Picking up the prophecy that closed "The Night Marching," what Lo Chan Peng turns to peel shifts from society's garment to emotion itself. "Ashen Face" takes its name from the white-faced, golden-furred nine-tailed fox of Japanese legend, Tamamo-no-Mae; but under his hand this allure is made of ash: the young life seems already over-burned, with only an ember left to hold a thread of breath.

This is his first great act of subtraction, and a deeper act of peeling. He removes the vivid colour, sets aside the exaggerated styling, and draws the picture down to grey, black, white and brown — if the Strawberry series peeled the garment society puts on a person, "Ashen Face" peels the mask of expression a person puts on themselves. We are used to facing the world with a legible face — happy, rebellious, seductive; Lo strips these ready-made expressions away too, leaving faces pale, weary, sorrowful, or lost in thought, by which you are plainly moved, yet cannot say by what.

That "cannot say" is the point. When every nameable wrapping has been peeled off, the truth that remains often cannot be taken up by language — it can only be felt. The frozen stillness of his figures is not emptiness but compressed time: the ash, the fatigue of having burned too hard, are the sediment a life leaves after passing once through the world. Here, for the first time, duration becomes the picture's protagonist — the one thing still standing when he has peeled emotion to its floor.

From the Strawberry Generation's overt satire to the Ashen Face's covert silence, Lo buries the same social anxiety in the grain of the paint: the surface is always splendid, while beneath it everything is already on the verge of collapse. And what he asks us to behold is precisely that quiet threshold between collapse and holding on — the moment before emotion breaks its banks, before the truth is spoken.