Inside Artflow Studio’s Undercurrent – Our Culture

The first thing you notice walking into Undercurrent at Artflow Studio Ltd is that it doesn’t shout for attention. It’s quiet, but not in a cold way — more like it’s got something brewing under the surface and you’re being pulled in before you’ve even decided to step closer. The white walls and bare floor make the air feel a bit sharper, like every sound in the room has space to bounce back at you. The works aren’t crammed in — they’ve got breathing room — but they still feel like they’re passing a message between each other when you’re not looking.

There are a lot of voices here, twenty-one artists all told, and somehow it doesn’t turn into a noisy mess. Installation next to paintings, video a few steps from sculpture, textiles hanging near photography. You get the sense the connections are loose but deliberate, like someone arranged a dinner party knowing half the guests might never talk, but the room would still hum. The theme — forces you can’t see but can definitely feel — isn’t handled like a school project. It’s slower, stranger. Sometimes you only catch it in the corner of your mind.

You get moments where the works almost push against you. Syntax by Yiyi Song has four ceramic pieces leaning into each other, none able to stand alone. They look steady enough, but you can tell one wrong move and the whole thing’s done for. Abbas Khan’s Jaws of Success is sharper, almost nasty — that gnawing feeling of being eaten alive by the job you thought you wanted. Xin Zhang’s Growing Pain hits in a quieter way, all bricks and walls standing in for how identity gets built and chipped at over time. Then you get Baoyue Zhang’s Blue Entropy, which just blows the whole scale out to the size of the universe — order and chaos circling each other while machines and memory fight it out.

Memory’s everywhere in this show. Not the neat, photo-album kind, but the way it actually works in your head — bent, hazy, bits missing. Lingjun Feng’s The unraveling of memories is all liquid blur, almost like it’s trying to get away from you. Amar Shrestha’s Reflection of Camden Market flips this around, catching quick, raw moments in market mirrors that weren’t meant for art at all. Both feel real in different ways, like the stuff you remember without meaning to.

Some works are about the body — what it holds onto, what it loses. Haopeng Yang’s The Diamond Cutter uses a hanging spine and medical images to talk about living with pain, and it’s not pretty or tidy. Jordan Leung’s Untitled feels like a dare to get close to nature again, even if it cuts. Lingfei Shen’s BLUE somehow makes an empty stretch of sea feel full of something you can’t name.

Other pieces dig into folklore or history, but not in a stuck-in-the-past way. Anna Yan’s AWU brings back an old Guangdong ghost story, the kind of thing kids would whisper about to scare each other. Bingge Liu’s silk landscapes need time to look at — the kind where you almost have to slow your breathing to see the details. These works aren’t rushing to make their point, and maybe that’s why they stick.

A few pieces are direct in their challenge. Xinyue Liang’s Defying the Vase is exactly what it says — not letting women be treated like something you put flowers in and leave on the table. Alina Burkovska’s I Was Whole is softer in tone, more about piecing yourself back together without pretending it’s all fine.

Not everything here is heavy. Anni Li’s A Liminal Dream floats somewhere between being a kid and an adult, half-clear, half-not. Sammy Lai’s Daydreaming catches the way a city moves, not through buildings or traffic, but through the rhythms of the people walking past you. PinChing Wu’s pieces feel like they were made on the move — part travel diary, part self-portrait — where you’re not sure what’s true and what’s made up. Minyu Zhu’s Interweave is tactile, almost like you could read it with your hands.

The works don’t wrap things up neatly. Abbas Khan’s All Fawksed Up might have flames, but it’s not about the fire you see — it’s about the quieter, slower kind that works its way in over time. Nothing here really hands you an answer, and that’s probably the point. You’re meant to take your time, even if that means standing there longer than you thought you would.

Artflow Studio’s Undercurrent pulls this off without over-explaining itself. It trusts you to connect the dots — or not — and to notice the small things that shift inside you when you’re looking. That trust feels rare. You walk out with the sense something in you has moved a bit, even if you can’t pin down what. And maybe you’re not supposed to.

Exhibition name: Undercurrent

Exhibition Date: 1 – 7 August 2025

Curated Team: HongQian Zhang and Huan Zhou

Artist list: Baoyue Zhang, Sammy Lai, Xiaobin Zhang, Jordan Leung, Yingxin Yan, Amar Shrestha, Alina Burkovska, Lingfei Shen, Haopeng Yang, PinChing Wu, Xinyue Liang, Minyu Zhu, Anni Li, Xiang Li, Xin Zhang, Abbas Khan, Yiping Gu, Longfei Jiang, Yiyi Song, Bingge Liu

Volunteer: Tizi Pu, Longfei Jiang

Photographer: Amar Shrestha

*This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Our Culture, Jenny Ping Lam Lin and Dr. Quanliu, continuing Artflow Studio’s mission to connect emerging voices with diverse audiences.