Kiang Malingue is pleased to present at its Hong Kong space “borrnnn”, an exhibition of more than a dozen paintings by Chou Yu-Cheng created in 2025. The new series of paintings is directly affected by the birth of Chou Yu-Cheng’s first child with his wife, fellow artist Yang Chi-Chuan. The sheer joy inspired by the newborn child envelopes this series of meticulously crafted paintings, which recognise metaphorically through ripe fruits and gourds new hopes shaped by love and life.

In 2024, Chou developed during Yang’s pregnancy a new series of gradient paintings entitled “Imaginary Body”. Already anticipating the birth of the child, the series is filled with natural, organic forms that gradually connect with each other in a still chaotic environment, patiently shaping a full, complex body structure. The last two paintings from the “Imagined Body” series already shifted from depicting this process of bodily organisation to depicting a classic metaphor for the human body and fertility: the natural fall of a ripe gourd. The first line of Classic of Poetry: Origin of the House of Chow reads: “See the trailing young gourds, how they spread/ See in these how our people first grew.” Gourds and melons alike have long been considered a symbol of continuous and vigorous life force. In Han Dynasty, there were records of gourds being identified as auspicious signs; from Tang Dynasty to late Qing Dynasty, there were an abundance of paintings depicting gourds and melons, examining the metaphorical potentials of the rounded, organic forms.

In 2025, Chou began to create “borrnnn”, a series that directly follows the “Imaginary Body” paintings. The new series, situated between still life and portrait, depict gourds by using exuberant contrasts, cradling the ripened fruits in soothingly colorful environments. Chou also further develops his unique language of gradient painting with this series: by applying self-ground earth pigments on paper for the first time, Chou allows the fine gradation of different color fields to pervade in a more organic, free-flowing fashion. He then assembles on canvas the large or tiny pieces of paper with remarkable precision, filling the composition with a gentle and playful relationship of colors. For Chou, the basic logic of gradient painting is to respond to and capture light; the particularly figurative series of “borrnnn” balances technical and textural subtlety with a candid expression of unrestrained emotion.

Suspended, mounted on walls, or perched on pedestals, the “borrnnn” paintings on view at Kiang Malingue Hong Kong also demonstrate Chou’s longstanding interest in spatial physicality, emphasising the relationship between the fruit and the pictorial space in a painting. The Chinese proverb “fall of the ripened gourd” is indicative of the subtle relationship between things and their environments, as well as the potentials that the process of birth creates in the world.