From 5 July - 2 August 2025, WKM Gallery is delighted to present Return to Nothing, Freddy Carrasco’s inaugural exhibition in Hong Kong. A Canadian artist of Dominican heritage, Carrasco has cultivated a diverse multidisciplinary practice over the past decade spanning painting, sculpture, animation, illustration, music, and spatial design. This exhibition, developed in Hong Kong over 4 months during his residency at SIDE SPACE, unveils a new body of work that marks a new chapter in the artist’s personal narrative. Having spent the past 6 years in Tokyo, Carrasco’s time in Hong Kong has served as an extension of a physical and spiritual journey into rediscovering what connects humanity across cities, cultures, religions, and eras. Spurred by the existential tension that such overwhelming (and often brutally indifferent) megalopolises bring about, the exhibition returns back to the home: through deeply vulnerable works reflecting on family and intimate relationships, Carrasco finds an entry point towards the universal human desire for connection, meaning, and transcendence.
Before arriving in Hong Kong, Carrasco had already started to confront the ways his surroundings shaped his sense of self. After a period of travelling across multiple big cities and residing in Tokyo, Carrasco came to view the cluttered, gadget-ridden cyberpunk aesthetic he had once idealised as a symptom of consumerism. A place where performativity eclipsed authenticity, the city had become an antithesis to spiritual survival rather than a vision of an emancipatory future. Abandoning the mirage of techno-futurism, Carrasco sought a new north star, stripping himself of all pretensions and returning to the rawness of the physical world. It is this return to materiality that lies at the heart of Return to Nothing.
Unfolding across the gallery’s interconnected rooms, the exhibition charts a path from inner turmoil to transcendence, shaped by the artist’s time in Hong Kong. Greeted with a visual palette of blacks, reds, and cage-like grids, the viewer is initially met with an oppressive atmosphere that is almost claustrophobic. There is a sense of continuation from his previous exhibition, a show anchored by the haunting black monolith “The Father” (2024). The canvases, mostly airbrushed, look as if they are floating within a thick fog.
In one work, the vague outline of a face hovers like mist before — or perhaps behind? — an equally hazy grid, mimicking the scenery outside of the gallery where a city eternally under construction continues to clang and clash, the ever-present bamboo scaffolding crawling up alongside buildings like expanding tesseracts, half-hidden skeletons behind transparent flowing veils of nylon mesh. “Leave Nothing”, a wall-hanging work made out of a grid-like structure of burnt wood and locally sourced linen, pays homage to this structure and calls attention to its coming demise as Hong Kong slowly phases out the iconic bamboo poles for metal piping. Other canvases have reached total abstraction: airbrushed grids, intersecting lines, and floating squares are rendered in sombre colours, invigorated by shocks of heavy red. The father figure is no longer to be seen, replaced instead by the artist’s confrontation of his own ego. It seems that the city has become a topographical representation of the artist’s soul; a soul disembodied by sensory overload, floating through a crushing waterfall of information that threatens to overtake the self entirely.
In the same room, a succession of small wooden sculptures, both burnt and raw, illustrate a transformation in stages. The charring of the material is a reference to the act of self-immolation performed by Buddhist monks, while the shape itself brings to mind the sarcophagus, a cocoon-like structure symbolising metamorphosis and spiritual transition. The final transformational stage is marked by the growth of graceful wing-like shapes that stretch towards the sky, a silhouette that brings to mind representations of heaven within Christianity and reincarnation within Tibetan Buddhism. The artist’s experience growing up in a Christian household is freely intertwined with Buddhism and the eastern religions he began to explore in adulthood, a blend that is mirrored in the material source: made out of discarded blocks collected by construction crews in Sham Shui Po, each piece of wood is of an unknown origin, a mix of different grains and weights that nevertheless merge into one continuous movement. While on first glance the sculptures seem solemn, they are in fact alive with the power of transformation.
As the exhibition progresses, it becomes clear that each of the works is a step on the path toward transcendence. The final section finds its conclusion in “Mother”, a canvas of soft white and blurry red. Intersected with a glowing grid that appears cross-like from afar – a reference to his mother’s extreme Christian beliefs, which shaped his childhood – the simple work hums with an overpowering energy. Red, the foundational colour of the exhibition, holds a double-sided energy that blossoms here, as the colour itself transforms from a symbol of power to a symbol of love. Released from “The Father”, the artist finds, through “Mother”, the door that will lead towards the next phase of enlightenment.
This final room signals, if not total release, a kind of awareness, acceptance, and peace. The red thread of life continues to thrum with energy, signalling that the journey is not over, that the path winds on through the Buddhist concept of samsara: the cycle of death and rebirth that binds us to the material world. As the artist quotes from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, a novel exploring spiritual awakening, the exhibition might best be understood as an offering of this insight: “We are not going around in circles, we are moving up, the circle is a spiral, we have already ascended many a level.” Rather than closing a chapter, the exhibition opens the next turn of the spiral, inviting viewers to reflect on their own journeys through the cycles of life and rebirth.
