Join artist Kien Situ on a tour through his exhibition, 金 (Metal).

About the Exhibition

In 金 (Metal), Situ transforms CIW Gallery into a striking environment of rupture and reincarnation. The installation brings together Chinese ink, cement, titanium, and incense ash collected from Taoist temple censers in New South Wales, alongside fragments of the artist’s earlier works. These materials come together in a suspended, charged space—where opposing forces collide and new forms emerge.

Titanium needles and planes puncture the gallery like acupuncture points or tools of extraction. Ink flows across painted surfaces. Titanium catches and refracts faint light. Sculptures made from cast ink—a signature of Situ’s past work—appear toppled, shattered, pierced. These are not static objects but shifting states: broken, reassembled, and suspended within a cycle of destruction and transformation.

The title 金 refers to “Metal” in the ancient Chinese system of the Five Elements (五行, also translated as “Five Phases”), which describes the world in terms of five interrelated forces: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. In this exhibition, metal is not only literal—the titanium structures invoking the raw material’s geological origins alongside often-invisible systems of global mining and trade—but symbolic: In conversation with ink, cement, and incense ash, metal here refers not only to the substance, but to the philosophical elements that orients space and time in Chinese cosmology.

金 (Metal) continues Situ’s exploration of what he calls “multi-dimensional matter”—a way of working with materials that hold layered meanings across time and space. By placing ancient elements like ash and ink alongside high-tech metals, the artist invites us to consider how the harmonic tensions among different worlds (spiritual and industrial, organic and engineered) can come together in innovative ways.

About the Artist

Kien Situ (b.1990) is an architectonic artist whose practice spans sculpture and space. Informed by his diasporic heritage at the juncture of contemporary global cultural theory with ancient Sinospheric philosophy, he explores matter, ruin, distance, numerology, and time in relation to cultural dislocation.

Situ reconfigures structures and space through encounters formed by destabilisation, tension, and hybridity. Drawing from deconstructivist, minimalist, and brutalist spatial methodologies, his work merges ancestral materials with modern techniques. Chinese Mò ink is central to his practice, altered through architectural materials. By displacing and reorienting these elements - while ‘reincarnating’ old works into new forms - he examines the destructive relationality between matter and identity, envisaging the cartography of his practice as an ‘endless, formless ruin.’

Situ has exhibited at Artspace, 4A, Passage, The University of Sydney amongst other local institutions. In 2025, he will be showing at the Australian National University, Bankstown Arts Centre, Nasha Gallery, and undertaking an artist residency at Bundanon. His work belongs to Deloitte’s Corporate Art Collection and various private collections. Alongside this, he has designed numerous exhibitions at AGNSW. In 2024, he was shortlisted for Create NSW’s Artspace Visual Arts Fellowship and Lee Ufan Arles x Maison Guerlain Prix Art & Environment. In 2025, he will be presenting an artwork for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025: Intelligens for HOME at the Australian Pavilion.

He holds a Bachelor of Architecture (UNSW, 2016) and a Masters of Architecture (USYD, 2025).