This week in Hong Kong, New York-based artist Sarah Sze celebrates her solo debut in Asia with a kaleidoscopic exhibition at Gagosian. Her meaningful sixth presentation with the revered gallery is currently on view through May 3, and invites viewers to descend into her visceral universe of new, mixed-media paintings and suspended sculptures. Drawing perceptively from the contemporary human experience and a perpetual cyclone of image-making, Sze utilizes her own creative language of organic motifs and materials to crystallize the mystery of modernity. “Images and their authorship are always in flux,” said Sze. “We build, rebuild, and trade images like never before.”
A Delicate Yet Profound Crush of Emotion and Materiality Unfolds in Hong Kong
Sarah Sze, 2023; Photo: Vincente de Pauo,
Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Drawing from her own past explorations and potent memories, Sze orchestrates a delicate yet profound crush of emotion and materiality. Torn paper enhanced by printed images, prismatic tape, and sweeping brush strokes harmonize and collide like a classical-pop fusion. The natural and the digital unfold individually and collectively, seamless and ruptured elements of our strange and beautiful life on earth. One might notice a bird, a seascape, a sunset, or a storm of clouds, pushing through a shimmering technological space, just as we are.
SARAH SZE,
“Rip Tide,” 2025 (detail), Oil paint, acrylic paint, archival paper, acrylic polymers, ink, dibond, aluminum, and wood; 103 1/4 x 71 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches (262.3 x 181 x 6.4 cm); © Sarah Sze,
Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
“Images and their authorship are always in flux,”
Sarah Sze
Rip Tide (2025) follows the knowing bird through cold and clear blue skies, with glass-like waters below, while a graphic streak of fuschia and orange pulses through the landscape like an electromagnetic wave. Forever Now (2025) is a glittering fantasia of rising mists and glossy seas, besieged by a downpour of cyber flares, as alluring as it is poisonous. Objects and materials seem to play a captivating game of hide and seek with the audience. Nothing is as it seems, in art and in life.
Sarah Sze Honors Japanese Printmaking, Western Landscape Painting, and Chinese Scroll
SARAH SZE,
“Double Speed,” 2025 (detail), Oil paint, acrylic paint, archival paper, acrylic polymers, ink, dibond, aluminum, and wood; 103 1/4 x 71 1/4 x 2 1/2 inches (262.3 x 181 x 6.4 cm); © Sarah Sze,
Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
A skillful honoring of Japanese printmaking, Western landscape painting techniques, and Chinese scroll unfold dramatically throughout this series. Paired with the artist’s own innate sense of acutely recording and experimenting with two- and three-dimensional space, works such as Double Speed (2025) find solace in animals as secure anchors to gaze upon eternity. Here, wandering deer give way to massive space soaring above and through the landscape.
“We build, rebuild, and trade images like never before,”
Sarah Sze
A parade of hanging sculptures also debut at Gagosian in Hong Kong, further illuminating the artist’s Fractured Images series. The nature of ethereality is investigated in suspended pieces of pigment prints, placed back together in a gloriously undefined manner. Hovering worlds, vague and hesitant, are drawn together or perhaps pushed apart. Playing out from one end of the gallery to the other, mindfully torn paper, pictorial horizons, and silver necklace chains harmonize with visitors and the Hong Kong harbor just steps away.
SARAH SZE,
“Forever Now,” 2025 (detail), Oil paint, acrylic paint, archival paper, acrylic polymers, ink, dibond, aluminum, and wood; 103 1/4 x 158 x 2 1/2 inches (262.3 x 401.3 x 6.4 cm); © Sarah Sze,
Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
