Thresholds, Hong Kong (2025)

Dates

31 October 2025 – 10 January 2026

Location

White Cube Hong Kong

50 Connaught Road Central
Hong Kong

Featured artists:

Galuh Anindita
Arahmaiani
Christine Ay Tjoe
Nadiah Bamadhaj
Kei Imazu
Ines Katamso
I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih
Citra Sasmita
Jennifer Tee

‘Through darkness to light.’ – Kartini, Door duisternis tot licht, 1911

‘Thresholds’ brings together the work of nine artists who chart their individual spiritual, political, physical or mythological journeys of transformation. Forming a chorus of unique experiences, all of which are shaped by the crossing of a ‘threshold’, the works selected reflect an understanding of the coexistence of light and dark; a dynamic whereby opposite forces are not at odds but in balance.

This harmony, a duality kept in balance, is encapsulated by the black-and-white chequered design of the Balinese poleng cloth traditionally used to adorn statues, shrines and sacred trees. With its bold, criss-crossing pattern, the poleng’s intersecting lines signal the meeting of polarities of order and chaos, good and evil. Taking this as the point of departure for an exhibition, ‘Thresholds’ presents works by artists whose practice engages this same tension. The ability to keep opposites in equilibrium is understood in Indonesian tradition as a maternal force, one that offers provision and passage, and bears influence over change. Amid today’s ecological, spiritual and social fractures, these thresholds are no longer symbolic but lived. Through the myths we inherit, the rituals we practice, and the bodies we inhabit, we are each involved in a radical and ongoing process of transition. Along this journey, it is thresholds that mark moments of change and, often, determine the outcome of a shift.

Transformation begins in the maternal body, with a potential lifeform that is fragile and restless, yet resilient. Christine Ay Tjoe’s abstract paintings are full of a bodily turbulence, her marks testing her physical limits and that of her soul. Murni describes the act of making as a search for bodily presence, in which the artist confronts the body as a site of pain and survival: ‘painting to feel that I exist’. Trained in Bali’s Pengosekan style of painting, Murni’s works are characterised by figures that hold fear and tenderness without resolution, and reveal scars that attest to a journey of endurance and growth. They show the body not as a boundary but a site of change.

While Ay Tjoe and Murni turn inwards in their journeys of discovery, others look outwards, towards ritual and acts of communing. Citra Sasmita roots her work in Balinese cosmology: ‘As a Balinese person, I believe in the ability to be embodied in space and time,’ she writes. Referencing the lamak, a ceremonial cloth used in Balinese Hindu temple rituals, Sasmita’s work is informed by women’s knowledge, drawing power from craft, care and the body. In her work, the dragon-serpent Naga deity unfurls as sacred landscape – a spine extending from mountain to river to sea, binding earthly life to ancestral and divine realms.

Arahmaiani makes ritual a site where politics, faith and identity meet, using silence to unsettle certainty and invite reflection. Working with Jawi script (also known as Arab Pegon), her paintings and soft-sculpture installations show script slipping into form, speaking to adaptability and cultural plurality. Turning to the deity Naga Antaboga from Javanese and Balinese cosmology, Ines Katamso uses botanical forms, soil and repetition to think through cycles of regeneration. The works trace slow transformations – in material, gesture and form – attuned to the forces of earth and sky, and to the spirits that shape the cycles of life.

Where Sasmita, Arahmaiani and Katamso transform inner turbulence into shared practices using cosmology, script, soil and silence, other artists turn to myth to nourish their visual language. Here, myth is neither a fixed nor nostalgic narrative, but alive and open to renewal. Nadiah Bamadhaj turns to the myth of the warrior mother, the Goddess Durga, whose many arms hold both tenderness and wrath. In her suspended sculptures The Whip, Jimat, Solar Plexus (all 2023) and The Harvest (2023-24), form becomes an extension of this maternal force - fierce yet protective, balancing nurture with the power of transformation. In their suspension, creation and destruction are not opposing states but cyclical gestures through which renewal takes shape. Galuh Anindita continues her longstanding dialogue with Kanjeng Ratu Kidul, the Queen of the South Sea from Javanese mythology, with the work The Body Is A Temple, The Memory Is The Sea (2025). Referencing rong telu – a cabinet for a soul between realms – within this traditional three-tiered structure, Anindita places amulets mapped to Javanese chakra points and to soil, fire and air, which shape the body through acts of protection and surrender, as both armour and threshold. Among the objects is Mayang Koro, a silver belt-buckle that acts like an umbilical bowl. Traditionally worn around the waist, it functions as a protective charm – restraining restless spirits or ‘hungry ghosts’, while symbolically binding the self to the nurturing force of the Mother. Equally, the cabinet echoes the form of the dancer’s mask – bearer of love, drama and ancestral knowledge. Also drawing on myth, Kei Imazu reimagines the story of Hainuwele, the ‘coconut girl’ from the island of Seram in Maluku, who was killed by villagers yet from whose buried body the earth was seeded and staple crops grew. In this origin myth, the deity Mulua Satene guards the gate to the afterworld: those who pass through remain human while those who fail to make the journey become animals or spirits.

Across the works brought together in ‘Thresholds’, myth is organised by the Mother, from whose gifts, and within whose limits, the worlds take shape. Describing her ‘Tampan’ series as ‘a ship with the Tree of Life as its mast, transporting humans, animals and sea creatures from the earthly world to the afterlife’, Jennifer Tee draws on Sumatran ceremonial textiles, with their use of sea and ship imagery and the idea of the soul in limbo. Creating arrangements that sit on the threshold of becoming, her ships of dried tulip petals become fragile vessels, carrying memory across uncertain waters. Like the shadow puppetry of wayang kulit, they mark the crossing point between the living and the ancestral, guiding us across the veil.

Galuh Sukardi is an independent curator based in Indonesia. With a passion for promoting Southeast Asian contemporary art, Sukardi has held positions as Head of Southeast Asia at White Cube (2015–2019), Director at David Zwirner (2020–2024), and Junior Specialist for the Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian paintings department in Sotheby's Hong Kong and Singapore (2010–2014).