An Atlas of Longing

Every act of longing begins with a place that has yet to be reached.

Long before we arrive somewhere, we have already imagined it. A city encountered through another's memory, a landscape shaped by mythology, a distant planet projected into the future, or a home continually reconstructed through remembrance—our relationship to place is rarely formed through geography alone. It is built through memory, desire, imagination, and the stories we inherit.

An Atlas of Longing brings together artists whose works unfold across different landscapes, histories, and states of mind, tracing an emotional geography that stretches from Singapore and Paris to Hawaii, and beyond the Earth itself. These places do not appear here as destinations in the conventional sense. Rather, they emerge as vessels of personal memory, cultural imagination, spiritual inquiry, and collective experience.

Throughout the exhibition, longing takes many forms. It appears as nostalgia for home, as the recollection of youth, as an attachment to a city transformed by love, or as a return to places that exist more vividly in memory than in reality. Elsewhere, longing is carried through mythology, ritual, craftsmanship, and artistic tradition—stories that continue to shape the identities of places long after they were first imagined. It also extends beyond the visible world, reaching towards the cosmos, where questions of existence, consciousness, and humanity begin to eclipse geography altogether.

Presented as an online viewing room, An Atlas of Longing reflects the way contemporary experience is increasingly mediated through images and imagination. We often construct our understanding of a place before ever setting foot there. In doing so, distance becomes less a physical condition than an emotional one. The atlas assembled here is therefore not a map of territories, but of relationships—between people and places, memory and history, the known and the unknown.

Perhaps longing has never been about arriving somewhere else. It is through the continual act of looking beyond ourselves that we come to understand both the world and our place within it.

Section 1: Places We Carry Within Us

Some places remain with us long after we have left them. Home, the city where love once unfolded, or the streets that shaped our youth gradually detach themselves from geography and become inseparable from memory. Time does not preserve these places; it rewrites them.

For Alvin Ong, Singapore becomes a psychological landscape through which questions of belonging and identity continue to unfold. Liang Hao's Paris exists as the emotional space between two lovers separated by the pandemic, transforming the city into a vessel for absence and affection. Wenjue, meanwhile, revisits the Paris of his adolescence, where lived experience merges with fantasy, allowing memory to evolve into a dreamlike narrative suspended between reality and fiction.

Together, these works remind us that the places we return to most often are not always those we can physically revisit, but those that continue to inhabit us.

Section 2: Places Built by Stories

Some places become familiar long before we encounter them. They are shaped not only by geography, but by the stories, myths, rituals, and artistic traditions that continue to give them meaning across generations.

Michael Lin’s paintings adopt the visual language of Hawaiian floral textiles, reflecting the fluid movement of culture and identity across borders. Katherina Olschbaur reimagines figures drawn from mythology and religious iconography, using angels and goddesses not as symbols of the past, but as protagonists through which contemporary questions surrounding womanhood, vulnerability, and resistance are explored. Austin Lee's reinterpretation of La Joconde reminds us that works of art themselves can become inseparable from the identities of the places they inhabit, continuing to shape how cities are imagined across time.

What these works ultimately reveal is that places are sustained as much by narrative as by landscape. Stories do not simply describe a place—they allow it to endure.

Section 3: Toward the Unknown

Beyond every horizon lies another question. For centuries, humanity has looked towards the sky not simply in search of new worlds, but in pursuit of a deeper understanding of itself. The sun, the stars, and distant planets become more than astronomical bodies; they become mirrors through which we contemplate time, existence, and the limits of human knowledge.

Bernard Childs devoted much of his practice to the elemental forces of light and the cosmos, transforming abstract painting into meditations on energy, movement, and celestial rhythms. Tim Crowley's imagined exhibition site within Mars' Hellas Planitia projects the red planet as a possible destination for future humanity, where speculation and science fiction quietly converge. In Stargazing, Dene Leigh draws upon cosmology, Kabbalistic mysticism, and meditation to reflect upon identity, consciousness, and humanity's place within the universe. A partially obscured face gazes towards celestial forms, where recognition and misrecognition coexist, allowing memory, perception, and transformation to unfold simultaneously. Here, looking outward also becomes an act of looking inward. Suyi Xu draws upon the Renaissance dome—a symbol of order and spiritual belief—to transform the act of looking into a contemplative experience. As light descends from an unseen source, architecture gradually dissolves, leaving only the presence of light itself. The work invites viewers into a meditative gaze, where light becomes a path towards the unknown.

The places imagined within this section no longer belong solely to the Earth. They invite us to consider not where we might travel next, but how we understand our own existence.

Section 4: Shared Resonance

If the previous chapters trace our relationships with places, histories, and the unknown, the exhibition concludes by returning to one another. Connection is not always forged through language. Sometimes it emerges through gesture, shared attention, or the silent recognition of another person's experience.

Dene Leigh's Mime reflects upon communication beyond speech. Inspired by the aftermath of her grandfather's stroke, the painting considers how meaning persists when language and facial recognition begin to dissolve. Fragmented imagery conceals as much as it reveals, inviting viewers to reconstruct understanding through memory, intuition, and perception. Gong Hengzhi turns instead towards one of the most widely shared experiences of our time: the FIFA World Cup Final. More than a sporting event, it becomes a collective performance in which millions of people, across nations and cultures, briefly inhabit the same emotional landscape. Anticipation, celebration, disappointment, and hope unfold simultaneously, revealing how shared moments can transcend the boundaries of language.

The exhibition closes not with a destination, but with a possibility. Longing may first lead us towards distant places, yet it ultimately returns us to what has always mattered most—the ways in which we continue to recognise ourselves in others, and each other in the world.

Scan the QR code for The Exhibition Storybook (on view til Sep 28, 2026)