A ROOM

Hands-on is pleased to present A Room, a curatorial project featuring works by Jialin Yan, Shooq AlShawi, and Verona Shi.

Conceived as a lived-in environment rather than a traditional exhibition, A Room reimagines the gallery as a domestic space- an interior shaped by gestures, rhythms, and objects that resonate with the textures of everyday life. Within this setting, artworks inhabit roles both familiar and newly charged: a table becomes a site of encounter, a surface becomes a threshold, and domesticity becomes a method for thinking through intimacy, transformation, and the quiet negotiations that structure how we dwell.

The exhibition unfolds as an interplay between material presence and emotional frequency, between the visible forms that anchor a home and the more elusive states- memory, ritual, breath, and transition- that circulate within it. Across their practices, the artists activate the domestic not as a backdrop but as a generative space where function, narrative, and sensorial experience coalesce. The room becomes both container and collaborator, holding traces of bodies, histories, and natural rhythms that seep into the objects we live with and the environments that shape us.

Drawing from the rhythmic traces of natural phenomena, Verona Shi introduces a quiet, tidal sensibility to the space. Her ceramic works, informed by the cyclical movements of tides, erosion, and shifting sands, echo the subtle temporalities that shape both landscapes and homes. Within the domestic environment, her pieces act as reminders of nature’s unspoken cadence- marks of time that persist even in stillness. By merging natural rhythm with household presence, Shi nurtures a dialogue between the persistent motions of the world and the often unnoticed rituals that structure everyday living.

Shooq AlShawi brings an energetic counterpoint to the space, layering gestures of breath, faith, and remembrance. Her paintings, expansive and unbound, introduce an atmosphere of meditative intensity into the domestic setting. Colour vibrates; brushstrokes oscillate between control and surrender; the canvas becomes a porous field where breath is recorded, dissolved, and renewed. Flowers- symbols of presence, impermanence, and surrender- guide her movement into a dimensionality that is both bodily and spiritual.

In Jialin Yan’s work, the domestic becomes an arena of transformation and vulnerability. Inspired by Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, her visual experiments explore a quiet metamorphosis- an instinctive shift toward vegetal softness that emerges in moments when language collapses under the weight of pain. The entanglement of plant forms with the female body creates an image of tenderness marked by constraint and endurance. Yet the presence of the cage structure complicates this transformation: offering neither escape nor resolution, it reveals the persistence of harm in muted, internalized forms.

Together, these practices create a space where domesticity expands into a field of material, emotional, and temporal resonance. A Room invites viewers to inhabit a setting where objects are not passive furnishings but active participants- where surfaces hold memory, where breath leaves traces, and where natural rhythms seep into the contours of everyday life. The exhibition asks us to consider how we live with objects and how they, in turn, live with us: carrying our gestures, reflecting our transformations, and revealing the layered, often tender negotiations that make a room more than shelter- a space of becoming.