Concrete Colour

Ora-Ora is pleased to announce a new solo show by Hong Kong-based artist Sophie Cheung at its Tai Kwun gallery space. This will be the artist’s third solo show at Ora-Ora. Opening on September 17, the title is Concrete Colour.

Sophie Cheung has shown at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2022, 2023 and 2024 and been the subject of solo and group shows in Hong Kong and London. Additionally, Cheung is a disability rights advocate, who has campaigned extensively across issues including children’s mental health.

The 2025 exhibition is composed of the artist’s brand new CMYK Series andnew works fromher highly successful Erasing News Series.

In Concrete Colour, the gradual erosion of familiar sights in the artist’s home city becomes a departure point for an exploration of memory and the landmarks of belonging. The artworks arerooted in Hong Kong and represent steps in the artist’s own healing process. However, the show has widespread appeal. In a fast-shifting world, the sensation of nostalgia and of coping with rapid change has become near universal.

Responding to this stimulus both of memory and of the city around her, Sophie Cheung’s new CMYK Series amplifies the colour adventures of her past work, whilst building further on her artistic manipulation of industrial ink.

CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key (Black), a cornerstone ink combination, harnessed in the production of printed materials of all kinds. The artist  reconstructs the initial materiality of printer ink, endowing it with a new, local vitality. This subversion of the material mirrors Hong Kong’s cultural spirit of borrowing, hybridising, transforming, and rebirth（借用、混雜、轉化、重生）.

The artist paints on plastic-coated paper, using printer ink, without touching a brush. The output is born of the interplay of various forces—the artist’s will, the ink’s tension, the paper’s resistance—much like a city’s landscape is a temporary outcome of the interplay between capital, power, and cultural tensions.

The CMYK Series glows with vanishing colours. Neon is one of the many distinctive everyday realities of Hong Kong now disappearing. At night, neon lights are absorbed by glass, including the facades of buildings. By contrast, those on the inside of the ubiquitous glass curtain walls can see the outside world with perfect clarity. This interplay of alienation and intimacy in the urbanscape remains constant, depicted in CMYK Painting: Neon Light Embodied on the Glass Curtain Wall, Mongkok (2025).

The Erasing News Series creates a state of in-betweenness through acts of addition and subtraction, an interplay of eraser and newspaper. Her new artworks including Erasing News: Petrified Flow Under the Flyover of Texaco Road (2025) which is a location Sophie Cheung previously developed in Erasing News: Time of Stone and Plant Under the Flyover 1 and 2, part of Cathay Pacific’s Gallery in the Skies collection. Additionally, Erasing News: Stumps Resprouting at the Retaining Wall on Tai Wo Hau Road (2025)muses on unexpected life and rebirth in the city, and a sense of melancholy at time passing. The new artworks offer an evolution in the original series, including bold use of negative space, scratched, tactile textures, and a form of veiled figuration. Each is anchored in a sense of place, and yet carries universal insight and meaning.

The artist has also created her first sculpture from the series, titled A Closed Energy Loop (2025), which brings the already tactile and contoured surfaces into an assertive, three dimensional presence.

In the words of Ora-Ora co-founder and CEO, Henrietta Tsui-Leung: “Sophie Cheung’s artworks innovate, develop and evolve, yet journey resolutely into memory. This desire to move forward in full sympathy with the past represents a valuable kind of tension and completeness. We are delighted to present Sophie’s third solo show at the gallery.”