Contemporary by Angela Li is proud to present "Soma", curated by Hong Kong curator, Shirky Chan, group exhibition featuring Gordon Chi, Cynthia Kwok, Claire Lee and Alyssa Tang. The exhibition will open on Thursday, 7 May 2026, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. with curator and four artists present. The exhibition will remain on view until 13 June 2026. 

In ancient Greek, soma simply meant "body." But in the traditions of somatic practice, from dance to phenomenology, and to Eastern ritual, soma refers to something more precise: the body as felt from within, not the body as seen from outside. It is the body that breathes, aches, remembers, and trembles. It is the body that is the mind, and the mind that inhabits the body.

This exhibition brings together four artists working at the intersection of mind, body, and time; not as separate categories, but as a single, indivisible soma.

Gordon Chi captures time itself, not as a number on a clock, but as a slow, invisible transfer. Time moves from the body of the maker to the body of the object. His practice is an act of listening to what philosophers call the ‘extended soma’: the understanding that our inner body does not stop at the skin. We leak into the world. We leave traces of our breathing on everything we touch. And objects, patiently hold onto us.

Cynthia Kwok repeats the human form until something surfaces from beneath the surface. Memories of alienation rendered repeatedly until they take on flesh. Her figures emerge when the weight of the world presses on a body until it becomes unrecognizable. And yet—it breathes. Still stubbornly alive. Kwok shows us that to be pressed into a new shape is not the same as being erased.

Claire Lee paints and builds in the space where vulnerability becomes strength, not by conquering fragility, but by learning to breathe inside it. Her surfaces bear the marks of touch, pressure, and narrow escape; reminding us that a living body is never smooth. Lee is telling us that breaking is not the end of the story. Falling and rising, she shows us, are the same motion, seen from different angles.

Alyssa Tang strives for affect—that electric, pre-verbal current that passes between bodies before thought arrives. Her figures are not portraits. They are events. To look at her work is not to analyze; it is to feel, and to recognize that your own inner body. Standing in front of them, is already responding. Already leaning. Already remembering a touch that you had forgotten.

Four artists. Four ways of listening to the body from the inside.

In a world that asks us to live inside screens, to optimize our bodies like machines, to outrun time with filters and formulas, this exhibition offers something simpler.

It asks you to stand still.

To feel your own breath.

To realize that you, too, are a living archive. A thinking body. A creature of time.

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