Installation view of Possibly, Here, 2026, Solo Exhibition, Harper's Gallery.

Courtesy of the artist

Poppy & Butterfly, 2026
Engraved aluminum, artist's frame, 30.25 x 30.25 inches.

Courtesy of the artist

Graft, 2026, Engraved aluminum, artist's frame, 87.5 x 48 in each, a set of two.

Courtesy of the artist

[Details] Graft, 2026, Engraved aluminum, artist's frame, 87.5 x 48 in each, a set of two.

Courtesy of the artist

Bauhinia × Blakeana, 2026, Nylon garden mesh, engraved aluminum, artist's frame, 48.5 x 32.25

Courtesy of the artist

[Details] Twin Leaf, 2026, Nylon garden mesh, engraved aluminum, artist's frame, 48.5 x 32.26

Courtesy of the artist

memory/

I grew up in Hong Kong, a port city, and water left a deep impression on me. It was part of my daily commute: I took the ferry crossing Victoria Harbour from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island. Watching the skyline ripple in the water’s reflection—its shifting lights melting into a hazy neon glow at night—were some of the most tranquil moments for me.

My home was on a mountain near Butterfly Valley. From my room, I could see the city framed by different species of plants and trees. After sunset, swarms of moths would gather at the window. These experiences led me to build a practice that frames my memories and my homeland’s histories through a botanical lens, tracing how botany becomes entangled with global histories.

On a magical day in a park with my father, we saw a rainbow paint the sky. We rushed home to grab our camera, but the rainbow had vanished by the time we returned. Disappearance feels habitual in Hong Kong. Things change, vanish, and return in an altered form. This cycle of loss and renewal shapes my art practice. I keep returning to the idea of turning disappearance on its head, embracing its inevitability. Can disappearance, embedded in the city’s cultural and historical machinery, shape an alternative way of seeing?

Possibly, Here, 2026
Solo Exhibition, Harper's Gallery.

Courtesy of the artist.

line/

I didn’t have the chance to travel until later in life, so as a child I was drawn to collecting stamps and postcards, images that traveled from far away and often carried personal notes. Later, while working with archives and found images, I came to recognize postcards as a unique visual form that condenses grand histories and private memories onto a single surface, revealing power structures through layers of highly coded symbols.

Historical postcards and photographs allow me to re-read Hong Kong’s histories in a fragmented, non-linear way. I trace a line by following these scattered points as they drift through time, approaching images through expanded archives. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection, I discovered a photograph dated 1900, View from Hillside Toward City and Harbor. The image is located as “Possibly Hong Kong.” While looking for my homeland’s past inside a foreign archive, a familiar mountain view sparked a personal resonance that briefly softened the uncertainty of being in an unfamiliar place.

My debut solo exhibition in New York, Possibly, Here, at Harper’s Gallery follows this search. A location misfiled or withheld becomes an opening for feeling. The imprecision of geography makes room for an attachment that cannot be verified by labels. “Possibly” names a condition as much as a place: a global port at the margins, bilingual and multilingual by necessity, postcolonial by inheritance.

Beyond institutional collections, I am equally inspired by everyday objects and natural materials. A new series in the exhibition is inspired by dried poppy pods I found on an abandoned military airstrip during my residency at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in Virginia. We are familiar with the bright red poppy flower, but I had rarely encountered the pod, whose “tears” produce opium. Opium, as an instrument of pleasure and sedation, was used by empires as a tool of control. The Opium War in the mid-nineteenth century led to Hong Kong becoming a British colony for ninety-nine years. Using botany as a lens for history and memory, I continue to re-read Hong Kong by tracing a line from the intimate to the global geopolitical.

The artist’s studio

Courtesy of the artist

color/

I work from the root of color – light. Light structures my thinking. It is something I translate, transform, and always return to. Across a decade of practice, I have continually searched for new ways to approach light. Recently I have been focusing on engraving images on metal to produce a shifting optical field where images disappear and reappear in relation to movement. This process returns me to the origin of photography: “light drawing.” I engrave images line by line, dot by dot onto the reflective surface of metal so that lines shift with light and the perspective of viewers, insisting that looking is never still.

I have worked with images through alternative photographic processes, always returning to one desire: to slow them down. In an era of AI, when images can be generated instantly, this desire to slow down feels even more urgent. I am interested in images that unfold over time, rather than objects to be quickly consumed and forgotten.

I insist that seeing is an active condition and that images remain fluid within their contexts. This approach allows photography to extend into both sculptural and painterly forms. I keep experimenting, interrogating each image as a way to ask what it holds, what it obscures, and how broader histories shape individual experiences.

Poppy Field, 2026
Engraved aluminum, artist's frame, 48.5 x 32.25 in each, a set of 4

Courtesy of the artist.

Written and interviewed by Emma Kang.

Emma Kang is a writer based in New York City.

Published March 1, 2026.

Photo credit: Javier Griffey

Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee

Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee (b. 1992) is an artist born in Hong Kong and based in New York City. She received an MFA from Columbia University in 2025.

Lee’s work has been exhibited internationally, including Harper’s Gallery, New York (2026); Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong (2025); Below Grand, New York (2025); WMA and HART Haus, Hong Kong (2024); Kyoto Art Center KG+ SELECT, Kyoto (2023); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022); The Listening Biennial, Berlin (2021); and Peer to Peer: UK/HK (2020). She has presented solo exhibitions at Harper’s Gallery, New York (2026); Kyoto Art Center KG+ SELECT, Kyoto (2023); and Lumenvisum, Hong Kong (2017). Lee is the recipient of the WMA Masters Award (2019) and was a finalist for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2023). She has participated in residencies at Transmitter Gallery and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York (2025); Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Virginia (2025); and Taipei International Art Residency, Taipei (2018). Her work has been featured in publications including ArtAsiaPacific, The Harvard Advocate, Artomity, and Hong Kong Free Press.