Nigel Ip

Taking over Hypha Gallery Marble Arch this month is To Heaven-gate Ascend, a group exhibition curated by Ivana Ng, Gabrielle-Aimée Séguin, and Cas Campbell. The last two are artists with some of the most visually appealing works in the show.

There is something quite poetic about entering the space through double doors and immediately seeing Pavel Isupov’s Doorway at Dusk (2024), where an open door invites you back outside again. This feeling of circularity and in-betweenness in one’s life experiences underpins the show’s curatorial endeavours and Seihee Cho’s drawing Bare House (2023) highlights what such a solitary landscape might look like.

Her multimedia works like Deux iii (2024) and Pal (2024) are more interesting, exploring tension’s anchoring effect in life. Both contain pairs of junk cards (피; pi) from a Korean Hwatu (화투) deck matched in their respective monthly suits of January and August, respectively, and can often be used like tarot cards for fortune-telling. Meanwhile, Hongil Yoon’s Digital Diary (2025) sees figures floating in liminal spaces between digital and physical realms. These are paired with Séguin’s Coming of Age Masks series (2023), which blend figuration and imagined landscapes with the structures of graphic novels and coming-of-age narratives.

We are invited ‘to linger in these suspended moments, to reflect on the paths we follow, the ones we leave behind, and those that quietly await, real or imagined.’ This seems apt, as I observe the way Yijia Wu’s Ladder with a Gap (2023) guides the eye heavenwards into the light, a clear nod towards the exhibition’s title. Wu’s practice explores ‘home’ as a fluid concept, using soap as a mediumistic parallel for its fragility and transformative capabilities. Although Soap Tiles (2025) evoke the remnants of a lived space, daily use will cause those physical traces to fade.

In another part of the room, Check-in Luggage (2023) is a monument to Wu’s personal habit of collecting stones wherever she goes; it serves as a metaphor for containing memories and emotional baggage, things which can soon be released when the soap loses stability. Sophie Longwill’s Wishing Vessel II (2024) is the opposite. Rather than containing the creator’s written reflections inside a vessel, they are precariously suspended on the outside as delicate skins of glass. Such contemplations resonate strongly with Campbell’s Hidden Rivers (2024), where the raw materials gathered to create it contain individualised histories in the same way the artist navigates life herself, intersecting with the stories of people and places around her.

On the more concrete side of human experience, William GC Brown’s drawings and paintings present glimpses of observed narratives, while Samuel Zhang’s video In The Place Where We Left and Arrived (2022) highlights shared experiences of queer identity, rejection, racism, and cultural confusion in Chinese LGBTQ+ communities in the UK. The role of political narratives in shaping identities and a sense of belonging is also explored in Lydia Wong’s Crab, Ascend! (2024), a kite representing the spirit of the crab rising from the earthly realm to the metaphysical realm.

Finally, some works consider the notion of human movement quite literally. Jihoon Cho’s As Above, So Below (2025) is an impressive, life-sized cardboard recreation of an aircraft’s front landing gear. On an opposing wall, Jamie Duncan’s Final Farewell (2021) draws attention to the end of production of Boeing 747s.

This is a show that takes patience to unravel its disparate, but relatively focused connections. The venue itself is also a challenge – a former café – which adds to the poetry of the theme. Due to its meditative quality, you would be hard-pressed to find another emerging artists’ show that makes you want to stay a bit longer.

To Heaven-gate Ascend (1 – 30 August 2025) is at Hypha Gallery Marble Arch, https://hyphastudios.com/marble-arch/