I don`t know how to love you teach me to love

Struggling Art Space is an artist-run initiative that counts on the variance of struggles and finds inspiration in their unpredictability through art making. We invite artists to embrace and transform personal and collective difficulties into strategies as magical spells. Since 2021, we have curated exhibitions and engaged in collaborations that explore the art world’s desires, challenging its underlying norms and questioning its established power structures. We work with fellow artists in search of our own position in our surroundings and embrace failures in our everyday life, so as all the fear that comes along.

Our projects included Whatever It’s Yours Will Come to You (TRYST 2023, Torrance, 2023); Everybody Struggles in Struggling Art Space (SUPERMARKET 2023, Stockholm, 2023), May the Art World Tear Us Apart Til We Meet Again (Bierumer School, Bierum, 2022); Once Again in One’s Hand (Mamamini, Groningen, 2021); Momentje Alstublieft, I’m Lost for Words (Pip Expo, Den Haag, 2021), TRAINING workshop When Herbs Come Together, How Far We Can Go? (Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, 2021); Spreadzinefest (Het Resort, Groningen, 2021) and Zinecamp (WORM, Rotterdam, 2021).

WONG focuses on image-making including paintings and videos with different methods, exploring ways to express consciousness with primitive emotions and fill the vacuum of belief. In the creation process that is non-research-based yet introspective, a narrative structure is almost nonexistent. To erify and communicate emotions, images were extracted from fragmented life experiences, as meanings disappeared and were re-established repeatedly.

WONG obtained her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019. Her works were exhibited at Floating Projects, Gallery Exit in Hong Kong, and de Bierumer School in the Netherlands.

Jennifer Poon graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, majoring in Fine Arts. During her university years, she began to explore different art forms and from then on developed a special interest in image making and creating mixed media installations. Her art pieces are often inspired by Joseph Cornell’s wooden box assemblages and Wes Anderson’s movies. The wooden boxes and the movie scenes that they created house a world and story of its own, which inspires Jennifer’s artistic expressions in the way of storytelling. Her quiet, delicate, spiecemen-like artworks have become a source of fascination for audiences.

In recent years, she has been working as an art teacher, teaching students ranging from pre-school kids to secondary school teenagers. Her diverse art teaching experiences have impacted her art making process to display authentic emotions and to show curiosity in life like the students she taught.

She was selected as one of the finalists at First Smash 5 Art Project in 2018.

Born in Hong Kong, Jessie explores addresses the complexities of relational dynamics in new surroundings as an interdisciplinary artist, somewhere here somewhere there: “I always want to sew up the gaps between personal experience with life’s realities and power relations. Drawings are the starting point where I channel those uneasiness and failures in the art and societal world to negotiate with the world on a daily basis. And I am very much interested in the moldable and performative potentials of materials in amplifying spatial memory. My work often ends up with site-specific installations in a stage-set setting and I am obsessed with transparent materials such as PCV and glass to blur the lines between dream-like reality. ‘A statement to conclude my practice?’ I would say, Jessie’s work is a game of intimacy, wherein everything is carefree, humorous, child-like, low-brow, easy to make, and not meant to last.”

Graduated from MFA in painting from the Frank Mohr Institute in 2021 and BA in Fine Arts from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2018, Jessie is currently based in Hong Kong and UK. She is the co-founder of Struggling Art Space.

Raised in Hong Kong, Lau Man Pan gained his Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2012 and his Master of fine art in painting from the Frank Mohr Institute in 2022.
His multidisciplinary practice revolves around painting as a medium to convey his view on self-identity
and freedom. He explores the notion of emotional memories and the mnemonic nature of objects, finding traces of human existence in the distance between reality and its depiction. ‘The human’ is a main subject that his works always seek to discover and reveal, especially through engendering recognition via images. Expressing his anxiety and doubt about an ahistorical perspective on identity, his artworks reflect his traumatic experience related to drifting and migration in the contemporary context.

Man Wai SE, Van was born and lives in Hong Kong. After graduating from the Department of Fine Arts at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019, she previously worked at a non-profit arts and disability organization and an exhibition production company. Currently, Van is working as a freelancer in the art field. Her artistic focus lies in molding and casting, low technology, and readymade materials, through which she shares various frustrations and mishaps she encounters in her daily life. She loves discovering tiny things in different corners of the city and enjoys collecting fragments of the urban environment. Recently, she discovered that “Doing things foolishly, yet seriously” is her life motto, and she hopes to share humor and jokes with the audience.

After a decade of studying art in tertiary institutions, Rose looks upon the sky and wonders if it is clearer than before. In 2024, they accepted the challenge to learn and began practicing what seem to be unrelated to art making: Noh, Hong Kong Sign Language, Kundalini yoga and dubbing. During the process of acquiring new skills to express, they moved on from being a self-proclaimed ‘voyager’ in an infinite holiday to an artist who is taking nourishments in a long vacation. They used to perform monologues on an empty stage. Lately, they wish to incubate a space where all could come forth — one with text, sound and motion.

Rose is grateful to the souls they encountered and pulled close during their exploration in art, including but not limited to fellows who studied Fine Arts in The Chinese University of Hong Kong in their bachelor years, and those who crossed paths during their doctoral study in Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University.