The marks Chiu Wei-Hsiang makes after midnight point to demolished land — now at gdm Hong Kong

There is a specific kind of urgency in work made under constraint. Chiu Wei-Hsiang manages a nursing institution by day; painting happens at night, on paper, with acrylic. He graduated from the National Taiwan University of Arts with a degree in calligraphy and painting, and then set aside what the academy taught him. The brushwork is rapid, childlike in its directness, immediate rather than refined — a deliberate rejection of the scholarly precision his training had formed. The material is doing something audible here: insisting on its own urgency against the discipline it was made to inherit.

Chiu Wei-Hsiang seated in his studio surrounded by paintings and calligraphy works in progress — Chiu Wei-Hsiang in his studio. Image: gdm

The subject matter of Toil and Soil (日日耕 — daily cultivation) is ground that no longer exists. Chiu grew up in Dayuan, Taoyuan, where his grandfather was neighborhood chief and the landscape ran to rice fields and courtyard animals. The Taoyuan Aerotropolis project — a government-led smart-city development around the airport — erased that world. Earlier solo presentations at his family home (The House and Root) transformed the vanishing site into exhibition space before demolition closed it. This is his first show in a commercial gallery, and the work carries that shift.

The acrylic-on-paper pieces at gdm render everyday objects — vegetables, hands, domestic tools — in marks that keep the speed of their making visible. Two anchoring works are No Rush (不急, 2026) and Hands, Impending to Grow (等待長出雙手, 2026), both 79 × 55 cm on paper. The title No Rush reads against the painter’s own situation: a practice compressed into whatever hours remain after caregiving. The gap between that title and the visible haste of the brushwork is where the exhibition’s real argument sits.

Chiu leads an artist tour of the exhibition on 12 September at 2:30 PM, conducted in Mandarin. The event follows a conversation held three days earlier at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Cheng Ming Building — part of the Cheng Ming Night series organized by CUHK Fine Arts — where Chiu spoke with students about caregiving, nocturnal painting, and works made around his childhood home before and after its demolition.

Toil and Soil runs through 31 October 2026 at gdm Hong Kong, 1/F, 11 Duddell Street, Central. The gallery — founded in 1974, long a platform for emerging Chinese contemporary practice — pairs Chiu’s work here with an international commercial context for the first time. He will present further work in October at the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei.

The marks were made at night, after the caregiving was done. Toil and Soil asks what is preserved in that act — and what it costs.

Tags: Chinese University of Hong Kong, Chiu Wei-Hsiang, contemporary art, gdm Hong Kong, Taiwanese artists, Toil and Soil