ART CITIES: Seoul-Rick Lowe
Rick Lowe’s expansive practice encompasses painting, drawing, and installation, and is deeply interwoven with an ongoing commitment to collaborative projects rooted in the ethos of “social sculpture.” Engaging directly with individuals and communities, Lowe has cultivated diverse strategies for activating creativity within the rhythms of daily life. Through these efforts, he transforms artistic practice into a shared endeavor, one that not only generates new forms of expression but also opens space to grapple with urgent questions of equity, justice, and collective imagination.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive
In his solo exhibition “Harbour Fragments”, Rick Lowe translates the frenetic pulse of Hong Kong into a series of luminous abstractions. Drawing on aerial perspectives of Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong Island, and the Kowloon Peninsula, Lowe distills the city’s dynamism into canvases where geography becomes rhythm, and cartography dissolves into fields of color, pattern, and movement. Lowe’s practice occupies a fertile space between painting, urban studies, and social engagement. Known for both his studio work and community-based projects addressing the complexities of urban transformation, he brings to “Harbour Fragments” an exploratory approach that resists fixed interpretation. His canvases, simultaneously painterly and structural, engage the visual languages of collage and mapping while remaining rooted in improvisation—a sensibility cultivated through games of dominoes he has long played with communities around the world. The dominoes’ shifting patterns, juxtapositions, and chance combinations become metaphors for the negotiation of civic relationships and the improvisatory nature of city life. The genesis of “Harbour Fragments” lies in a monumental work: a single 360 × 850 cm composition painted across twenty-one square canvases. This sprawling visual field was later deconstructed into nine discrete works, each comprising one to six canvases. In the process of reworking, Lowe adjusted orientations and refined visual elements, allowing each fragment to stand as both an autonomous painting and part of a larger urban constellation. All but two panels anchor themselves to segments of Victoria Harbour, underscoring the essential role of water in shaping Hong Kong’s cultural and historical identity. Rather than mapping the city with cartographic precision, Lowe abstracts its essence into shifting grids, vectors, and layers of color. The deep blues trace watery expanses, while luminous greens echo the mountains and public parks that punctuate the dense metropolis. White and red circles—derived from the pips of domino tiles—punctuate the canvases like constellations of light, which Lowe likens to “flowers in a landscape of lights dotted on the edge of the city.” Arcing lines and polychromatic shapes suggest bridges, roads, and tunnels, linking districts and gestures of human connectivity. Many works operate on multiple registers at once: they read as bird’s-eye renderings of topography, yet also evoke traditional landscape compositions with horizon lines where blue can shift between sea and sky. Complementing the canvases are new works on paper, where Lowe deepens his engagement with painting and collage. Here, geometric and geographic structures fragment and recombine, creating arrangements that resemble shuffled domino tiles. These compositions meditate on order and disruption, continuity and rupture—qualities that echo both the physical fabric of Hong Kong and the social relationships that animate it. In “Harbour Fragments”, Lowe reframes the city as a living organism, where history, geography, and human connection overlap in constantly evolving patterns. The exhibition transforms Hong Kong into an abstracted terrain of light and movement, a reminder that the metropolis, like Lowe’s art, is always in the process of becoming.
Photo: Rick Lowe, The Harbour Fragment Series: Fragment 1, 2025, Acrylic and paper collage on canvas, 96 x 144 inches (243.8 x 365.8 cm), © Rick Lowe Studio, Photo: Thomas Dubrock, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 11/9-1/11/2025, Days && Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://gagosian.com/
