gdm Hong Kong is pleased to present Chen Hui-Chiao: Under One Sky, the artist’s debut solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Under One Sky traces the trajectory of Chen’s creative practice, spanning the early installation work Amorphous Company (1997), through the sprawling spatial intervention A Room with a View (2018), to newly unveiled works including: When the Spheres Merge in Colors for a Large Wall… (2024), Airco DH-4 1916-1918 (2025), and Starlink (2025). Employing needles and thread, cotton, ping-pong balls, and LED as vehicles of thought, Chen stitches aviation military symbols into everyday objects, probing how humankind has transformed the sky into a battlefield.
When the desire for flight rewrites the stars as coordinates of war, how do we look up at the same sky?
The needle is the smallest weapon. It pierces fabric as desire pierces consciousness. Yet it is also a tool of connection and repair, suturing fragments into wholeness. This fragile act of piercing and suturing is where Chen’s practice locates its tension—a counterpoint to the countless larger, deadlier weapons that pierce distant cities and flood our screens. Under One Sky opens with this dissonance—departing from Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Under One Small Star”, Chen translates contradiction, unease, and awe into a cold, unyielding gaze at human ambition.
The exhibition begins with spheres and ends in ruins. The dream of flight collapses into the trajectory of a fall—from Icarus’s waxen wings to the rubble of apartment blocks in today’s news headlines. Every attempt to “fly higher” carries the possibility of collapse; every technological breakthrough leaves fragments that cannot be cleared—whether mythic feathers, orbital debris, or the wreckage of war.
