17–27 September 2026 • Hong Kong

D elirium, obsession and desire; discipline, dedication and skill; these are the pole flames around which the creative drive perpetually turns. These impulses, which in their excess become volatile and destructive, are the forces, fractures and extremes which often drive the artistic impulse. Revealing an interior world of subconscious, undisclosed compulsions, PSYCHO: Identity Alienation Shadow Duality seeks to explore the visual expression of such states, bringing to light the dark, secret corners of the human psyche. In a world dominated by images of violence, greed and status, Psycho reveals that appearances are not always what they seem, and that, just beneath the surface, lies a darker, more unstable, and often more seductive, reality.

In 1907, Sigmund Freud asked “Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own.” The artist, like the child, exposes the latent inner world of subconscious obsession, aggression and desire through the creative impulse.

As with the 1994 work Present, which depicts one of his androgynous children with angled eyes and rosy-cheeks clutching a sword, Yoshitomo Nara’s ostensibly innocuous depictions of children penetrate the surface of human consciousness. The paradoxical strength of Nara’s children lies in their extraordinary ability to express the hidden emotions of contemporary people. The penetrating gaze of the child reflects our own unresolved discontents, angers and frustrations, with Nara’s children revealing the hidden or repressed aspects of the human psyche. As Nara has described, “I kind of see the children among other, bigger, bad people all around them, who are holding bigger knives.” Nara’s children recall the early developmental stages in which the boundaries between fantasy and reality, dependence and independence, desire and aggression remain fluid. Yet, while these impulses are certainly restrained into adulthood, Nara’s children bear a psychic affinity to the hidden desires which lurk beneath the surface of everyday life.

This relationship between childhood development and the creative drive is acutely articulated in the work of Yayoi Kusama. Kusama has described experiencing hallucinations and obsessive thoughts from childhood, including visions of patterns that appeared to proliferate across surfaces and envelop her surroundings. The accumulation of loops seen in her Infinity Nets series translate the compulsive patterns of her childhood perception into an expansive field of colour. The small, interlocking, repetitively and compulsively applied arcs seen across the surface of Kusama’s Infinity-Nets (LHLUJ) (2017) unravels the boundary between conscious, controlled artistic expression, and unconscious compulsion. By ordering the psyche thus, these repetitive movements act as an expression of underlying anxieties. Through the act of repetition, Kusama attempts to stabilise that which remains fundamentally unstable, with these various psychic states emerging and receding from beneath the surface.

If Nara exposes the secret impulses of the human experience in his depiction of children, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1998) is this dark psychology all grown up. In a world governed by the superficial compulsions of money, status and excess, Ellis’ Patrick Bateman, rather than a singularity, is merely a violent extension of the desires embedded within a bankrupt and morally empty culture. His aggression, obsession and brutality are mediated, to varying degrees of success, by his desire to maintain appearances. Beneath the polished exterior lies an abyss; as Bateman says, “I simply am not there.” The classical example of madness in America, Andy Warhol’s Dollar Sign (1980) visualises the delirium of the dollar which underpins much of Ellis’ novel. Simultaneously a symbol, a commodity, and an object of pathological fixation, the dollar is deified, exposing the religious quality of consumer desire. The dollar and consumer culture is the means through which the hidden desires of modern life are mediated and extinguished. Yet, these secret passions covertly remain, veiled beneath the face one presents to the world.

Through portraiture, many artists have explored the uneasy tension between representation and concealment, with the face being something both delicate, intimate, unknowable, and fallacious. As Ellis writes in American Psycho, “My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage.” The psychologically charged portraiture of Zeng Fanzhi, in whose Mask No. 3 (2001) the anxieties of presentation and social self are shown to be dangerously unstable, the face becomes less the means through which communication is made possible, but a place where selfhood, interiority and perception collapse. Assembling various psychological states—disgrace, mistrust, anger, ambition—within one plane of representation fragments the notion of a unified self.

This fragmentation is what George Condo describes in his work as a kind of “psychological cubism.” Condo once said, “Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states.” His dizzying, disorientating tableaus of excess and chaos, as seen in Figures in Motion (2013), capture many different states within one compositional frame. Beauty and the macabre, fear and seduction, Condo’s psychological chaos is intoxicating, a visceral, delirious portrayal of interior states, and external representation. Physiognomy may not necessarily reveal the stirrings of the soul in a moral sense, but can reveal the machinations of hidden impulses.

Across the shimmering, glacial surface of Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Plum and Dark Brown) (1964), all symbols, all acts of representation, and all superficialities are denied. One of a celebrated group of large, black-toned and contemplative paintings, Rothko here pits the formal opposites of light and dark in perpetual struggle, where hope and despair, longing and rejection, are compressed into its guts. Across the monochromatic surface, the pregnant emptiness and direct simplicity of its depths express an instantly perceived and unconsciously felt psychological reality; that of tragedy and victory, joy and despair, eternity and impermanence. Profoundly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Rothko’s paintings stage the dualism inherent to human nature; that of the Apollonian, representing structure and the universal order, and the Dionysian, representing the forces of chaos, instability and wildness. The ultimate expression of interiority and exteriority, Rothko’s black paintings no longer simply represent the psychological, but demands that it be felt.

In this final movement, Psycho arrives at an impasse, an unknowable space. Childlike fears, violent desires, insatiable appetites and obsessive ambitions have been revealed to lie beneath the surface, and appearances are shown to not be what they might seem. The facade of normalcy, even if for a moment, has been shown to be farcical, with the boundaries between innocence and corruption, sanity and madness, rendered increasingly indistinct. Ultimately, Psycho leaves us with the knowledge that obsession, desire, violence, vanity and fear are not the impulses of the extreme, but have been lurking within the familiar all along.