On Saturday, October 25, GALA organized DTLArts day: 17 galleries participated by extending their hours, organizing events and pop ups. A shuttle ran between Imperial St and Traction Ave, stopping six times at gallery hotspots along the way. The city felt intimate that afternoon, its streets and galleries blending into one moving exhibition as visitors hopped on and off the shuttle. What follows are brief accounts of the exhibitions currently on view at two participating galleries: Baert Gallery and Luis de Jesus.
CHEUNG TSZ HIN at BAERT GALLERY
I was at Baert Gallery on the opening night of a sunbeam lent to us too briefly, a show of paintings by Hong Kong-based artist Cheung Tsz Hin.
Cheung Tsz Hin, homes of void, 2025. Oil on canvas. 78 3/4 x 149 5/8 in (200 x 380 cm) Image courtesy of Baert Gallery.
When I walked in, I was completely caught by homes of void, a substantial canvas that looks like it’s smoldering from within. Big licks of yellow and orange sweep across fragments of a surreal room—a beanbag slouched in the corner, a standing keyboard in the back, a table, slouchy leather chairs, a hanging lamp whose beams seem to spill across the floor like rippling silk. It’s the kind of painting that overwhelms your peripheral vision, the kind you can fall into through any small corner or flicker of light.
I found Hin standing nearby and asked him about it. He told me that he never plans out a canvas. He lays down a thin layer of oil paint and goes from there: “As you can see, the yellowish or greenish one is the first layer…my practice is spending lots of time looking at the canvas to find out what emotions it can bring me. When I look at the greenish yellow of the first layer, I think about some homes and places that I stayed in before…which I have since left. I start to put these feelings or emotions into the painting and add layers on it. There are multiple homes or places…in this painting.” For Hin, the canvas is a kind of layered memory palace, part past and part present. For me, it was that beanbag in the corner—a place I could sink into for a while.
We moved to a neighboring wall to look at veil on juxtaposed scenes, a smaller, stranger painting than homes of void. Before meeting Hin, I stood in front of it trying to decode the image—to me, it looked like a cluster of ghostly birch trunks ruptured by pockets of black vacuum, each void threatening to expand until it swallowed the entire scene. Hin, though, didn’t assign it any literal form. He only offered the memory that guided him: a period in university when he was suffering the loss of a family member–the dark color had brought that time back to him. “The canvas and my memory is like a feedback loop.” He said, “When I work a little bit…the Canvas will feed back a little bit to me, and somehow it can help me to reorganize how I think about or how I feel about my past. And, yeah, I think it's like a thinking tool or diary for me.”
Hin had taken the shuttle earlier that day for DTLArts Day, moving through downtown and seeing other shows. When I asked him about the coolest thing he saw, he mentioned a video work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: Samar Al Summary’s essay film What Goes Up (2024). It is a haunting meditation on homesickness and loss—disembodied voices narrate stories and images that fold into the desert sky. See it for yourself: Excavating the Sky will be on view at ICA LA until March 2026.
The artist next to his piece, homes of void (2025). Photo by Chela Simón-Trench.
And a sunbeam lent to us too briefly remains at Baert Gallery until December 13, 2025.
