Spectral Kinship: Tenter Ground, London
Spectral Kinship is a group exhibition curated by Sophie Guo. It brings together six artists whose works give voice to silenced subjects and explore how suppressed histories and unaccommodated desires are made palpable through sound, ritual, materiality and form. Featured artists are: Kent Chan (b. 1984, Singapore; living in Amsterdam), Charmaine Poh (b. 1990, Singapore; living in Berlin), Alison Wing Yin Poon (b. 1996, UK; living in London), Caroline Wong (b. 1986, Malaysia; living in London), Liu Xuan (b. 1991, China; living between Jiangxi & London) and Mingxuan Zhang (b. 1998, China; living in London).
Spectral Kinship brings together six artists whose works give voice to silenced subjects and explore how suppressed histories and unaccommodated desires are made palpable through sound, ritual, materiality and form. Drawing on Avery Gordon’s account of haunting as a social force that makes the present waver, the exhibition approaches the spectral as a condition of latency: elusive or buried beneath the surface, yet continually seeping across seemingly impermeable temporal and spatial boundaries and reverberating through everyday life. Spanning film, sound, painting, sculpture and kinetic installation, the exhibition attunes to spectral traces and resonances that connect otherwise disparate histories and embodied experience into relation across postcolonial, trans-Asian and trans-tropical sites. It amplifies the sounds through which subjects and collectivities negotiate systems of domination and compose new acoustics of solidarity and resistance. Elsewhere, bodily friction and intimacy, material witness and translation, animist and animalistic forms register experiences that lapse from any predetermined knowledge or taxonomy. Moving between ancestral villages and portal cities, the works forge alternative kinships among migrant women, ancestors, mythological figures, bodies and ecologies, proposing forms of healing that accommodate desires foreclosed by bloodline and the nation-state.
On the ground floor, a painted folding screen by Caroline Wong (b. 1986, Malaysia; living in London) depicts a group of the artist’s friends in her studio, getting ready to pose for her Picnics and Parties series. Originally made for her models to change behind and to conceal parts of the workspace, the life-size screen functions as both an artwork and an extension of the studio. Wong adapts Fumie Taniguchi’s Preparing to Go Out (1935), which in turn draws upon the Edo-period Matsuura screens, featured on the screen. This art-historical lineage channels Taniguchi’s portrayal of confident young women, emblematic of women’s growing social and financial independence in 1930s Japan, with Wong’s exuberant celebration of female friendship and the shared pleasures of dressing each other and getting ready for a party.
Alison Poon (b. 1996, UK; living in London), who appears on Wong's screen, dismantles and reweaves found rattan and bamboo furniture that reached British interiors along routes shared with Chinese porcelain. Ceramic inserts painted to imitate lacquer keep questions of authenticity and value open. In Pot Luck, a red female torso patterned after cloth found in a Peckham charity shop rests on a rattan stool, interrogating the making of the Asiatic feminine through and as ornament. A Coiled Connection, shaped as a dressing-table mirror, reflects Poon's journey to her family's ancestral town in Guangdong, a pilgrimage of sorts that prompts her to reassess her mixed English and Malaysian-Chinese heritage from the unstable position of neither tourist nor resident. Adorned at the Final Meeting collates disparate memories of her Chinese grandmother. Its red motif derives from the grandmother's wedding dress, worn in photographs kept on mantelpieces in Malaysia and England. Hanging elements echo the earrings she gave Poon at their last meeting before her sudden passing, while the rattan bindings mimic the chair in which she spent her final moments.
The body takes on a more unruly form in the paintings of Mingxuan Zhang (b. 1998, China; living in London). Drawing on the raw physicality of butoh, Zhang depicts spectral figures whose gestures are intimate and contorted, at times delirious. Her figures are conjured through a labour-intensive process that sits between painting and printmaking. She stretches heavy nylon tights until they tear, secures the torn fabric over cut boards, inks the boards black and presses them to the canvas. By repeating the bodily actions of stretching, tearing and imprinting, each painting records the physical intensity from which it emerged. Although hosiery carries associations with desire and the sexualised female body, Zhang unsettles this familiar trope by minimising or erasing her figures’ faces and distorting their flesh into viscous, unfamiliar forms. Anonymous bodies bend, dance and gather in a ritual-like scene poised between intimacy and violence, their heads merging with the dark sky as they appear to celebrate the unbuttoning of a pale central figure against a warm, volcanic ground that tempers danger with flashes of humour and sensuous beauty.
Ritual takes on sonic and kinetic form in the sculptures of Liu Xuan (b. 1991, China; living between Jiangxi and London). Named after the heroine of Dvořák’s opera, the Voice of Rusalka recalls the water nymph who relinquishes her voice to attain human form and love. For Liu, it offers a means of facing childhood trauma and restoring voice to both Rusalka and the artist herself. Liu assembles horn, wood and oil palm from her home province of Jiangxi with glutinous rice paste, cashew lacquer and scrap metal salvaged from Fengcheng’s recycling industry, forming a wounded, siren-like body of animal, vegetable and industrial matter. Weaving and lacquering further embed the work in embodied technologies of making historically rooted in the agrarian rituals of her hometown. The pull of a cord animates the sculpture and sets the bronze bells ringing, returning Rusalka’s lost voice as a ritualistic soundscape that reverberates through the gallery. Liu’s new kinetic sculptures carry the healing power of sound into more relational forms: two oscillate between attraction and repulsion, drawn together and prised apart in turn, so that intimacy is never free of struggle, nor shedding a former self without friction.
Pressed on vinyl, Kent Chan’s sonic work (b. 1984, Singapore; living in the Netherlands) plays the tracks that punctuate the speculative filmic world of Solar Orders, which imagines a future in which the tropics continue to expand under climate change and the sun becomes society’s organising principle. Solar deities, mythologies and principles converge in a prophetic register. Chan’s formulation of a ‘solar and sonic alliance’ proposes music as a means of attuning the terrestrial to the solar while challenging lingering colonial faultlines. The work’s multiple voices form a polyphonic kinship across climates, geographies and histories of tropical regions we know today.
On the lower ground floor, The Moon is Wet, a three-channel film by Charmaine Poh (b. 1990, Singapore; living in Berlin) centres on three migratory figures across Singapore’s history: the sea goddess Mazu; a majie, also known as a ‘self-comb woman’ who migrated to British Malaya for domestic work; and Monic, an Indonesian domestic worker. Speaking in Hokkien, Cantonese and Indonesian respectively, they inhabit fluid timelines, paralleling and at times addressing one another. Their spectral kinship forms an alternative to the forefather's historicity through which Singapore’s national history has often been narrated. While majie are remembered predominantly as industrious labourers who contributed to the nation-building years, their intimate desires and the forms of kinship they created remain difficult to locate in the archive. Set along Singapore’s intertidal zone, the film relates these migrant histories to the ecological lives buried through land reclamation. Through voice, song and speculative ancestry, Poh allows histories displaced by state-driven progress to resurface without being resolved into a single lineage.
About the artists
Caroline Wong is a British-Malaysian-Chinese artist based in London. She explores female desire, primarily through colourful, cluttered scenes of women dining, drinking, or dozing, often in the company of cats. Mirroring the gluttonous girls in her works, she likens her process to indulging, satiating, and — to quote Bonnard — retrieving ‘the savour of things’. Blending party de tritus with lushly patterned party dresses, and saturated, saccharine hues with smudged, scribbly pastel, Wong’s tableaux are ultimately a gleeful celebration of excess: a marriage of the carnivalesque and the decorative, the chaotic and the ornate, the feral and the feminine. Her work depicts and embodies hunger in its most literal sense, shaped by an obsessive relationship with food, but hints also at other underlying appetites, desires, and manias in life.
Wong’s work was recognized with the Drawing Biennial Bursary Award (2021), the Liberty Specialty Markets Art Prize (2018) and the Society of Women Artists’ Derwent Special Prize for Materials (2018). Recent solo exhibitions include: Girl who Devour (Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, 2026), Feline Theatre (Berliner Ensemble Theater, Berlin, DE, 2024), Hungry Women (Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, UK, 2024), Picnics and Parties (Gallery Belenius, Stockholm, SE, 2024), and Artificial Paradises (Soho Revue, London ,UK, 2022). She participated in recent duo exhibitions: SEE-SAW (with Jaiyoung Cho, Fim Gallery, Seoul, KR, 2024) and Lotus Eaters (with Shailee Mehta, Indigo + Madder, London, UK, 2022). Recent group exhibitions include: Drawing Biennial 2026 (Drawing Room, London, UK, 2026), Tainted Love (Kristin Hjellegjerde, London, UK, 2026), TBT (Soho Revue, London, UK, 2026), and Myths, Dreams, and New Realities (Saatchi x Bagri Foundation, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, 2025). Wong holds a MFA from City and Guilds of London Art School, UK, (2021).
Alison Poon creates ceramic, rattan and found object sculptures that focus on her mixed-heritage background. With Chinese family in Malaysia, Alison’s practice looks to identity, domestic spaces, and cultural interactions, through narrative-heavy work, with the aim of creating a space of belonging.
Alison creates scenes that are part observed and part fiction, collaging together the lived experience juxtaposed with tradition. These scenes feature repeated themes of reconstruction, and the in-between, taking inspiration from architecture and street scenes in Malaysia and China. Playful figures inhabit the sculptures and etchings, pulled from Alison’s personal archive of photographs. These characters act as interlopers and a metaphor for the diasporic individual.
Alison is a 2026 recipient of the Gilbert Bays Award for Emerging Sculpture, awarded by the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Xuan Liu is a Chinese multidisciplinary artist based in London, Shanghai, and Nanchang. She graduated in 2020 with a Master of Fine Arts from Chelsea College of Arts (UAL) in London. Liu has been a Fine Arts Special Lecturer at UAL since 2020 and an Assistant Lecturer at Jiangxi Science and Technology Normal University, China, since 2016. She co-founded the art project GMF (Glimmer Music Festival) in 2019, after her local music festival in Nanchang (2012-2015).
Xuan Liu’s studio work has largely focused on analogue and digital audio technologies, sculpture, video, performances, and event production. She works individually and collaboratively to explore notions and concepts of the merging of noumenal experience and fiction, negotiating between the human body’s sensory epistemology and the development of sound technology, contemporary spiritualism and ritual, expanded theatre and improvisation. Her creative system is inspired by the Buddhist concept of symbiosis. As a researcher, Liu Xuan has an ongoing observation of the relationship between the work, the audience, and herself as an artist in the exhibition space, using public participation to trigger the flow of sound energy. She views this series of mixed-media works as a sequence of sound events presented as open-ended structures, within which she searches for sound connections: ontological, fictional, hierarchical, symbiotic, heterogeneous, controllable and uncontrollable. The artist also views such events as single and serial experiments, enjoying the various uncontrollable parts of the exhibition and performance process that lead to the intervention and production of relationships while predetermining the rules of participation in advance.
Her works and projects are globally exhibited, being recently featured in Slime Engine’s online exhibition with her piece Ocean 2 in China 2021), in TATE Britain’s Tate Late series, UK (2021), in jlN Space, China (2021). in Numero Magazine, China (2021), in Fringe Arts Bath, UK(2020), and in Turner Contemporary with Assemblage Experiments, UK(2020), among others.
Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices porous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art, and contestations to the legacies of modernity as the epistemology par excellence. His works have taken the form of moving-image, text, performances, and ex hibitions.
He is a former resident of Gasworks, Art Explora, Pivô Research, Jan van Eyck Academie, MMCA Residency, and NTU CCA Singapore. He has held solo and two-person presentations at Gasworks, CAPC Bordeaux, Kunstinstituut Melly, Bonnefanten Museum, NTU CCA Singapore, and de Appel. His works and films have been exhibited in institutions and festivals including Tate Modern, MMCA Seoul, Liverpool Biennial, Videobrasil, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Times Museum, EYE Film Museum, Onassis Stegi, and Bienalsur. He is the 2023 winner of the Paulo Cunha e Silva Award and Impart Art Prize, and the 2021 winner of the Foundwork Artist Prize. His works are collected by the Kadist Foundation, the Ri jkscollectie, Netherlands, Bonnefanten Museum, Frans Hal Museum, Museum de Fundatie, and Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig.
Charmaine Poh is an artist working across film, photography, media, text and performance to peel apart, re-examine, and hold ideas about how the body survives and repairs across technologies, migration, cosmologies, and timelines. She aligns herself with strategies of visibility, opacity, deviance, and futurity.
Based between Berlin and Singapore, she is a co-founder of the magazine Jom and a member of the Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR). She was a participating artist in the 60th Venice Biennale - Foreigners Everywhere and was awarded Deutsche Bank’s 2025 Artist of the Year and the 2026 Villa Romana Prize. She was recently announced as a finalist of the 7th VH Award.
She graduated with a BA in international relations from Tufts University and an MA in visual and media anthropology from the Freie Universität Berlin. She is continuing at the Universität as a doctoral candidate under Prof. Dr. Annette Jael Lehmann.
