PSYCHO: A Journey Through the Recesses of the Mind in 18 Remarkable Works

D erived from the ancient Greek word for the soul, or “breath of life,” the mysteries of the psyche have been puzzled over by artists, psychologists, philosophers, and scientists for millennia. Sigmund Freud reasoned that human behaviour is primarily driven by continuous struggles between the impulsive unconscious mind (the id), the rational conscious mind (the ego) and social moral standards (the superego). On view at Sotheby’s Maison in Hong Kong, PSYCHO: Identity Alienation Shadow Duality brings together a group of modern and contemporary art and rare books that stand at the centre of these volatile crosscurrents.

First-edition copies of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and a 17th-century volume of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy address literary traditions of alienation and despair. Celebrating the most elusive recesses of the inner self are works by artists such as Mark Rothko, whose dark, enveloping voids seek universal revelation; Yayoi Kusama, whose personal hallucinatory neuroses found their outlet in transcendental self-obliteration; and Matthew Wong, whose sublime landscapes also functioned as the artist’s inner sanctuary.

Inviting the viewer into liminal worlds where perspective dictates reality, PSYCHO is an exhibition where the act of looking becomes a profound interrogation of what it means to be human.

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PSYCHO: Identity Alienation Shadow Duality

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown), 1964

Enveloping the viewer’s field of vision at over two metres tall, Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown) (1964) establishes the “intimate and human” scale that Mark Rothko insisted was necessary to achieve true “revelation.” Painted just prior to his preparatory works for the monumental Rothko Chapel commission in Houston, the painting anticipates the architectural scale, brooding palette, and spiritual gravity of his life’s most important works. Rothko purges the work of personal gesture, leaving only pure form and colour through laborious layers of thin, turpentine-diluted oil washes worked directly into the canvas fibres. Far from signaling existential despair, these darkening tonalities draw the viewer into a quiet communion with the transcendental sublime.

Yoshitomo Nara, The Crated Room in Iceland / Drawing Room, 2009

Fresh to auction and unseen by the public for 17 years since it was presented at his exhibition at Reykjavik Art Museum, The Crated Room in Iceland / Drawing Room (2009) is an extraordinary artistic and institutional milestone within Yoshitomo Nara's seminal practice. Conceived as a major installation within the artist's landmark collaboration with the design group graf, working under the name YNG, it is one of only seven works in Nara's Crated series and one of three conceived specifically for his 2009 exhibition. The work transforms utilitarian shipping crates into an intimate visual world reminiscent of Nara's own working studio. Comprising 97 drawings, viewable only through small windows and openings, alongside everyday objects and a monumental billboard painting, the installation playfully flouts the boundaries between freight and artistic universe.

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, 1991

Published in 1991, American Psycho remains one of the most polarising yet defining landmarks of contemporary fiction. The novel chronicles the salacious descent of Patrick Bateman, an elite Wall Street investment banker whose yuppie obsession with luxury, status, and designer labels runs parallel to his depraved, ultra-violent secret life as a serial killer. Writing in his late 20s, Ellis channelled his own profound isolation and disillusionment with the vapid and hyper-capitalistic Manhattan of the late 1980s into a pitch-black social satire, fundamentally reframing cultural conversations around masculinity, corporate greed, and consumerism. The book's publication ignited an unprecedented international cultural firestorm. Dropped by its original publisher due to its graphic content, it faced intense public boycotts, censorship and even death threats upon its release by Vintage Books. Ellis's promotional tours were abruptly cancelled, leaving an incredibly small number of genuinely signed contemporary copies. In the rare book market, a signed first edition is exceptionally rare—a symbolic artifact of literary rebellion and late 20th-century moral panic.

Yayoi Kusama, Pumpkin (TWPOT), 2010

Yayoi Kusama's pumpkins are one of the most iconic and recognisable motifs of contemporary art, stemming from a vivid hallucination in her childhood when she accompanied her grandfather to visit a seed-harvesting ground: “There it was: a pumpkin the size of a man’s head… It immediately began speaking to me in a most animated manner.” With its rare and seldom-seen shade of flaming golden-orange, PUMPKIN (TWPOT) (2010) belongs to Kusama’s most coveted large-format category, where pumpkin canvases at or above 130 by 130 cm consistently achieve her highest auction prices. The present work achieved the top record price for a Kusama pumpkin painting when it sold at auction in 2019 for HK$54.5 million.

George Condo, Figures in Motion, 2013

Figures in Motion (2013) is a polyphonic triumph of American artist George Condo’s self-described “psychological cubism,” exemplifying Condo’s ability to map the fractured landscape of human emotion onto a single canvas. Whereas classical Cubism fragmented its subjects across spatial planes, Condo fragments them across psychological and emotional states. Disembodied teeth, eyes, and limbs collide in a dramatic crescendo of anatomy and gesture. Painted shortly after the artist’s recovery from a life-threatening illness, the canvas burns with a blistering vitality across syncopated lines and brilliant passages of buttercup yellow, lavender, peach and cerulean blue.

Yoshitomo Nara, Present, 1994

Clutching a knife and striding forward in a vermilion dress, haloed by a dazzling aquamarine background, Present (1994) is the earliest canvas to depict Yoshitomo Nara’s archetypal child in full figure. It was painted in 1994, a landmark year for Nara: moving from Düsseldorf to his new larger studio in Cologne, where he began painting larger scale works. Just one year later he would be catapulted onto the international stage with his breakout solo exhibition at SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo (1995). Measuring a monumental 180 by 150 cm, Present is one of the two largest knife-bearing canvas of the 1990s. The series would culminate in Knife Behind Back (2000), which sold for HK$195 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2019.

Alicja Kwade, Conversion in Perspective, 2016

First presented in 2016, Conversion in Perspective is constructed using a precise arrangement of double-sided mirrors that separate raw materials—wood timber, sandstone, granite—from their manmade brass and metal counterparts. Conversion in Perspective embodies Kwade’s signature investigation into “object-oriented ontology”: exposing how the human consciousness relies on certain social conventions and visual assumptions to construct its understanding of the physical world. Transforming sculpture into a philosophical device, Kwade constructs an impossible realm that subverts the viewer’s trust in the relationship between empirical observation and reality.

Adrian Ghenie, Lidless Eye, 2016

Adrian Ghenie’s portrait series Lidless Eye is an arresting reinterpretation of historical trauma and contemporary identity. It engages directly with a series of self-portraits painted by Vincent van Gogh around 1889 at the Saint-Paul Asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence as he recovered from a debilitating mental breakdown. Ghenie subjects van Gogh’s tentative paintings of psychological survival, human vulnerability and creative struggle to a violent figurative dissolution, using a palette knife to scrape, smear, and disassemble thick layers of oil pigment. The result—a complex terrain of flesh-like textures and chaotic bursts of vivid colour—evokes the unblinking, relentless gaze of history and its refusal to close against the weight of 20th-century post-communist trauma. Blending van Gogh’s restless energy with the visceral, distorted surfaces of Francis Bacon and the physical immediacy of Abstract Expressionism, Lidless Eye stands as a powerful testament to how the art-historical past continues to haunt the present.

Lee Bul, Heaven and Earth, 2007

In the middle of a shattered, white ceramic-tiled bathtub lies a sinister well of black calligraphy ink ringed by snowy, miniature peaks. This improbable tableau references Heaven Lake (Cheonji), a volcanic crater lake atop Mt. Baekdu—the sacred mountain that, according to Korean mythology, was the birthplace of the founder of Gojoseon, Korea’s first kingdom. Born from the union of a heavenly prince and a bear-woman, the lineage of this “grandson of heaven” anointed Mt. Baekdu as the spiritual birthplace of all Koreans. Once a pristine ideal celebrated in classical literature, Cheonji’s mythic union of “Heaven and Earth” has been marred by modern politics. Mt. Baekdu was left stranded in North Korea following the 1953 Armistice, cutting off access to South Koreans. Heaven and Earth is a haunting monument to modern trauma and misplaced idealism.

Yayoi Kusama, My Heart is Flying to the Universe, 2018

Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms have tantalised audiences with their poetic, startling and even terrifying visions of infinity: from her first—a life-sized room in which the artist herself lay down in endless fields of red polka-dotted phallic soft sculptures in 1965—to this intimate iteration, a tiny hexagonal room visible only through a titillating face-sized opening. My Heart is Flying to the Universe (2018) consists of a single multimedia installation of tiny LED bulbs flashing across the colour spectrum. Ruminating on the impermanence of life, the certitude of death, and the boundless love that flourishes in the space between, Kusama brings her audience on a journey towards a moving and mesmerising crescendo.

Matthew Wong, The Edge, 2019

The Edge (2019) is a poignant achievement from the final year of Matthew Wong’s life. Painted at the apex of his brief yet brilliant career, this canvas captures the self-taught artist's singular capacity to translate profound psychological states into unforgettable landscapes of the mind. A defining motif of Wong’s work, the solitary wanderer serves as an avatar for human vulnerability and existential longing. Synthesising a diverse web of East-West influences, Wong fuses the expressive brushwork of Post-Impressionists like Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse with the contemplative literati tradition of traditional Chinese ink painting. Like the literati scholars before him, Wong turns nature inward, illustrating how landscape painting can serve as a mirror for the human soul and transforming a quiet sense of isolation into a visual language of universal resonance.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

Initially published in 1621 under the pen name Democritus Junior (a tribute to the “laughing philosopher” of Ancient Greece), The Anatomy of Melancholy represents a labyrinthine effort to comprehensively chart the boundaries of human psychological suffering. Rather than compiling a conventional medical treatise, Robert Burton assembled a panoramic philosophical, historical and cultural compendium that frames depression not as a mere ailment, but as an inescapable element of the human condition: “Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality,” he declares. The book is peppered with unexpected glimpses of black humour: “I write of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy,” Burton jokes in his introduction. Burton’s own struggles with “melancholy” fuelled the writing of this book, and he concludes that profound sorrow is ultimately bittersweet, at other times a “delicious frenzy,” but above all inextricably intertwined with intense contemplation, artistic creation, and human thirst for knowledge.

Tetsuya Ishida, Can't Fly Anymore, 1996

Coming of age during Japan's turbulent “Lost Generation” following the catastrophic 1991 asset bubble collapse, artist Tetsuya Ishida forged a surreal oeuvre dominated by a distinct dystopian malaise. His iconic, uniform salaryman—caught in an eternal cycle of anxiety-inducing, Kafkaesque absurdities—underlines a profound rupture in the Japanese economic dream, embodying a pervasive sense of hopelessness that haunted an entire generation. In Can't Fly Anymore (1996), Ishida’s avatar attempts a futile swimmer’s front crawl, trapped mid-stroke atop a rusting amusement park pirate ship. His protagonist is neither fully flesh nor machinery, suspended impassively between life and death.

Hans Bellmer, Mille filles, 1939

The German Surrealist Hans Bellmer used the female body to map the deepest anxieties of the subconscious mind. In a fantastical style highly reminiscent of the Mannerist still life portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Mille filles (1939) dissects the very mechanics of desire itself—its internal frictions, uncanny compulsions, and sensual impossibilities. Soft coral flesh folds into jade green pleated silks; delicate hands grasp obscenely at corpulent orange pumpkins. The naked female form is no longer offered up as a simple object of desire; rather, Mille filles presents the ambiguity of yearning as a site of active psychological disorientation. The year of the work's creation was marked by severe personal and political disruption for Bellmer. Finding sanctuary in Paris after fleeing Nazi Germany, the outbreak of World War II saw him detained at the Camp des Milles, an internment camp housed in a disused brick factory in Aix-en-Provence. Mille filles, completed just months prior to his internment, marks a critical juncture in Bellmer’s life.

Bernard Buffet, Autoportrait sur Fond Noir, 1956

Considered one of the greatest stars of the art world by the tender age of 21, the French Expressionist painter Bernard Buffet depicted himself aged 28 at work next to his easel, sleeves rolled up and left hand placed across his heart in reference to the German Renaissance painter’s Albrecht Dürer’s famous Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight (1500), an artist Buffet held in great esteem. Seemingly etched from the inky darkness, Buffet’s sharp, unforgiving lines and starkly elongated features reflect the melancholic Miserabilist timbre of post-war Europe.

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886

Few works of literature map the fractured architecture of the human mind as definitively as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Victorian novella follows the respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll, whose medical experiments into the polarisation of human nature unleash his notorious alter ego, Edward Hyde. Overturning contemporary assumptions about morality, Stevenson suggests that evil is not an external threat but a latent impulse residing within the civilised self. He famously drafted the story during a feverish, drug-addled six-day burst in Bournemouth, England, fuelled by his own lifelong battles with chronic illness and a deep fascination with the double lives led by respectable Victorian gentlemen. Upon publication, the book became an instant global sensation, selling tens of thousands of copies within months and permanently transforming the cultural lexicon around the duplicitous nature of human identity.

Frank Auerbach, Head of Leon Kossoff, 1954

“We were like two mountain climbers roped together,” said the painter Frank Auerbach of his friend Leon Kossoff, whom he had met as a student at St Martin’s School of Art. Bonding over a mutual disdain for the “urbane” and “tea-time” teachings of the academy, Auerbach and Kossoff pored over Rembrandts at London’s National Gallery and took turns trying to capture each other’s likenesses in their studio. Auerbach would go on to paint eight oil paintings of his fellow artist between 1950 and 1956, one now in the collection of the Tate, London, and another in the Yale Center for British Art. Executed in a dense, wet-on-wet mountainous landscape of impasto oil pigment, Auerbach paid eternal tribute to Kossoff in a portrait that captured the visceral presence and enduring spirit of his subject.

Philippe Parreno, Marquee, 2019

French artist Philippe Parreno made his first Marquee in 2006; since then, it has become a landmark body of work with over 60 marquees exhibited around the world, from the Tate Modern in London to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But Parreno’s Marquees are no mere advertising hoardings. Constructed from a Plexiglas structure that reveals neat rows of glimmering halogen lightbulbs framed within slim neon tubes, an integrated DMX controller initiates pre-programmed choreography that shifts disconcertingly between a soft warm glow and a blinding staccato glare. Denuded of any textual clues, Parreno resurrects a glowing “ghost” that functions as a permanent prologue—an architectural introduction to an event that never arrives, forcing its viewers to inhabit a liminal space where the expectation of an experience becomes the artwork itself.

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PSYCHO: Identity Alienation Shadow Duality