STATEMENT

Gigi Tsim (b.2004) is a Hongkonger artist primarily working in Painting. Recently graduated with First Class Honours from BA Fine Art: Painting at the Camberwell College of Arts, UAL, her practice explores themes of displacement and the oppression of memory through painted Hong Kong cityscapes.

Her White Paintings began with her finite archive of Hong Kong street photographs taken before her departure, but after exhausting her personal photo archive, she now uses Google Maps to revisit multiple temporal layers of the same streets, navigating the tension between documentation and imagination.  Incomplete, fragmented scenes heighten the viewer’s ability to find familiarity within her cityscapes. Using landscape as a vessel to process migratory grief, the blankness of her faded, low-saturated works is poignant with what remains unsaid...

As her White Paintings series develops, she introduces toned grounds such as yellow, mauve and natural linen as non-whites, departing from her initial literal use of white to convey blankness and decay. Her displacement further manifests in her urge to preserve Hong Kong culture. An interest in materiality led to experimentation with alternative painting surfaces, such as the iconic red, white, and blue fabric, which serves as a symbol of migration, and traditional bamboo scrolls, reminiscent of the bamboo scaffolding in Hong Kong.

Recently, her work has become increasingly interested in creating a physical liminal space that situates viewers in the uneasy position between estrangement and the comfort of imagined familiarity. Ongoing experimentation with colour and materiality continues to inspire her work as she seeks to find the fragile balance between displacement, oppression and belonging.

Gigi Tsim (b.2004) is a recent graduate from Camberwell College of Arts BA Fine Art: Painting. She has previously exhibited in Society of Women Artists Annual Open Exhibition 2026 (group show), If On a Winter’s Night (group show), Living Between Spaces (group show), Affordable Art Fair Battersea Recent Graduates Showcase (group show), Memory and Belonging (group show), Archives in Absence (group show, online), WHAT NOW (group show), ‘Milk and Honey’ (group show), Coalesce (group show), Round Table (group show) and Before Now, After Then (group show).

Connect to more of my art and process on Instagram! @gigi.tsim