Gallery Exit presents The fifth season, a duo exhibition showcasing the artistic practices and collaborative dialogue between Chow Chun Fai and Ivy MA King Chu across different creative states. This collaboration began in 2023 when Chow encountered Ma's 'Bird of Shape' series created during her travels, leading to his deep reflection on the concepts of 'lightness and weight' in her collage works.

The two artists present a striking contrast in their creative backgrounds: Ma has long lived a nomadic lifestyle, developing a spontaneous and portable collage practice, while Chow works from a stable studio environment, maintaining a bold painting style with clear thematic focus. Building on these differences, they engaged in a six-month online dialogue, moving from casual life updates to impromptu conceptual exchanges, deeply reflecting on their respective practices and exploring the limitations and experimental possibilities of their working conditions. This process of this exploratory collaboration generated rich creative outcomes.

During the exhibition period, the artists' life situations underwent an intriguing reversal: Chow embarked on travels while Ma ended her wandering to settle in a small European country. In his journeys, Chow contemplated the relationship between place and traveler, believing that one should maintain a 'gentle whisper' approach when describing unfamiliar places, preserving beautiful moments purely in personal 'memory drawers.' Returning to his studio, he reopened this long-forgotten drawer, discovering unexpected creative materials: stones collected during his cycling tour around Taiwan, a 1901 poetry book obtained in Berlin, Germany, and a parking ticket from Pennsylvania, USA. On these objects, he painted corresponding travel memories and local characteristics.

During her six months of settled life, Ma gradually adapted to a regular daily rhythm. The scenery on her daughter's school route, English books borrowed with her local library card from limited selections, a frequently passed tree, morning light filtering into her home, and the vivid colors of food ingredients all became sources of creative inspiration. Working within limited spatial conditions, she returned to primitive automatic drawing and sketching, ultimately completing three series of small oil paintings: Square scenery, Domestic nature, and Still life theatre.

The exhibition title The fifth season comes from Ma's sketching notebook. Weather and seasonal changes are among the most basic topics in human interaction—seemingly trivial courtesy conversations that can, under special circumstances, carry profound meaning. The fifth season, as a concept beyond the four seasons, could represent either a continuation of seasonal cycles or encompass all possibilities of intuitive phenomena, repeated displacements, and imagined imagery.