Asia Art Center is pleased to present Unseen Topographies, a two-person exhibition featuring Hong Kong artist Tobe Kiu Sin Kan and British artist Charlotte Keates. Bringing together two distinct painting practices, the exhibition explores how memory, perception, identity, and emotion may be translated into spaces that feel at once familiar and elusive.
The title Unseen Topographies refers not to geography in a literal sense, but to the invisible contours that shape lived experience: memory, longing, psychological association, and the shifting relation between inner life and the world outside. Through painting, both artists give form to what cannot be directly seen, tracing emotional and psychological states through atmosphere, composition, and spatial imagination.
Although both artists live on small islands, the worlds they inhabit are markedly different. Kan's experience of Hong Kong as a dense, fast-moving city shaped by multiple cultural influences and colonial history informs her reflection on cultural difference, identity, and belonging. Keates, by contrast, lives in Guernsey, the second-largest island in the Channel Islands, where quiet rhythms and relative isolation foster a more contemplative mode of looking. These contrasting conditions are reflected in the emotional tone of their works: Kan's paintings often carry a sense of in-betweenness and self-searching, while Keates's invite stillness, observation, and immersion.
The period around Covid marked a shift in both artists' practices. During lockdown, Kan began developing her arched canvases while reflecting on earlier travels in Europe, including visits to Berlin Cathedral and St Paul's Cathedral in London. The arch recalls forms found in European religious altarpieces and ecclesiastical architecture, while also resonating with the colonial and architectural legacy embedded in Hong Kong. For Kan, it became more than a compositional device, carrying associations of distance, memory, and cultural encounter.
At the same time, Keates began collecting film stills as a source of inspiration. This cinematic quality is central to her practice, which moves between interiors, architecture, nature, and invented settings. For this exhibition, Keates presents a triptych, a format that likewise recalls the structure of European altarpieces. Reimagined as a three-act play, the work introduces a heightened sense of drama and theatricality, while an arched window in the centre panel creates a subtle formal dialogue with Kan's paintings.
Despite their differences, both artists engage with architecture, artificial spaces, plants, interiors, and traces of travel. Both draw on visual languages that echo European art and religious forms, yet neither makes direct historical or religious reference. Instead, these influences are absorbed into works shaped by lived experience, memory, and imagination.
Unseen Topographies brings the two artists into dialogue through a shared sensitivity to the unseen forces that shape experience. Together, their works reveal a layered terrain of memory, emotion, and perception, offering a reflection on how painting can trace inner landscapes that remain just beyond view.
