Dust Becoming
Diane Chappalley
Jin Fang
Lau Yee Vanessa Fong
Curated by Huiyun Chen and James Hu
2nd July – 25th July 2026
Opening 2nd July 18:00 – 20:30
Lau Yee Vanessa Fong, The Piper’s Lament, 2026, 100 x 162cm, coloured pencil and oil on linen
Gaia’s dawn-kiss
reaches my eyelids, conjunctiva, and lens
through the light of time;
passing the tunnel of the pupil, it touches me.
My beloved dead sleep within the earth.
Borrowing the chalices of flowers,
I drink with her once more,
on every nameless meadow of spring,
passing through the wall of life.
Flowers run throughout Diane Chappalley’s practice, originating from what she describes as a moment of miracle. After the death of a close friend, a packet of poppy seeds was left behind and later planted by a mutual companion. When Diane visited, she encountered the first poppy in bloom on an alpine meadow in Switzerland.
“You may not believe me, but in that moment I saw magic.”
From then on, she began painting flowers. Some remain recognisable—poppies, roses—while others resist naming altogether. These flowers become messengers, moving between the living and the dead. The revelation they carried entered her work: at times gathering into mountain-like forms from which a spiritual blue ascends (Blue Moon); at others branching like veins, animating bodies that seem perpetually in the process of becoming. Elsewhere, they emerge from the earth itself and are guided into the world through the artist’s hands as ceramic forms.
“Not today, not tomorrow.
When you have grown a rainbow consciousness,
I will recognise you in my star chart.
I will accept you as I accept my destiny.”
A pilgrimage to Bhutan three years ago transformed Vanessa Fong’s painting. Deeply influenced by Buddhism, her earlier works resembled the mandala image or Tibetan sand paintings—intricate ritual images that monks spend days or months creating, only to sweep them away upon completion without attachment.
“All compounded things are impermanent.”
Vanessa encountered this teaching not only as a philosophical statement but as a lived artistic gesture. While hiking to the Tiger’s Nest Monastery, she happened upon a religious ceremony. The monks’ chanting reverberated through the temple halls and into her body, resonating with something hidden deep within her.
From that moment onward, impermanence became the very substance of her paintings. Where particles gather, images emerge, carefully delineated with dense colour and fine brushwork. Yet they soon disperse again into luminous atmospheres rendered with paint diluted almost to the transparency of watercolour. Whether depicting a specific day (April 6th, Kensington Gardens) or a folk tale that captivates her imagination (The Piper’s Lament), details and emotions dissolve into rhythm and movement, becoming fleeting manifestations of the transient.
Fold the present moment into a paper airplane,
and cast it toward an unknowable future;
and with the past, time and again,
arrive at the same meeting
in a different posture,
like picking up a dream
dropped long ago into a cave.
Whenever a painting begins to feel complete, Jin deliberately wipes away part of its surface with pure alcohol. Faint traces remain: whispers of marks that are repeatedly covered, erased, and revealed again. Through this process, time itself seems to weather and compress the image.
While documenting a performance journey undertaken with her husband, Jin visited the Chauvet Cave and encountered its 36,000-year-old prehistoric paintings. What struck her was not only their vitality but the evidence of multiple temporalities embedded within them. Beneath the animal outlines were countless smaller marks and isolated lines. She realised these images may not have been created in a single moment, but had instead faded, eroded, and been redrawn over generations.
Different moments in time coexist within the same surface; different lives have stood before the same wall. Echoing this process, Jin repeatedly layers, erases, and reworks her paintings, bringing geographical memory and present participation into dialogue, allowing history and emotion to accumulate their own density.
Repetition, uncertainty, and waiting seem to be the ordinary condition of human life, like dust drifting rootlessly through light. Yet at certain moments, meaning suddenly appears. It seems capable of bringing a search to its conclusion, only to propel another beginning. As Gilles Deleuze writes in A Thousand Plateaus: “A line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination.” Across these three practices, personal experiences are transformed into symbols, methods, and painterly languages. Death, faith, and history—subjects too vast to be fully grasped through words alone—are translated into images. Through gestures as fragile and subtle as dust itself, they become part of humanity’s shared mythology.
text by Qian Qian, an artist, poet, and freelance writer currently living and working in Scotland.
About The Artists
Diane Chappalley (Born in 1991, in Switzerland, lives and works in London) works across painting and ceramic that explore processes of becoming. Her paintings depict atmospheric environments where inner and outer worlds dissolve, holding the ordinary and the magical in tension.
Her work explores transitional states, including matrescence and grief. Figures often appear suspended within these landscapes, while recurring motifs such as flowers, hearts, seeds, and roots are intertwined, forming fluid systems. These forms extend into three dimensions as ceramic sculptures, weaving the corporeal and the mythic into a shared, intimate world.
Her practice moves between the seen and the invisible, life and death, the earthly and the cosmic.
Solo & duo exhibitions include: upcoming solo show, Taymour Grahne Project, digital project(2026); What Holds Us, Megan Mulrooney Gallery, Los Angeles, USA(2025); Constellation, Solo show, Lychee One Gallery, London, UK(2023); The Flowers are Witness, Solo Show, Taymour Grahne Project, London, UK(2022); Death, In Bloom!, duo show with James Jessiman, Artworks Project Space, London, UK(2022); The Auguries, duo show with Anna Reading, Informality Gallery, UK(2020); Behind Closed Doors, Informality Gallery, Oxforshire ,UK(2019);Diane Chappalley & Georgia Sowerby, duo show, SET Space, London, UK(2019); The present is already gone, duo show with Antonia Showering, Chalton Gallery, London, UK(2018); Alice Bailly Award, duo show with Noémie Doge, Espace CHUV, Lausanne, CH(2018); POND, Academy of Visual Arts Gallery, duo show with Anna Reading, Kaitak Gallery, HKBU, Hong Kong, HK(2017);
Recent group shows: Cells & Love, curated by Paola Lucente, Hypha Studios, 1 Poultry street, London, UK(2025); Sentire you are April the sky, Upsilon Gallery, London, UK(2025); Imagined States: Chapter 2 “Intrinsicality”, WOAW Gallery, Group Show Hong Kong, HK (2024); KIAF, presentation by COB Gallery, Seoul, ROK(2023); Cross Breeze, curated by Domenico Dechirico, Oneroom Gallery, London, UK(2023); Landscape, Taymour Grahne Project, London, UK(2022); The Throat of the Snake, COMA Gallery, Sydney, AUS(2022);Somewhere in Time, Tube Culture Hall, Milan, IT(2022); Conversation with Memory, Cedric Bardawil, London UK(2022); Invisible Dragon, Cedric Bardawil, Cromwell Place, London, UK(2021); Aora Space, nature / nurture, online(2021); Casa Da Dona Laura, group show, Casa do Capitao, Lisbon, PT(2021);
Jin Fang (b. 1994, China) is a Chinese artist living and working between Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Shenzhen, China. She graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2024), following a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2020).
She creates her paintings and drawings through slow layering, erasing, and reworking. Her art reflects impressions she gathers from travel and daily life. This approach allows images to develop gradually instead of being predetermined. Each piece is constructed through a rhythm of building and interruption. Marks are scraped, covered, and revisited, leaving behind traces that stay active in the final image. The surface becomes a record of these changes.
She was awarded the Royal College of Art Full Scholarship in 2023, will undertake the GlogauAIR Residency in Berlin in 2026, and was featured in Curatory Magazine (Volume 11, 2025).
Lau Yee Vanessa Fong (b.1997, Hong Kong, China) is a London-based visual artist who graduated with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. Her art, deeply rooted in Buddhist and Eastern philosophy, explores a personal journey of spiritual self-healing and interprets ancient philosophies in a contemporary light.
Recent exhibitions includes: Good Eye Projects, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; Celestial Pabulum, Lychee One, London, UK; The Torrent & The Fold, LBF Contemporary, London, UK; Full Disclosure, D Contemporary, London, UK; Malerei, akku Kunstplattform, Emmenbrücke, Switzerland(2025); Fantasyland, Twilight Contemporary, London, UK(2025); Invited Worlds, Speiro Projects, London, UK(2024); Delphian Open Call 2024 winners exhibition, Delphian Gallery and Unit 1 Gallery|Workshop, London, UK(2024); I Am Rooted, But I Flow, Maison Lune and MEY Gallery, Los Angeles, USA(2024); Royal College of Art 2024 Post Graduate Exhibition, London, UK(2024); ÈTER SPACE, Ethereal Maison, London, UK(2024)