Tai Kwun | MASSIMODECARLO Gallery - Lily Stockman: A Grass Roof

Description

A Grass Roof is Lily Stockman’s first exhibition in Hong Kong. The presentation brings together six new oil paintings that take their title and conceptual grounding from The Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage, an eighth-century poem by Tang Dynasty Buddhist master Shitou Xiqian. 

“Though the hut is small, it includes the entire world.” 

— Shitou Xiqian 

Stockman takes this proposition as a challenge: can a painting contain the world? Can abstraction hold experience, memory, architecture, and life within its frame?  

Working in a restrained palette dominated by blues and greens, Stockman constructs layered compositions built from frames within frames, portal-like forms, and softly contoured organic structures. Painted with fine badger-hair brushes traditionally used in Chinese calligraphy, her lines retain a sense of breath and physical presence. Surfaces appear permeable rather than fixed, suggesting painting as provisional architecture — a shelter responsive to season, mood, and climate. 

The exhibition draws on the spatial logic of the traditional Chinese garden — historically conceived as a site of retreat and contemplation during times of political or social upheaval. In this context, Stockman’s paintings operate as intimate spaces within the dense urban fabric of Hong Kong. They propose beauty and inwardness not as escape, but as recalibration. 

Her research encompasses references ranging from Brice Marden’s Cold Mountain paintings, which translated Tang dynasty calligraphy into gestural abstraction, to Ni Zan’s Yuan dynasty landscapes, the Buddhist frescoes of the Mogao caves, and European interpretations of Chinese garden aesthetics in the eighteenth century.  

The above content is provided by MASSIMODECARLO Gallery