Mandy Zhang Artis pleased to present The Things We Hold Dear, a duo exhibition bringing together paintings by Korean artist Heyo Lee and ceramic sculptures by British artist Aliyah Hussain in a thoughtful exploration of the everyday.
The Things We Hold Dear invites viewers to rediscover the extraordinary within the ordinary, where the familiar becomes a site of reflection, affection, and quiet transformation. Blending still life and botanical forms, the exhibition celebrates the quiet beauty of familiar objects and plants, revealing how they become repositories for memory, care, and personal history.
Neither Lee nor Hussain approaches the everyday as something fixed or merely descriptive. Instead, their works occupy the space between observation and imagination.
Lee's carefully composed paintings elevate humble subjects like fruit, vessels, plants, books and household objects into contemplative arrangements where colour, scale and placement encourage us to look beyond function. His compositions evade narrative, instead inviting viewers to linger with the relationships between objects and the visceral responses they generate.
Rather than treating paint as a material that sits on top of the canvas, Lee allows pigment to become absorbed into unprimed linen, creating images that emerge from within the fabric itself. While influenced by painters such as Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko, he also sees this approach as deeply connected to East Asian traditions of ink painting, where pigment and paper become inseparable. His works seek emotional depth through subtle layers of colour and optical texture rather than heavy impasto, creating surfaces that feel rich without relying on physical thickness.
Hussain begins with remembered gardens, collected leaves, and botanical forms before allowing them to evolve into speculative ceramic sculptures that blur the boundaries between the organic and the imagined. Working with clay, she creates animated biomorphic forms that embrace the tension between living subjects and an inherently inert material. This contradiction lends the work a slightly uncanny presence, while its pared-back forms evoke traces of memory or memorials, rather than direct representations. For Hussain, plants cease to be simply organic or, within the domestic environment, merely decorative. Instead, they become companions to lived experience, carrying traces of memory, ritual, and care.
Across both practices, domestic and organic landscapes are understood not as static settings but as living ecologies, where seemingly insignificant details quietly shape how we understand ourselves and the worlds we inhabit. Still life, in this context, becomes less a record of objects than an expression of relationships: between people and place, memory and material, the familiar and the imagined.
Rather than asking us to escape the everyday, The Things We Hold Dear invites us to return to it with renewed attention. In slowing our gaze, the exhibition reveals that the things we hold close are never merely useful or familiar. They become vessels of memory, symbols of affection, and sites of continual transformation.