The Ruin and The Ripples Solo Exhibition

Period: Jan 10 - Feb 8, 2026

Venue: 1839 Contemporary Gallery, Taipei

Curator: Blues Wong

Curatorial Statement: 

The Hong Kong Ex-Shum Shui Po Service Reservoir was constructed with orthodox Neoclassical Roman architectural style in 1902. This discharged public facility has ultimately conserved as a Grade I historic building in 2021 and became a popular tourist spot. Maria Cheung’s ‘The Ruin and the Ripples’ photo series is a visual documentation of this site with artistic significances beyond sheer collective reminiscence of the former colonial era. The entire portfolio consists of nine diptychs and a stretched photo sequence compiled with eleven prints.

In the color photographs, Cheung registered the historical ruin with keen observation on spatial arrangements, design details and wall stains. Her impressionistic interiors rendered an ensemble of tableau watercolor paintings which recall the Pictorialism photographic movement between 1880s and 1910s. With closed inspection, viewers could ‘discover’ a panoramic silhouette of the Victoria Harbor shoreline; skyscrapers with Victoria Peak at the background can be clearly ‘seen’ along the Hong Kong Island horizon. These connoted picturesque symbols reject photography’s objective immediacy and allow a more creative reading of her digital images.

Cheung expands the narrative of above pictorial realism with photograms of flowers and water ripples. The photograms are the artist’s subjective darkroom experimentation on accidental possibilities between picked flowers and flow of moving water, the resulted elegant floral forms and liberated ripple motifs articulated a novel topographic imagination which at once links the past (reservoir) with the present (ripples). The diptychs combining on-site photographs and expressive monotone photograms provide a binocular interpretation of the cultural heritage: a parallel universe depicting the interiors of architecture and spiritual state of mind with water elements as well as exposure time or technological differences between digital photography and the archaic darkroom photograms.

The white out conditions of the flowers or ripples opened up empty spaces for possible understandings and can be decoded as an elegant farewell to the past colonial era, a final trace of the city once remembered. Cheung preserved this longing temperament with a concluding iced myositis (forget-me-not) color print, a closing gesture to fixate her sentiments with a poetic pronouncement. 

Artworks: Photography

• "The Ruin" (9): 2022, Pigment Inkjet on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315gsm, 762 x 610mm (each)
• "The Ripples" (9): 2022, Pigment Inkjet on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic 340gsm, 762 x 610mm (each)
• "The Ripples in color (10)": 2022, Pigment Inkjet on Fine Art Paper, 508 x 406mm (each)
• "Frozen" (1): 2020, Pigment Inkjet on  Hahnemühle Photo Rag Metallic 340gsm, 610 x 508mm (each)