Body Is The Foreign Place
Art Central Art Fair, Central Harbourfront, Hong Kong
On Display: 25 of Mar - 29 of Mar 2026
Dubai-based RARARES Art Gallery returns to Art Central 2026 with a focused group presentation exploring the body as a frontier, continuously adapting to new realities in a dynamic cultural world.
Exhibition features vibrant new colour-driven oil compositions and textile canvases exploring relocation and personal authorship, positioning sensitivity as strength. Presented cosmic sculptures reflect on the delicate tension between humanity and nature. Collectors are offered a cohesive and timely presentation, where material experimentation meets cultural resonance.
This exhibition brings together a dynamic group of international artists whose practices expand the possibilities of material, form, and narrative across contemporary art. Tehran-born, US-based artist Elnaz Javani transforms textiles, embroidery, and assemblage into intimate sculptural archives exploring memory, identity, and transformation, while Ustina Yakovleva merges labor-intensive craft, mythology, and meditative processes into tactile works that blur the boundaries between body, nature, and metamorphosis. Seoul-based sculptor Chunkook Lee reinterprets digital and game-inspired imagery through meticulously constructed forms, presenting new sculptural works that fuse organic vitality with technological precision. Painter and draughtswoman Tatiana Chursina contributes psychologically charged compositions rooted in memory, symbolism, and emotional space, while Norwegian artist Mathias Hagen Masarati brings vibrant, gestural paintings alive with animals and symbolic motifs that reflect movement, presence, and the interconnected energy of life. Together, the exhibition offers a compelling dialogue between craft and technology, figuration and abstraction, intimacy and transformation, presenting a cross-cultural exploration of how contemporary artists navigate identity, materiality, and lived experience.
Exhibition features vibrant new colour-driven oil compositions and textile canvases exploring relocation and personal authorship, positioning sensitivity as strength. Presented cosmic sculptures reflect on the delicate tension between humanity and nature. Collectors are offered a cohesive and timely presentation, where material experimentation meets cultural resonance.
This exhibition brings together a dynamic group of international artists whose practices expand the possibilities of material, form, and narrative across contemporary art. Tehran-born, US-based artist Elnaz Javani transforms textiles, embroidery, and assemblage into intimate sculptural archives exploring memory, identity, and transformation, while Ustina Yakovleva merges labor-intensive craft, mythology, and meditative processes into tactile works that blur the boundaries between body, nature, and metamorphosis. Seoul-based sculptor Chunkook Lee reinterprets digital and game-inspired imagery through meticulously constructed forms, presenting new sculptural works that fuse organic vitality with technological precision. Painter and draughtswoman Tatiana Chursina contributes psychologically charged compositions rooted in memory, symbolism, and emotional space, while Norwegian artist Mathias Hagen Masarati brings vibrant, gestural paintings alive with animals and symbolic motifs that reflect movement, presence, and the interconnected energy of life. Together, the exhibition offers a compelling dialogue between craft and technology, figuration and abstraction, intimacy and transformation, presenting a cross-cultural exploration of how contemporary artists navigate identity, materiality, and lived experience.
Body Is The Foreign Place
Art Central Art Fair, Central Harbourfront, Hong Kong
On Display: 25 of Mar - 29 of Mar 2026
Tehran-born and US-based, Elnaz Javani is a rising voice among MENA and American artists commanding increasing institutional and market attention. Named one of Newcity Chicago’s Breakout Artists (2022), she has exhibited internationally with presentations at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Madrid), and Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles).
Working across sculpture and installation, Javani transforms embroidery, stitching, dyeing, and assemblage into layered, spatial textile architecture. Her practice is a strong addition to today’s collector-driven discourse on materiality and identity.
Javani transforms textiles into intimate archives of memory, identity, and transformation. In Dwelling Places (2024–ongoing), figures dissolve into layered embroidery, exploring the body’s fluidity. The Fall Series (2025) reimagines falling as liberation, while The Fate Series (2013–ongoing) turns second-hand coats into vessels of personal and cultural memory. Across seven years, Inner Compulsion (2013–2019) distilled repetition into revelation with black and red embroidered muslin works. Together, these series offer collectors a rare encounter with art as both process and narrative—tactile, resonant, and enduring.
A rising force in contemporary craft-based practice, Ustina Yakovleva (Thailand/Russia) merges traditional labour intense craft, nature, and meditative practice into mesmerizing, tactile experiences both deeply personal and universally resonant. Following her London debut at Frieze Cork Street Gallery in February 2026, Yakovleva makes her highly anticipated Hong Kong debut.
Having international exhibitions and residencies, Ustina Yakovleva offerscollectors art that captivates the eye and enriches any collection. Yakovleva transforms embroidery, beadwork, and layered textiles into imagined marine forms, where the body meets the unfamiliar and mutable. Drawing on myth, ritual, and archaic craft of Russia, each piece captures fleeting psychic experiences, embodying the boundary between living and inanimate matter. It invites collectors to experience the body as foreign terrain, where form, memory, and identity shift in continuous metamorphosis.
Chunkook Lee (b. 1995) – Seoul-based sculptor transforming digital and game-inspired imagery into meticulously crafted forms. His solo exhibitions include FARM (2025, Bio Gallery, Seoul) and HIT AND RUN (2022, Artspace Hyeong), with international group shows at P21, IN HQ, Studiya Gallery, Pipeline (London), and L.U.P.O (Milan), positioning his technology at the cutting edge of sculptural innovation.
Making his Hong Kong debut in March 2026, Lee presents a new Cherry Tomato sculpture, where organic vitality emerges through precise construction.
Tatiana Chursina (b. 1985, Russia) is a painter and draughtswoman renowned for her long-term thematic cycles, including Animals and Polyclinic. Her work explores psychological states, spatial tension, and restorative voids, balancing figuration with open, semi-abstract forms. Trained in fresco painting at the Moscow State Academic Art Institute, Chursinafavors large-scale, gesture-driven compositions. Influenced by Vasnetsov, Kollwitz, and Roginsky, her works are held in major private collections worldwide.
Love of the Octopus and the Frog is a large-scale work central to the artist’s practice, bringing together two recurring figures from her imaginative world: the octopus and the frog. These characters, present since childhood, act as personal symbols and inner totems tied to memory, attachment, and emotional grounding.
The frog stems from an autobiographical memory of a girl holding a frog, linked to the artist’s mother, preserving a connection to early experience and family. The octopus, in contrast, is fluid and ambiguous—signifying sensitivity, vulnerability, and a desire to hold and gather the surrounding world.
Mathias Hagen Masarati (b. 1991, Norway) transforms canvases into a vibrant, expressive visual language. His compositions are pulsing with color, energy, and gestural immediacy, where animals and symbolic motifs become personal emblems reflecting the interconnectedness of life.
Debuting in Hong Kong in 2025, and after shows in Oslo, Basel, and Miami, his new Art Central 2026 pieces celebrate movement, presence, and the living energy of creation. His art celebrates movement, presence, and the act of creation itself.
Working across sculpture and installation, Javani transforms embroidery, stitching, dyeing, and assemblage into layered, spatial textile architecture. Her practice is a strong addition to today’s collector-driven discourse on materiality and identity.
Javani transforms textiles into intimate archives of memory, identity, and transformation. In Dwelling Places (2024–ongoing), figures dissolve into layered embroidery, exploring the body’s fluidity. The Fall Series (2025) reimagines falling as liberation, while The Fate Series (2013–ongoing) turns second-hand coats into vessels of personal and cultural memory. Across seven years, Inner Compulsion (2013–2019) distilled repetition into revelation with black and red embroidered muslin works. Together, these series offer collectors a rare encounter with art as both process and narrative—tactile, resonant, and enduring.
A rising force in contemporary craft-based practice, Ustina Yakovleva (Thailand/Russia) merges traditional labour intense craft, nature, and meditative practice into mesmerizing, tactile experiences both deeply personal and universally resonant. Following her London debut at Frieze Cork Street Gallery in February 2026, Yakovleva makes her highly anticipated Hong Kong debut.
Having international exhibitions and residencies, Ustina Yakovleva offerscollectors art that captivates the eye and enriches any collection. Yakovleva transforms embroidery, beadwork, and layered textiles into imagined marine forms, where the body meets the unfamiliar and mutable. Drawing on myth, ritual, and archaic craft of Russia, each piece captures fleeting psychic experiences, embodying the boundary between living and inanimate matter. It invites collectors to experience the body as foreign terrain, where form, memory, and identity shift in continuous metamorphosis.
Chunkook Lee (b. 1995) – Seoul-based sculptor transforming digital and game-inspired imagery into meticulously crafted forms. His solo exhibitions include FARM (2025, Bio Gallery, Seoul) and HIT AND RUN (2022, Artspace Hyeong), with international group shows at P21, IN HQ, Studiya Gallery, Pipeline (London), and L.U.P.O (Milan), positioning his technology at the cutting edge of sculptural innovation.
Making his Hong Kong debut in March 2026, Lee presents a new Cherry Tomato sculpture, where organic vitality emerges through precise construction.
Tatiana Chursina (b. 1985, Russia) is a painter and draughtswoman renowned for her long-term thematic cycles, including Animals and Polyclinic. Her work explores psychological states, spatial tension, and restorative voids, balancing figuration with open, semi-abstract forms. Trained in fresco painting at the Moscow State Academic Art Institute, Chursinafavors large-scale, gesture-driven compositions. Influenced by Vasnetsov, Kollwitz, and Roginsky, her works are held in major private collections worldwide.
Love of the Octopus and the Frog is a large-scale work central to the artist’s practice, bringing together two recurring figures from her imaginative world: the octopus and the frog. These characters, present since childhood, act as personal symbols and inner totems tied to memory, attachment, and emotional grounding.
The frog stems from an autobiographical memory of a girl holding a frog, linked to the artist’s mother, preserving a connection to early experience and family. The octopus, in contrast, is fluid and ambiguous—signifying sensitivity, vulnerability, and a desire to hold and gather the surrounding world.
Mathias Hagen Masarati (b. 1991, Norway) transforms canvases into a vibrant, expressive visual language. His compositions are pulsing with color, energy, and gestural immediacy, where animals and symbolic motifs become personal emblems reflecting the interconnectedness of life.
Debuting in Hong Kong in 2025, and after shows in Oslo, Basel, and Miami, his new Art Central 2026 pieces celebrate movement, presence, and the living energy of creation. His art celebrates movement, presence, and the act of creation itself.
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