Exhibition • 13–26 September 2025 • Hong Kong

A sudden gasp, a rush of light. Desire burned and bloomed, reaching out into the darkness, consuming. With drawing breath the flame flickers, suspended in a state of protracted tension, anticipating its undoing, demanding its obliteration. With a guttural sigh, the flame surrenders and is snuffed out. Heat lingers in the wick, the spark still burning in the dark, as smoke spirals and ascends, the extinguished echo of light, now absolved. In the alchemy of fire and air, the candle snuffer acts a memento mori where desire gestures towards destruction, and mortality becomes the shadow of longing. A reflection of life and reminder of death, the candle snuffer is at once unyielding and obscene, and a reminder that for every erotic spark, there is the anticipation of an ending. This flame possesses the “convulsive beauty” French Surrealist André Breton sought out in life and art, the kind which demands to be felt violently, possessively, or not be felt at all. And as it burns, the embers of life, of Eros, cry out in ecstasy, into the darkness, for death.

From the silent, frozen earth, a whisper from the recesses of deep time carves an elegy to Thanatos, to death, in shadow with ice and bone. Suspended in the long echo between heartbeat and dust, the mammoth strains into the darkness, the vestige of another world. Here, desire is fossilised, capturing the divine ecstasy of life, and the horror of stillness. We call out into the gloom, and a voice replies. The voice of ancestors, of those long dead, of Kota reliquary figures and gods cast in stone. The ritualised body of these ancestral figures live in twilight between flesh and spirit, presence and absence. A sigh calls out between these two worlds, the finality of death drawing the body into a protracted state of dissolution, and of spiritual rapture. Across the mutilated head of Pharaoh Apries, his ruin told by the prophet Ezekiel, steel and blood draws the body of the Pharaoh into desolation, and the violent ecstasy of divination. The duelling drives of creation, unification and life are pulled towards the forces of destruction, dissolution and death, finding absolution in what the great theorist of the erotic, Georges Bataille, describes as “divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.” Flayed flesh, cruciform and unredeemed, the sacrificial body of Bernard Buffet’s Bœuf écorché (1954) offers itself without salvation, seducing with its purple-red decay. The noble rot of exposed organs captures a sensual beauty, all skin, and blood and bone.

Beneath a heavy, silent sky, the body of Christ in Albrecht Dürer’s Christ being Nailed to the Cross is drawn down towards the earth, suspended between agony and religious ecstasy. Flesh is drawn across wood, the wounds of transformation, as sinew and skin collapse into longing beatitude. Divine mutilation, a sacred rupture, reveals an intimate annihilation; that in collapse there is transcendence, and we cannot look away. The holy relic, buried beneath a tomb of gold, the chasse of Saint Stephen, his body condemned above, his body destroyed below. As steam rises from the bronze vessel, ritually used in the Late Shang dynasty to prepare the bodies of sacrificial offerings, shapes form in the half-light. The fragmented bodies of the martyred and the murdered, the sacrificial lamb and the four apocalyptic beasts, reveal that behind the erotic and poetic allure of the fragment, there is a lust for terror, and an apocalyptic yearning to walk in twilight between rapture and ruin.

The finality of a skull, a vanitas of hard bone, of forgotten things and endings yet to be realised, is haunted by the spectre of the sensual body which once inhabited it. The light which caresses Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (known as Guercino)’s decaying skull also touches the unfurling roses beside it, their soft, pink petals curving, as if daring one to desire them before the first petal falls. In an embrace of passion and decay, the erotic, in Bataille’s words, “is assenting to life even in death” where the spectral figure of Thanatos is violated and transgressed by the sensual body, by the force of Eros. Andy Warhol’s Jackie (1964) is life mediated by death. Shrouded in elegiac blue, the colour of the Holy Virgin, Jacqueline Kennedy is the venerated Saint, her beauty returned to again and again, her image offered in memory to the dead. Her unknowing smile, an innocence now lost before she is covered in the blood of her husband, encapsulates the allure of the memento mori; we reach out for her, longing to touch her, and to see mortality. Warhol’s image of Marilyn, one of desire and longing, becomes a relic, repeated and echoing, preserving her at the edge of life and death, where beauty flickers like a distant flame, luminous and fading.

The skeletal apparition which haunts Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Thin in the old (1986) is a body remade in the image of death, suggestive, carnal and violent. Convulsive, writhing, and compelling, the central figure of Francis Bacon’s Version No. 2 of Lying Figure with Hypodermic Syringe (1968) sprawls upon a bed, the primal site of birth and death, and in itself is similarly rich in associations. Quivering with seductive energy, time and movement collapse around her outstretched limbs, capturing a fleeting moment of carnal energy with savage intensity. The reclining nude, whose flesh is moulded in pigment and stone, unfurls herself in a series of smooth and rounded surfaces. Divine flesh and softly undulating forms entice in a moment of intimacy, the stillness of their bodies evoking not sleep, but death. Sensual, melancholic and resigned, their bodies accept death, and surrender.

Isabella cradles the pot of basil like it were her lost Lorenzo, his body sustained by her tears. Wild, fragrant, festering, into his body she pours, and from decay, her love is sustained. In this, her violent consummation, John William Waterhouse’s Isabella blooms, wilts, and perishes, her hair and garments flowing down her back, collapsing and dissolving. In her melancholy, which transforms through metamorphosis flesh into foliage, the Florentine maiden is cradled by death in an embrace of decay and passion.

Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) places Eros and Thanatos as the duelling compulsions which conversely pull towards creation, union and life, and towards destruction, dissolution and death. To give yourself to the body of another, to be out of your own and consumed by the other. In the passionate embrace, the sculptural dialogue written in bronze, between Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, the body is metamorphosed and transformed at la petite mort – the “little death” of erotic climax. Rodin’s The Kiss transforms this reconciliation into sensuous trembling flesh, breaking against one another. Rival and capturer, caught in a dance of ecstasy and abandon, the body of Claudel’s L’Abandon (1905) surrenders as it is made and unmade by ecstasy, the self, annihilated. The spectral shadow of their lover can be felt, glistening, in these sculptural forms, softly bending, yielding to the other. Syrinx, her torn skirts exposing her breasts and flailing limbs, flees the lunging, groping satyr in Sir Peter Paul Rubens’ Landscape with Pan and Syrinx. Suspending a subject drawn from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the moment of sexual climax – la petite mort – and the undoing of the chaste Syrinx, is a rehearsal for death and collapse. An embalmed, entombed image of sexual annihilation, Jeff Koon’s Dirty – Jeff on Top (1991) presents an erotic tableau that similarly sees the sexual act as a violent assertion of life, of Eros, demanding its own climax. These lovers, circling one another, capture the paradox of desire, an erotic memento mori where climax is arrested, and resolution denied.

This consuming, obliterating desire – “to love, till we die” – is the kind the Surrealists reached for, one which cries out for eternity at the height of passion. The engulfing lobster, its tail, and by extension its sexual organs, enveloping the mouthpiece of Salvador Dalí’s telephone, suffocating as it consumes. This, the relationship between death, sex, impotence and the creative powers, was a central erotic theme of Dalí’s art. His Chevauchée céleste (1957), in which Dalí’s virile rhinoceros is tamed by the virgin, sees, in their hieros gamos, or celestial union, the spiritual death of desire, from which the creative force of Eros can then spring. It is here, striving for finality, that one may experience the continuity of life beyond the self, where the physical tension of discontinuity to which we are bound might be relieved.

Shimmering like a flame across paper, sending smoke and dust into the air, surrendering to a fleeting moment between death and desire. Artists have long sought to capture that at the height of passion. We brush against eternity, compelling us to linger in the shadows where desire burns brightest against the inevitably of its extinguishing. The twin compulsions of Eros and Thanatos, one generative, the other annihilating, are the poles around which the human experience perpetually turns. The forces of death and desire continually draw the body and psyche into a state of protracted tension – between the impulse to merge, to dissolve, and to transcend the self through their expression, or their obliteration. We, in turn, are drawn towards objects that resonate with the perverse pull of the transgressive, the seductive and symbolic allure of the fragment, their masquerade as artifice allowing for the dissolution of the boundary between self and other, life and death.