Soh Souen: My tender passion, tender patience — Soh Souen

“What I wanted to ask was this: Could it be that by regarding the softest aspects of humanity, by caressing the irrefutable warmth that resides there, we can go on living after all in this brief, violent world?” — Han Kang, Light and Thread

WKM Gallery is delighted to present My tender passion, tender patience, the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong by Japanese artist Soh Souen. This exhibition offers a wide-ranging overview of the artist’s ongoing inquiries into, and practices concerned with, life. The exhibition is on view from 5 September to 31 October 2026.

At the center of the exhibition is Again and Again, a series of two-dimensional works created with pastel, a medium the artist has continued to work with over many years. This is the first occasion on which the series has been presented on such an extensive scale.

In recent years, Souen has worked simultaneously across performance, project-based practices, and several other painting series. Amidst these other projects, the creation of Again and Again has remained an intensely private activity made during moments of respite and moments of anguish, a salve to quiet the mind on sleepless nights. The process involves an attunement to the sense of touch. The artist’s own skin gently strokes the skin of the painting’s surface; the clothing and adornments depicted are those that remain in intimate contact with the skin, the body. As the painting becomes skin, it tends to the artist in return. The conventional one-directional relationship between the one who paints and that which is painted begins to waver, turning into a reciprocal exchange between the artist’s body and the painting’s body; an encapsulation of the reassurance and vulnerability inherent in touching another person’s body.

Eggsercise is one of the artist’s principal performance works, and is presented in this exhibition through archival video. The performance is governed by a simple rule: place a raw egg—a symbol of life—within a hollow of the body, and move without allowing it to fall. The artist holds a raw egg between their own body and another person’s body, or between their body and some object in the environment; a wall, or a piece of furniture. They then continue moving slowly, sometimes for hours, without letting the egg drop.

The performance was first presented in 2022. Its conception was influenced in part by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as the artist was confronted by the weakness and fragility of bodies placed under wartime conditions. The nuances and complexities of protest are not lost on the artist as the fervour of anti-war sentiment might itself become a form of social pressure, and that the act of protecting something might, paradoxically, become an act of harm. Since 2022, the work has continued to be presented in different locations and in a growing number of variations. The questions contained within Eggsercise remain unresolved and ongoing.

N: 20.04.26–04.05.26 is a video work created collaboratively by Souen and N, a pseudonymous resident of Kyiv. It was filmed in Babyn Yar, close to the residential neighbourhood in which N lives. Although the site is now a park, it was once a ravine and bears the history of the mass murder of Jewish people and numerous other victims during the Second World War. Souen recalls seeing N’s warm, white breath escaping into the cold morning air of Babyn Yar in April, and feeling an intense desire to create a work together with her. The work attempts to collect the air surrounding N and, through it, to come into contact with invisible presences dissolved within that air: memories, the history of the land, and other things that cannot be seen. Drawing upon air and breath—themes that have occupied Souen’s practice over the past several years—the work becomes an attempt, however tentative, to affirm the life of a single human being.

N had previously lived in southeastern Ukraine. Four years ago, when the area came under Russian occupation, she was forced to leave her hometown and relocate to Kyiv. It is difficult to imagine what she experienced there. N herself is unable to speak about everything that happened. Even so, can we accept the difficulty of putting such experiences into words? Can we affirm both an other who is different from ourselves and a self who is different from others, while continuing to hold one another in mind? Set against the reality of a war with no visible end, this work traces an ongoing journey in search of what might still be made possible through a gentle exchange between human beings.