experiments with the boundaries of the sculpture medium through site-specific installations, videos, and public interventions. Probing the intersectionality between geology and social relations, her work parallels the phenomena of transformation and erosion in materials against layered temporalities and histories. Chung's works are collected by Seoul Museum of Art, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and SongEun Art and Culture Foundation, Seoul.

As one of the most critically acclaimed contemporary Korean artists on the international stage today, Minouk Lim is a trenchant observer of the turbulent social, economic, and political dynamics of contemporary Korean experience amid the sweep of globalization and accelerated modernity. Spanning a range of media—from drawing and assemblage to video and sculptural installation—and embracing diverse modes of expression, including text, music, and performance, her practice is distinguished by a provocative fusion of the poetic and the political. Lim's works are collected by the Guggenheim Museum, New York & Abu Dhabi; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Asia Society and Museum, New York, among others. She graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France. Lastly, incorporating dried flora and foliage into his creative process—elements that gradually shift from lush green to autumnal tones—Luis Xertu's phantasmagorical paintings, inhabited by poetic waterscapes, fauna, and figures, unfold like decelerated motion pictures that visualise the temporal realm and transient nature of reality. Xertu's works are included in the Stichting Kunstcollectie KPMG, the Netherlands.