Capsule is pleased to present Silent Permeation, Cheng Chit Yan’s (b. 1999 in Hong Kong, China; lives and works in Hong Kong) first solo exhibition at the gallery, opening on January 17 and on view through February 28, 2026.
The exhibition is not a loud declaration, but a soft murmur that lingers. Through nine new paintings, Cheng invites us into the quiet, liminal spaces that exist between journey and arrival, observation and absorption, the self and the landscape. She articulates the weight of one’s own perceptions and the tender ache of being simultaneously connected to and separated from the world. Cheng positions herself and her viewer as modern-day flâneurs—not the detached 19th-century strollers, but contemporary wanderers whose travel is as much internal as geographical.
The exhibition constructs a fragmented world built on boundaries and magic realism. In Cheng’s visual lexicon, windows, aquariums, fences, and the very surface of the canvas are not merely frames but psychological thresholds that we constantly negotiate. In Wandering in Moss Traces (all works 2025), a soft, tangible glow emanates through the glass of a moss-covered aquarium, itself viewed through the bars of a fence. The work originates from a memory of passing through the streets, where the artist's gaze accidentally caught the deep interior of an old building’s entrance. The fence and glass become a double barrier, rendering the vibrant orange fish inside both luminous and utterly lonely—mirroring the painter and the viewer alike.
Cheng’s poetry resides in her ability to shift our gaze from the panoramic to the intimate, from documenting a place to exploring a state of observation. A memory of a raucous street band is distilled into toylike figures dancing on a tabletop. A figure holds a glass glowing with the green haze of absinthe—a liquor Cheng first tasted out of pure curiosity, only later discovering its storied connections to nineteenth-century masters such as Degas and Van Gogh. We perceive a liquid distortion of sound, a head resting heavily on a wooden table, eyes glazed over in dissociation or reverie (For a Sound Sleep). In Passing Through the Deer, a snowy park at dusk functions less as a landscape and more as an emotional field, where the tentative, silent gaze shared between a human observer and a deer melts the abstract fence that separates them.
Cheng’s observant eye translates the aesthetic residue of life—the suspension of the sunset, the dim light of old building entrances, the echoes of drunken music—into a visual language of dreamlike tones, warped perspectives, and pockets of uncanny luminosity. The nine works, a combination of large-scale scenes and smaller, fragmented portals, operate like mise-en-scènes from a deeply intimate and barely accessible dream diary. They are psychic landscapes where geography is subordinate to emotion: a winding staircase with melting balustrades leads somewhere unknowable, enveloped in an intoxicating green fog. A lone figure hesitates below by a small pool, suspended between civilisation and nature. There is a palpable sense of unease and lingering—a chair sits empty, and no one is arriving anywhere (Room for a Breath). In A Soft Defense, a delicate pink parrot curls up to rest, but keeps one eye open, vigilant and alert, suspended between vulnerability and self-protection.
Ultimately, ‘Silent Permeation’ is an ode to the gentle, relentless passage of time and feeling, harmony and solitude. Cheng finds resonance in ephemerality through world-building on the canvas—mysterious, imaginative, and tinged with reality and memory. As the exhibition’s title suggests, memory permeates the present, time seeps through moments, the self soaks into the outer world, and identity forms through an osmosis of solitude. Cheng is not interested in offering explicit narratives or descriptions, but rather in offering foggy spaces for repose and reflection.
The viewer is led by the hand into a quiet room, bathed in soft light from a window, toward a vacant chair still holding dissipating warmth. The quiet asks, will you stay, or will you cross over?
Text by Eunice Tsang
