Small Gallery 斯磨畫廊
Past Exhibitions
Expected/Expecting
16 May - 23 May 2026
Expect
Etymons: Latin exspectāre.
'To look out for, await'
'To think or believe something will happen'
We always carry a certain form of expectation toward ourselves, which gradually dissolves alongside the trajectories of life, yet continuously regenerates itself within the unconscious.
'Expected' and 'Expecting' together form a resonant duo, throughout time, like a version of the future that was meant to be realised, but has never come to pass. In this sense, expectation becomes more than anticipation. It becomes a kind of illusion about our ability to understand reality. While entering the exhibition carrying “expectations,” what lies within has already been pre-constructed in a certain way. By reexamining “expectation” itself, we might recognise that expectation is never neutral but always directed.
Here, we attempt to question the familiar ways of encountering contemporary art, how it may shape, limit, or even obscure our experience of it. At the same time, we ask why we are drawn to things that have not yet happened, and why the future often seems more capable than reality of carrying emotions that remain difficult to express.
Curve & Sweep: Rebecca E. Miller
2 April - 8 April 2026
For Curve & Sweep, Rebecca E. Miller explores, evaluates, and is inspired by digital art making tools. How do they mimic traditional tools and at the same time build surfaces and shapes out of an entirely different medium? Rebecca E. Miller expresses this through the visual language of pattern and shape and colour; movement, geometry, symmetry and space. She is drawn to biomorphic forms that can be found in nature and those that appear in contemporary digital, algorithmic, and generative art. In combination complex, non-human or alien like organic shapes are revealed. This work aims to blur the line between the human body and natural and digital landscapes through experimentation with painting and image manipulation.
She is a tree, beginning from a state.
Within the exhibition,
bodies and materials return to similar conditions:
repetition, and a slow persistence of being.
Writing becomes unreadable.
Objects remain unfinished.
Plants grow where they are not expected.
Soft forms press against rigid structures.
Meaning does not rush to appear,
and may never be fully held by language.
Here, the tree takes root, permeates,
entangles with others, forming networks of connection.
It grows through care, fatigue, touch, and refusal.
These works do not ask to be fully understood.
They invite closeness.
They invite touch.
They invite listening.
They invite staying.
In this small house,
among the trees that surround it,
please linger, sense, and enjoy.
She is a Tree
3 January - 7 February 2026
Visit by appointment only
She is a Tree, installation view.
Visit Me Not
11 November - 12 December 2025
Small Gallery's exhibition, Visit Me Not, opened on 11 November 2025— ‘Singles’ Day’—and ran until 12 December.
At the centre of the gallery room stands a single mimosa pudica, known as the shame plant or touch-me-not. Its shy, sensitive, and gently antagonistic nature mirrors the exhibition’s own mode of operation. Throughout the exhibition period, every visitor who books an appointment/ticket would be turned away. If Yves Klein’s 1958 exhibition Le Vide asked whether an exhibition without artworks could still be an exhibition, Visit Me Not wonders: when there are no visitors at all, does the exhibition still exist?
NOUS
19 July - 27 September 2025
Visit by appointment only
In Greek philosophy, nous refers to a higher mode of perception: an intuitive grasp of essence beyond empirical sight. In French, nous means 'we': a pronoun of collectivity. Bringing together artists working at the intersections of human, nature, and artificial intelligence, this group exhibition reimagines East Asian art traditions as living, shifting forms. Their works traverse pixel and pigment, seeking new vocabularies for water and stones. Nous invites participants to reconsider authorship, intuition, and the possible futures of artistic practice. The exhibition proposes not an answer but an opening—a field of co-creation in which 'we' is yet to be defined.
As a deliberate curatorial gesture, this press release was written by ChatGPT-4o
NOUS, installation view. Photo by Panpan Yang and Meixuan Yi.
Oscillation
Curated by Denise Lin, Yu Wang and Yuri Xiao
24 - 30 June 2025
Departing from conventional visual-centered curating, Oscillation invites visitors into a multisensory environment shaped by plants, textures, weather, and sound. The exhibition unfolds across the gallery’s front yard, interior, and garden—embracing the natural rhythms and overlooked materials that already inhabit the space.
The project is rooted in an animist methodology, viewing materials not as passive objects, but as co-agents capable of response and resonance. Curatorial gestures emerge from field-based sensory sampling: sounds of wind through grass, birdsong, and ephemeral traces like moss or fragments of bark. These are not set decorations, but vital elements of an ecological choreography in which the exhibition takes place.
Sound plays a central role—not as background ambiance, but as a spatial climate. Wind chimes, environmental recordings, and subtle auditory traces invite slow attention, offering an alternative to visual dominance and linear viewing. Visitors are encouraged to drift, listen, and dwell in a space where perception is relational, not directive.
Oscillation, installation view. Photo by Yuri Xiao
Yasmine Anlan Huang & Diyou Yu:
Weighty is the Wood, Tender is the Night
2 November 2024 – 27 April 2025 (extended)
Visit by appointment only
What draws together Yasmine Anlan Huang and Diyou Yu is a deep fascination with time. Yasmine brings to this exhibition her lastest installation series Bad things happen, not only in literature (2024), where vintage, displaced objects re-emerge as a site where multiple layers of the past co-exist. In Yasmine’s single-channel video installation, Her Love is a Bleeding Tank, an eye becomes a theatre. Time, in a little girl’s theatre of life, finds a different kind of configuration. Light creeps into walnut wood in the blink of an eye. Time is folded into the pages of Diyou’s artist book While You Were Absent, Flowers Blossomed, a project that is all about waiting, a process wherein the apparitions of flower petals might even surprise their creator.
Yasmine Anlan Huang & Diyou Yu: Weighty is the Wood, Tender is the Night, installation view. Photo by Charlotte Duojin Yao and Panpan Yang.
Zhang Chi: Extra(Ordinary)
13 April – 18 August 2024
Visit by appointment only
With a diverse body of work spanning watercolour landscapes, sculpture and Chinese calligraphy, Zhang Chi’s art practice carries with it a sense of incompleteness and shows us that the most extraordinary details paradoxically emerge in the ordinary. A cloud, a cup of afternoon tea and a street corner: these quotidian, seemingly insignificant fragments of everyday life are elevated into something transcendent, whispering to us.
For this exhibition, calligraphic imagination takes root in the most unexpected corners of Small Gallery: a glass window, a shower screen, a roll of toilet paper, or a light bulb. These experiments put into play the relations between visibility and invisibility, between exhibition and non-exhibition spaces, and between art creation and curation.
Zhang Chi: Extra(Ordinary), installation view.
Lisa Chang Lee: Wind Dwellers
15 December 2023– 15 March 2024
Visit by appointment only
Taking inspiration from the wind chimes on the doorstep of Small Gallery, Lisa Chang Lee brings to this site-specific exhibition a set of newly commissioned, hand-painted bronze sculptures of birch tree leaves. Also on display is her 2023 remix of the audiovisual installation Serenade of the Woods. Evoking the 'wind in the trees' effect that fascinates audiences of early cinema, the work explores the ways in which a sense of contingency co-exists with audiovisual media of reproducibility.
Lisa Chang Lee: Wind Dwellers, installation view.