Gallery Exit presents Candyce Wong Ka Ying’s exhibition, Merry-go-nowhere, featuring a series of intuitively driven, automatic writing-inspired paintings. Wong’s playful, childlike style combines scribble and collage to construct her imagery. Treating her paintings as distinct objects, she presents them as subconscious manifestations of her psyche and subtle yet shifting feelings.

Wong approaches the intuitive assembly of imagery as a visual game. Viewers may recognize individual elements, but the resulting composition evokes an ambiguous, suspended atmosphere. In Maybe it’s a carsick dog, a small anxious dog with three blurred companions looking out the car window, evoke a sense of unease. Similarly, Party dogs portrays two dogs in party attire, yet frozen in time, conveying a mood of awkwardness and perhaps anxiety.

In Two cents apiece, Wong sews fabric tags from a bulk cherry purchase onto a tree with a giant cherry-symbol sign. From a distance, it looks like any ordinary orchard; viewed closely, it resembles stickers on an advertisement, challenging our assumptions about how agricultural products are marketed to us versus how they truly exist in nature.

Candyce Wong Ka Ying (b.2003, Hong Kong) graduated from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2025. Specialising in oil painting, her work is intuitive and playfully childlike, guided by impulse and the subconscious to construct scenes full of possibilities. She places strong emphasis on the materiality and texture of her work, treating each painting as a physical object to add depth and complexity to seemingly simple imagery. Through painting, she captures small, authentic moments from everyday life, transforming them into lasting memories.

Her recent group exhibitions include Ava Ba grad show 2025 (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, 2025) and N+ 2.0 (The Garage, Hong Kong, 2025). The artist currently lives and works in Hong Kong.