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The Tale of Beas River｜Lewis Lee Solo Exhibition Introduction

Lewis Lee, The Heavenly Bodies, 2025, Oil on fabric, 120 x 90 cm.

10 Chancery Lane Gallery is proud to present Hong Kong artist Lewis Lee in a solo exhibition entitled “The Tale of Beas River” at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. The exhibition consists of a new series of paintings and an installation of relics to commemorate the historical legacy of the Hong Kong-China borderland that runs along the Beas River.

Lewis Lee is an artist who is tied to the geographical stories of land and its connected meanings. He was born in Hong Kong’s Sheng Shui area near the Chinese border. He grew up watching the buildings of the now megapolis of Shenzhen emerge out of the landscape viewed from the rural borderlands on the Hong Kong side. Like many Hong Kongers, he is the son of a mainland Chinese immigrant. His father arrived in 1980 crossing through the barbed wire at Ta Kwu Ling, the starting point of his life thereafter. Lee likes to roam the hinterlands of Hong Kong’s border area reimagining the landscapes as a part of Hong Kong history and how the idea of being a “Hong Konger” emerged after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China when the British colonial government established a border prohibited area in 1951, creating a barrier similar to the Berlin Wall. Formally isolating the people of both regions with a serpentine river serves as a natural barrier, separating opposing ideologies in the air. The concept of "Hong Konger" began to take shape from that moment.

The exhibition combines paintings and various found object installations, merging real and fabricated "historical relics," creating a space in the bustling streets of Central that blurs the line between reality and fiction, reflecting the current environmental situation in Hong Kong through a romantic pastoral lens.

One of the paintings has the number 51 entitled “Gondolier” which is taken from the first diesel locomotive brought to Hong Kong in 1955. Locomotive No. 51 went on to pull passenger trains for the next 28 years, serving gallantly until 1983 when the passenger service of the Kowloon-Canton Railway switched to full electrification. This train also shuttled his father back and forth between Hong Kong and China.

The work “From Dawn to Dusk” portrays a Hong Kong water buffalo grazing along the river leading up to Shenzhen's sprawling skyline. Ominous balloons in the air carry imagined propaganda from across the borders towards Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a world of contrasts, a modern megapolis dwarfed by the even larger and growing faster megacity of Shenzhen, just beyond, competing for growth and power.

In the 1990s, Shenzhen was still farmland. The speed with which it has emerged is mind-blowing. The population of Hong Kong is 7.5 million and Shenzhen is now 13 million. Lee’s paintings seem to skip along the countryside capturing a precious moment in time of a lost land that exists between competing supercities, where water buffalo roam and rivers flow. A land that might soon disappear.

Exhibition Details

• The Tale of Beas River｜Lewis Lee Solo Exhibition
• Date: 6 Feb - 12 Mar 2025
• Venue: 10 Chancery Lane Gallery
• Address: 10 Chancery Ln, Central, Hong Kong

Source of the above information: PR