beyond the abstract: Writing, Gesture and the Shape of the Unseen

W hen our eyes encounter the looping, insistent lines of Untitled (New York City) (1970) by Cy Twombly, we are confronted with a form of writing that resists legibility. The repeated arcs and trembling lines resemble script, yet refuse to resolve into language. Suspended between drawing and inscription, Twombly’s marks evoke the act of writing while dissolving its communicative function. In their place emerges something more elemental: gesture itself. Stripped of semantic meaning, the calligraphic line transforms into a visual field in which the physical act of mark-making becomes a form of abstraction.

Writing has long carried a metaphysical dimension that extends beyond communication. Across cultures, inscription has often been understood as a means of mediating between the visible and the unseen – an attempt to fix thought, spirit or cosmic order into material form. Long before writing became a vehicle for recording information, it functioned as a bridge between human consciousness and the hidden structures believed to govern the universe.

This understanding of writing as both gesture and revelation finds a striking modern echo in Zao Wou-Ki’s Nuage (1956), which hails from the artist’s Oracle Bones series. In his Oracle Bones series, the artist drew inspiration from the fractured pictographic forms of Shang dynasty inscriptions, transforming them into luminous fields of abstraction. The marks that populate these compositions hover between sign and gesture, recalling characters without ever fully resolving into readable script. Much like Twombly’s looping lines, Zao’s calligraphic forms evoke the origins of writing itself – before language becomes fixed, when mark-making remains fluid, intuitive and open to interpretation.

If such inscriptions once served as a means of interpreting the hidden order of the cosmos, the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment pursued a different path toward the same question. Rather than seeking meaning through symbolic gesture or divination, Enlightenment thinkers attempted to uncover the structure of the universe through reason, measurement and classification.

This ambition is embodied in the manuscript notes of Isaac Newton, presented in the exhibition alongside an ancient Egyptian cubit rod. In these unpublished pages, Newton worked toward determining the precise length of the royal cubit used in the construction of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. He believed that such measurements might reveal the mathematical principles underlying ancient systems of knowledge, suggesting that the universe itself might ultimately be deciphered through number and proportion.

Yet even as Newton sought to unlock the hidden order of the world through calculation, artists continued to pursue another path – one grounded not in measurement but in the intuitive power of form and gesture. This aspiration is articulated in a note written by Amedeo Modigliani at the age of 23: “What I am searching for is neither the real nor the unreal, but the Subconscious, the mystery of what is Instinctive in the human Race.” In these words, Modigliani described an ambition to create a visual language capable of capturing something t.mes less and universal beneath the shifting surface of appearances.

It is this enduring impulse that lies at the heart of beyond the abstract, an exhibition that brings together modern and contemporary works alongside historic objects and artefacts to consider abstraction not simply as a formal language, but as a philosophical pursuit. A means of seeking meaning in a world that often appears fragmented, unstable and unknowable. African and ancient sculptures transformed through ritual use, iconoclasm and the slow erosion of t.mes reveal forms that have become abstract through both intention and chance. Literati objects, Chinese scholars’ rocks and ancient manuscripts likewise demonstrate how irregular surfaces, gestural marks and natural processes have long inspired contemplation of abstract form. Across these objects, the viewer encounters a shared sensibility: an attention to the tension between order and spontaneity, intention and accident, where perception itself becomes the subject.

Twombly’s calligraphic gestures and Zao Wou-Ki’s evocations of ancient script return us to the act of inscription itself, reminding us that abstraction can function as a parallel form of inquiry to give shape to what lies beyond immediate perception. Abstraction – through mark-making, gesture, colour, rhythm and reduction – emerges as a means of approaching that which is sensed but not fully seen.

This encounter between inner sensation and external reality unfolds vividly in the work of artists such as Mark Rothko and Joan Mitchell. In Rothko’s luminous fields of colour – No. 10 (1949) and Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957) – painting becomes a space of quiet contemplation, where subtle shifts in hue and scale invite the viewer into a meditative encounter with colour itself. Mitchell’s sweeping gestures in the magnificent 1983 diptych La Grande Vallée VII offer a more dynamic register of abstraction. Her gestural brushwork and vibrant palette translate fleeting impressions of landscape and memory into charged fields of energy, where the physical act of painting becomes inseparable from emotional and sensory experience.

For Mitchell, as for many painters working in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, the canvas becomes a site of discovery where form emerges through a delicate negotiation between control and surrender. This sensibility extends into the contemporary practices of Lynne Drexler and Lucy Bull. Drexler’s vibrant constellations of colour in Untitled (1962) – at once rhythmic and atmospheric – evoke shifting impressions of landscape and memory, while Bull’s fluid veils of pigment in 22:14 (2022) dissolve the boundaries between figure, space and light, pushing the language of abstraction toward new sensorial and psychological registers.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, the language of abstraction unfolds through a dialogue between Eastern and Western painterly traditions. In Beijing Circus, Sanyu’s characteristically distilled lines describe the central horse figure with calligraphic gesture, while the surrounding field of colour introduces a striking atmospheric presence. Painted following the artist’s sojourn in New York, the expansive ground unfolds in softly modulated bands of pigment whose quiet luminosity recalls, in spirit, the contemplative chromatic spaces associated with Rothko’s paintings. Rather than functioning simply as a backdrop, this field of colour envelops the composition, allowing the spare linear elegance of Sanyu’s figure to emerge with heightened claritys .

Alongside Sanyu’s work, the atmospheric compositions of Zao Wou-Ki – such as Terre rouge – 16.01.2005 (2005) – further demonstrate how artists working between cultures expanded the vocabulary of modern abstraction. In both artists’ practices, abstraction emerges through a synthesis of Western modernist painting and the gestural traditions of ink, where calligraphic movement, colour and space converge to evoke shifting emotional and natural energies.

This search for essence through reduction also finds resonance in objects and conceptual practices throughout the exhibition. The luminous asymmetry of Korean Joseon-period moon jars embodies a quiet abstraction, where imperfection and emptiness become aesthetic principles. In the work of Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo, this sensibility re-emerges in contemporary form through restrained materials and the disciplined repetition of gesture. Park Seo-Bo’s Écriture No. 37-74 (1974), in particular, transforms the act of mark-making into a meditative process of rhythmic incisions and repeated lines traversing the surface like a form of silent writing, recalling the physical cadence of calligraphy. Across these practices, abstraction appears not as a stylistic departure from reality but as a recurring strategy for distilling the essential rhythms of the world.

Within this lineage, Lucio Fontana introduces a radical extension of abstraction into space itself. Through his celebrated Concetto Spaziale works – seen here in Concetto Spaziale, La fine di Dio (1964) and Concetto Spaziale, Attese – Fontana rejected the painted surface as a closed field, opening it instead toward the infinite dimension beyond. His slashed canvases transform the picture plane into a threshold between matter and void: the cuts, simultaneously violent and precise, reveal a space that is both physical and metaphysical. In Fontana’s hands, abstraction does not simply distil form – it punctures it, allowing the unseen forces beyond the visible world to enter the work itself.

Ultimately, the philosophy of abstraction lies in its openness – its ability to gesture beyond fixed meaning toward a wider field of experience. From the calligraphic inscriptions of Cy Twombly and the evocations of ancient script in the work of Zao Wou-Ki and Park Seo-Bo, to the contemplative chromatic expanses of Mark Rothko and the spatial ruptures of Lucio Fontana, abstraction appears not as a single style but as a recurring human impulse. In bringing together objects shaped by artistic intention alongside those transformed by ritual use and the passage of t.mes , beyond the abstract reveals abstraction as a language that moves across cultures and centuries, tracing humanity’s persistent search for meaning beyond the limits of the visible.

EXHIBITION

beyond the abstract

20–27 March 2026 | Hong Kong