Gagosian Presents Sarah Sze's Solo Debut in Asia

Sarah Sze, Professor of Visual Arts, renowned multidisciplinary artist, and 2003 MacArthur Fellow, recently opened her first solo exhibition in Asia at Gagosian, Hong Kong.

The exhibition, which features several new large-scale mixed-media paintings alongside a new series of hanging sculptures, explores how we make meaning from the persistent saturation of images that defines our contemporary existence.    

"Images and their authorship are always in flux. We build, rebuild, and trade images like never before," said Sze. 

Flooded with a shared visual vocabulary—a fingernail, a wolf, a stroke of blue—Sze's paintings and sculptures enact memory through emotional perception. An image of a sunset, hanging from the ceiling in raw-edged fragments, strikes the viewer with new emotional resonance, having interpreted the same sunset, earlier, in a painting. The image becomes a memory, or an "interior image," as Sze puts it. 

For Sze, this process of making and viewing art reveals insights into our embodied knowledge of time, and how we experience its passage in bursts of emotional resonance: "I think when I'm on my deathbed, I will think, emotionally, about the timeline of my life… and art is a thing that gives us this way of seeing that."

Beginning with elements of prior paintings, Sze invites the viewer to experience the process of artmaking. She layers on the gestures, creating an image-system that is both recursive and generative. In Rip Tide (103 1/4" x 71 1/4" x 2 1/2", oil paint, acrylic paint, archival paper, acrylic polymers, ink, dibond, aluminum, and wood, 2025), the digital and analog overlap, becoming indistinguishable underneath her vibrant, dripping strokes of hot pink, electric blue, and creamsicle orange. Though intricate and detailed, the work calls attention to its making; images are laid on in bits of colorful tape, which compliment her detailed compositions while disrupting preconceived notions about how color should behave in a "painting." 

Working across painting, sculpture, architecture, and public installation, Sze's expansive practice is informed by her equally diverse influences, including traditional Japanese printmaking, Chinese scroll, and Western landscape painting. With careful attention to the relationship between two- and three-dimensional space, her multidisciplinary installations deftly present the fragmented, elliptical nature of memory, time, and materiality.

Sze's work is featured in private and public collections globally, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the New Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the 21st Century Museum of Art, Kanazawa, Japan; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. She has created permanent public works for LaGuardia Airport, Storm King Art Center, and The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York. In 2023, Sze presented a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 

The exhibition will be on view March 25–May 3, 2025 at Gagosian, Hong Kong.