ART CITIES: Hong Kong-Darren Almond

Over nearly three decades, Darren Almond has developed a practice that evocatively deals with time and duration as well as personal and historical memory. The frequently enigmatic register of Almond’s work belies an investigatory and exploratory process, often involving periods of extended travel to remote locations. In this process Almond develops discrete portraits of place that question geographical limits, the activity of journeying and culturally specific notions of arrival and departure.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: White Cube Gallery Archive

In “Night Before Day”, Darren Almond deepens his enduring exploration of time, place, and memory through a new body of work that unfolds across three distinct series. At the heart of these paintings is the recurring motif of the weeping willow, rendered through delicate, translucent washes of colour. This natural form becomes a portal through which Almond examines our relationship to the rhythms and transitions of the seasons. The willow’s cascading foliage appears not only in these atmospheric works but also in paintings that incorporate elemental metals—gold, silver, copper, and palladium—to evoke layered temporalities: mechanical, seasonal, and celestial. These reflective surfaces respond to light and space, embodying time’s passage as both subject and material. In a third series, Almond turns to numbers and grids, employing them as a formal language to investigate how time is quantified, represented, and perceived. The willow’s presence in Almond’s work is rooted in a formative childhood memory: fishing beneath its drooping branches near a flooded mining pit in Wigan, UK. The gentle arc of the leaves and the fluidity of their movement have become enduring motifs, serving as vehicles for the artist’s contemplation of the cycles that shape the natural world. Named for the way water gathers and drips from its branches, the weeping willow becomes a poetic embodiment of Almond’s themes of impermanence and renewal. During the recent winter months, Almond observed how rainwater moves down the willow’s branches, forming droplets that seem to weep before falling back to earth. This interaction of light, water, and gravity inspired the 2025 “Salix Triandra” series and the painting “Transition” (2025). Using heavily diluted pigment, Almond allows gravity to direct the flow of color, mimicking the gentle descent of water. These cascading washes create fluid tendrils of tone, which he subtly draws away toward a horizon line, establishing visual depth. In these aqueous meditations, water becomes both a medium and metaphor—holding, refracting, and transforming light and color into luminous, shifting compositions. This sensitivity continues in “Early Summer”, “Late Spring”, and “Éostre” (all 2024), where the willow’s drooping branches animate the canvas. Set against gilded backgrounds, a faint zero symbol materializes, nearly invisible within the underlying modernist grid. For Almond, zero represents “the nothing that holds everything together”—a paradoxical space where being and non-being intersect. Its quiet presence, interwoven with the grid, introduces a formal tension between organic motion and imposed order, alluding to humanity’s enduring desire to map, structure, and control nature. The “Senryū” series—named after a Japanese poetic form similar to haiku, known for its wry, often satirical observations of human nature—extends these seasonal reflections. Each linen diptych is layered with metal leaf, its reflective surfaces framing silhouettes of the willow at various stages of growth. A tree known for both its early spring emergence and its late autumn decline, the willow here charts the continuum of the seasons. The metals shift fluidly across the works—gold, copper, and palladium—mirroring the vegetal and atmospheric transitions of the year. In “Senryū (Autumn)” (2023), the gold surface glows with burnt orange foliage. The series culminates in “Senryū (Winter)” (2024), where palladium creates a cool, silvery plane behind a bare, skeletal tree—simultaneously conveying dormancy and latent renewal. Despite their evolving imagery, the “Senryū” works are bound together by a subtle, centrally debossed zero. This recurring form functions as a conceptual and visual anchor—an emblem of infinity, a portal or lens, a vanishing point, and an echo of Buddhist ideas of emptiness or nothingness. Almond’s use of numbers and grids across his practice becomes a disciplined syntax through which the mutable qualities of time are explored. As he notes, numbers are “our true common language”—tools by which we locate ourselves, relate to others, scale our lives, and mark growth. In the “Entropy” series (2018–24), zero again occupies a central role, stabilising compositions filled with fractured, overlapping numerals across eight-panel arrangements. These disjointed numeric forms evoke the visual mechanics of digital flip clocks—a technology that audibly and visibly marks the passage of time. Here, Almond presents time as neither linear nor fixed, but rather fragmented and layered, materially etched onto the surface of the work itself. Throughout “Night Before Day”, the symbol of zero acts as a quiet fulcrum for Almond’s reflections on transition, memory, and impermanence. Mirroring this is the willow’s soft, rhythmic movement—a motif through which the artist distills the poetics of the natural world. Whether recalled from childhood, observed in seasonal change, or embedded within abstract numerals, time in Almond’s work emerges as a deeply felt convergence of natural rhythms and our fragile attempts to contain them.

Photo: Darren Almond, Spring Fragments III, 2022, Gold and acrylic on linen, Overall: 136 x 193 cm | 53 9/16 x 76 in., 9 parts, each: 44 x 63 cm | 17 5/16 x 24 13/16 in., © Darren Almond, Courtesy the artist and white Cube Gallery

Info: White Cube Gallery, 50 Connaught Road Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 18/7-30/8/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.whitecube.com/