In the Studio with Chris Huen Sin-kan

Sussex-based Hong Kong artist Chris Huen Sin-kan is drawn to the routines and textures of everyday life. A child sits at the breakfast table. A dog plays in the woods. In his paintings, dapples of colour flicker against swathes of black and voids of blank canvas, and surfaces manage to feel at once porous and insistent. Simultaneously appearing and dissolving, it’s as if the scene is assembling itself in real time before our eyes. The Path and The Fog, Part I, his largest UK exhibition to date, presented by Matt Carey-Williams at The Bomb Factory in Marylebone, and opening on 2 September, expands tender moments from the artist’s familial life to a monumental scale. In conversation with Something Curated’s Keshav Anand, Huen Sin-kan discusses his work, reflecting on how the intensity of Hong Kong and the quiet of rural South East England have each shaped his practice.

Keshav Anand: The title The Path and The Fog feels loaded with metaphor. What drew you to these words?

Chris Huen Sin-kan: The title comes from a quote in Milan Kundera’s Testaments Betrayed. Part of its appeal for me is how the metaphors resonate with our current social experience, moving forward with great uncertainty, never seeing the whole road ahead.

It also reflects my thoughts on the autonomy of art and the possibility of misinterpretation in contemporary painting, an idea that connects back to Kundera’s critique in the original text. But most of all, as a painter, The Path and The Fog feels like a perfect image for the process itself: making and exploring without a clear map, moving through a mist of decision-making, and trusting that each step, seen or unseen, shapes the journey.

KA: You’ve spoken before about painting entirely from memory. What’s that process like in practice—do you spend time rehearsing the scene in your head first?

CHSK: I’m less interested in capturing a single moment than in visualising how we experience the passage of time. The scenes I choose to paint are glimpses of familiar places and moments that repeat in my daily routine—quiet accumulations of short-lived memories that refresh themselves each day during certain hours.

My aim is to bring my studio practice into harmony with my everyday life. I work Monday to Friday, 10am to 5pm, reserving weekends for my family. When I return to the studio, I already carry with me a load of fresh impressions—from last night’s dinner and bedtime stories to the morning school drop-off or walking the dog. My paintings are my responses to these memories, or subtle readjustments informed by how they’ve shifted since yesterday.

Rather than rehearsing, I think of my process as observing. Daily routines may be shaped by our habits and decisions, but they are never fully scripted. Because of this, I never sketch or pre-plan my paintings. I let my observations guide me, allowing the work to unfold in its own way—like time itself, quietly layered and never still.

KA: What’s your relationship to nostalgia when painting from memory? Do you ever intentionally distort or leave things out?

CHSK: I don’t think nostalgia plays a large role in my work in terms of revisiting distant memories. My focus is on the recent and immediate—those impressions still fresh from daily life. But there is a certain consolation when I manage to capture a quality that resonates with my lived experience. It’s comforting to know that these small, seemingly insignificant moments are not going unremembered.

I do intentionally leave things out. For me, that reflects the reality of our minds—out of the hundreds or thousands of moments we encounter each day, many slip away. I also intentionally add meaningless forms or brushstrokes, almost like distractions within the composition. These interruptions feel important, because they echo the way we navigate our days: always balancing focus with the noise and interruptions of life.

KA: These new paintings are described as monumental, yet they deal with such tender, fleeting moments. How do you reconcile that scale with the quietness of the scenes themselves?

CHSK: I’ve always felt that the everydayness is often disregarded. The fear of knowing or admitting part of us is insignificance. I was born in Hong Kong in the 1990s and grew up during one of its most peaceful and prosperous periods. That experience left me with a tension: on one hand, an awareness of the injustices in society, and on the other, a fear of our powerlessness of our own discourse.

Since then, my approach to art has often been about embracing our insignificance—finding a way to quietly defy the humdrum. Painting on a monumental scale allows me to give weight and presence to the tender, fleeting moments of daily life. In a way, each work becomes a celebration of ordinariness and, more specifically, the serenity hidden within it.

KA: Your palette has become more saturated in this new body of work. What’s led you toward using bolder colours?

CHSK: The shift in my palette is largely a result of moving to the UK. The physical and geographical change has given me a completely different sensory experience. Living under a new climate, surrounded by unfamiliar plants and landscapes, has introduced me to colours I had never encountered before.

The cultural shift has also influenced me. In Asia, I had easy access to certain materials that were part of my visual vocabulary, but here those are harder to find. Instead, I now have access to a wide range of Western materials that I previously only knew from books or catalogues during my studies. Working with them feels both new and like a kind of revisit—familiar in theory, but fresh in practice.

KA: Your family are at the centre of almost all your work. Has that ever felt uncomfortable, making the private so present in the public space of a gallery?

CHSK: Revealing one’s deeply examined personal experiences through their work is always uncomfortable. It is, in fact, a barrier that every artist is bound to face. At the same time, I think this slight uneasiness is exactly what I seek. It creates the perfect ground for my communication with audiences.

I remember when I was very young walking through the National Portrait Gallery. I saw thousands of portraits of important people, figures of historical significance. Yet, I could not meet them personally, and due to my limited intellectual capacity at the time they all became mere passers-by to me. This disconnection however led me to another dimension of understanding art from a different perspective.

In my own case, the people and dogs I depict are, for the vast majority of viewers, entirely unknown. They are also passers-by. I hope this unfamiliarity can trigger curiosity, inviting people to wander within the picture and discover their own connections.

KA: You’ve spoken about the “fog” of being raised in Hong Kong and now finding a different rhythm in the UK. Do you feel a sense of dual identity, or something more fluid than that?

CHSK: I don’t feel that I have a dual identity. Strangely, changes have happened, but for some reason my sense of identity has remained the same though for different reasons in each place. For example, I have always felt like an “outsider,” whether in Hong Kong or in the UK. In Hong Kong, I was an ethnic majority, but as an artist I still felt somewhat outcast from the mainstream. In the UK, making art isn’t so unusual, yet I have become part of an ethnic minority.

The one thing that feels fluid, and hasn’t really changed, is the sense of clarity that comes with distance. Going back to the quote I mentioned earlier: when I look back at my thirty years in Hong Kong, the fog has lifted. I can now see a completely clear path, with a sharper sense of judgment. But in the present, living in the UK, I’m reminded of how things felt back then—how I was constantly surrounded by uncertainty and distractions. In some ways, my present feels just as foggy as my past once did.

KA: Alongside your use of colour, how has living in Sussex shaped your work?

CHSK: I think I’m finding more synergy in my work when I depict the outdoors, as I’ve become increasingly drawn to the rural landscape. Growing up in the concrete jungle of Hong Kong, my current daily life would have seemed almost unimaginable. Even during the three years I spent in London, I couldn’t find anything quite like what I experience here.

As you can imagine, Sussex is much quieter. I remember once walking through the forest with my dogs when a tree suddenly fell right beside us. We might have been the only living beings within three miles. It was certainly dangerous, but I couldn’t have felt more at peace—knowing that we were the only witnesses.

KA: What are you currently listening to in the studio?

CHSK: Ghosts by Hania Rani. And Inner Symphonies by Hania Rani and Dobrawa Czocher.



Episode III: Chris Huen Sin-kan, The Path and The Fog, Part I is on view from 2-13 September 2025 at The Bomb Factory, Marylebone.



Feature image: Courtesy Chris Huen Sin-kan Studio