One of the very few museums in the world devoted to realist painting, Japan’s HOKI Museum opened in 2010 in Chiba and holds some five hundred works by major Japanese realists including Sōsuke Morimoto, Hiroshi Noda and Tadahiko Nakayama. Lo Chan Peng is the only non-Japanese Asian artist in its collection.

The special exhibition “The Expressive Portrait” (25 May – 5 November 2023) centres on the expressions a painter draws out in the encounter between artist and sitter. Working through portraiture as metaphor, Lo addresses time, history, faith and mortality, turning abstract ideas into visible form through finely wrought figures marked by deliberate passages of disruption.