ROMULUS

Recently, we visited Five Walls Gallery to see Peter Brook’s exhibition, Hot Minute.

When we first entered the gallery, the strong visual impact of the works immediately caught our attention. Blue blocks of colour and white lines fill the canvas, with fine lines crossing and connecting across the surface. From a distance, the works feel controlled and calm, with an almost regular sense of order.

In a gallery, we are used to seeing art in a certain way. White walls and open spaces allow us to focus almost entirely on the artwork itself.

However, when an artwork enters a home, our relationship with it begins to change. Furniture, light, materials, colour, and the traces of everyday life all become part of how we experience the work.

When I first looked at Peter Brook’s Byzantium sky and Razzmic Cinnabar, I found that they were very alike in composition. Both paintings are divided horizontally into two broad fields of colour, crossed by a row of narrow vertical lines. Their structures are orderly and controlled, almost as though the same visual formula had been repeated. Despite this shared composition, the two works create remarkably different experiences through the use of colour.

This August, the ROMULUS Folio Gallery team joins Threads of Love as guest curator and project manager, bringing together female artists from diverse cultural backgrounds and artistic practices for a contemporary exploration of creativity, identity, memory, cultural inheritance, love and human connection.

As part of Double Seventh Cultural Week, Creative Asia Art Centre will host Water, Lacquer & Love: A Contemporary Lacquer Fan Workshop on Sunday 16 August 2026, bringing together contemporary art, traditional craftsmanship, cultural exchange and community connection.  

A prism separates what seems to be a single beam of light into different colours. In Xinzhi Li’s Vessel, searching, the body goes through a similar process. It no longer appears as a complete and stable form. Instead, it is broken into fragments that resemble organs, limbs and traces of a face, mixed with flowing and overlapping colours. Bright yellow, red, blue and purple move through these body fragments, making the image seem to be forming and dissolving at the same time.

When I first encountered Keith Ross’s work, I was drawn to the strangeness and childlike quality of his figures. Their bodies are distorted, their expressions exaggerated, and their colours vivid but deliberately detached from reality.

A prism does not create colour. It reveals the different colours that already exist within light. In the PRISM exhibition, Fiona Johnston’s work follows a similar idea. Her paintings invite viewers to look again at colour, coastal environments, and natural change. Her two works, Thermal Shift and Swan’s Path, create different visual effects. However, both use flowing forms, layered surfaces, and blended colours to show a natural world that is always changing.