Kurt YAU Kwok Keung – A Kindred Spirit

SomoS Arts is pleased to announce the exhibition A Kindred Spirit—an installation constructed at SomoS exhibition space by visual artist Kurt Yau Kwok 

In this groundbreaking, first solo exhibition of visual artist Kurt YAU Kwok Keung outside his native Hong Kong, the artist constructs a series of spatial and temporal dislocations that interweave personal memory with collective history.

Through video, drawing, found objects, and sculptural installation, the exhibition traces quiet movements of migration, escape, and survival across generations, geographies, and ideological boundaries. Borrowing its title from the 1990s Hong Kong television drama, the exhibition evokes kinship and longing, sentiments often shaped by pop culture and state narration, and here, reconfigured through fragments of lived and inherited experience.

In “A Kindred Spirit,” the artist situates himself between visible and invisible walls—those built by history, politics, family, and fiction. Through repetition, minor ruptures, and quiet gestures, he unfolds a poetics of escape, where displacement is not only an action but a condition. These works do not simply ask how to cross a border, but how to live with its trace—how to carry the weight of containment and still move forward.
 

About Kurt YAU Kwok Keung   

Kurt YAU Kwok Keung is a Hong Kong-born visual and tattoo artist whose interdisciplinary work explores memory, mythology, and collective trauma through drawing, video, installation, and kinetic sculpture. Educated in graphic design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Yau began his creative path as part of the illustration duo Dirty Paper before shifting to working solo in 2018. His experience as a tattoo artist continues to inform his tactile, emotionally driven approach to form. Through the symbolic use of material, found objects, and time-based media, his works articulate layered tensions shaped by memory, displacement, and the quiet force of symbolic gesture. A recipient of the 2023 DFA Hong Kong Young Design Talent Award, he is currently engaged in a year-long international research residency. Recent exhibitions in Hong Kong have reflected his sustained engagement with symbolic narrative, fragmented identities, and the aesthetics of transience.

About SomoS

SomoS is a non-commercial artist-run art space with an emphasis on interdisciplinary projects, intergenerational community, and diversity, founded in 2012. Working with emerging and mid-career artists, SomoS provides space, knowledge, and resources for producing, presenting, and reflecting the arts. SomoS’ engaged schedule of exhibitions, performances, seminars, and artist talks is free to the public. It aims to spark discussion, cooperation and understanding, activating art’s unique positive uniting potential.