red caught in remembered
kin speaking through another skin
– Drenched Co.
At the opening, a friend of Alison Wing Yin Poon told me that work shaped by diaspora can scratch an itch, something trapped in the body that has to be dredged out. A red chilli was tattooed on her wrist. Its colour, the red of chilli steeped in oil, seemed to have entered the room ahead of her.
Red is caught inside remembered, sacred and shared. Kin moves through speaking and into skin. A borrowed language can conceal the very feelings it struggles to release.
Perhaps this is why grandmothers and their belongings recur in the work she described. When history misplaces you, a chair or an old cloth may hold the pressure of a life that passed through it.
Poon’s Pot Luck makes this inheritance strange again. A ceramic form hovers between a vase and a female torso, its red migrating into the cane beneath it. It balances what it has inherited on a borrowed stool.
Elsewhere, Alison reappears inside Caroline Wong’s painted screen, as Liu Xuan’s Jiangxi materials turn like wings at the pull of someone else’s hand. Mingxuan Zhang records bodily pressure through torn nylon. Charmaine Poh lets migrant women speak across Singaporean time; Kent Chan’s audio from a future of expanding tropics drifts slightly beyond the show’s bodily hauntings.
Sophie Guo draws on Avery Gordon’s language of haunting to give these works a shared direction, while the exhibition remains most alive in the moments before explanation settles over them, when red passes from wrist to sculpture and kin moves between bodies.
Downstairs, the dimness increases the distance between works, leaving kin more securely held in language than between the works themselves. Yet whatever coherence the exhibition struggled to make was already moving among its visitors. Friends had come for friends. For an evening, red and kin stepped out of the words that held them and into the room.
See https://a-i-gallery.com/exhibitions/74-spectral-kinship-tenter-ground-london/
See also https://courtauld.ac.uk/people/sophie-guo/
See also https://www.soaked.space/2026/09/exhibition-review-spectral-kinship-ai.html
Caption: Image above: Installation view, Spectral Kinship, ai. gallery, London, 2026. Curated by Sophie Guo.
Image courtesy of the artists and ai. gallery.
We take great care to respect the integrity of every image. The views expressed here are ours alone and do not represent those of the gallery, curator or artists.
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