(Not So) Silent Waters is a group exhibition that inaugurates the gallery’s four-year curatorial cycle, a programme exploring the four fundamental elements: Water, Fire, Air, and Earth, as lenses for contemporary artistic practice. Featuring Andrés Layos, Kimberley Ann, and Angelina Li, the exhibition treats Water as both a conceptual and material field, where stillness, transformation and latent energy converge.
Although 2026 is symbolically a “Double Fire” year, the gallery opens the cycle with Water, approached not as spectacle but as a quiet, generative force carrying memory, resilience and transformation beneath an apparently calm surface.
In Feng Shui, the Fire Horse year calls for Water elements to temper excessive Fire, calm the nervous system, and restore balance. Water here acts as a counterbalance, encouraging gentle growth and smooth circulation of energy.
Through their practices, Layos, Ann, and Li explore fluidity, suspension, and transformation. Their works unfold through layering, erosion, and subtle shifts of texture and light, evoking water not as an image but as a state. (Not So) Silent Waters thus sets the tone for the curatorial cycle, highlighting balance, attentiveness, and the unseen forces that shape artistic creation and our shared environment.
Andrés Layos focuses on water as a central element in his practice, as a space of the unconscious and of contradictory states of being, where the sea embodies both emptiness and fullness, confusion and illumination, calm and chaos - depth and surface coexisting simultaneously within an enigmatic and silent universe charged with metaphor.
Angelina Li merges traditional craft with direct engagement with natural elements, especially water. She often paints both in the studio and underwater, allowing buoyancy, resistance, and the ocean’s subtle currents to shape gesture, texture, and form. Her work translates marine life, submerged landscapes and oceanic structures into poetic compositions in painting and ceramics, exploring the interplay between solidity and fluidity, surface and depth.
Kimberley Ann, drawn to movement and liquid pours, embraces the lack of full control in her process, allowing paint and water to guide intuitive outcomes; in her work, water becomes a symbol of energy, connection and growth, its adaptability reflected in compositions that balance structure and release, inviting emotionally fluid and open interpretation.
Together, their works offer a layered reading of water as both medium and metaphor - at once contemplative, immersive and in constant transformation.
