Volery Gallery is pleased to present From Stardust to Pollen, the first solo exhibition in the Middle East by Hong Kong artist Ticko Liu. Bringing together paintings developed over the past three years, the exhibition marks a significant expansion of Liu’s practice and introduces his distinctive visual language to audiences in Dubai.
Moving between microscopic observation and cosmic scale, Liu reflects on the individual’s place within the vast continuum of time and amid forces beyond human control. His paintings suggest a world governed by cycles, repetition and déjà vu, where sustained attention transforms familiar surroundings into something intricate, strange and uncanny. For Liu, looking is neither neutral nor passive: once perception becomes attuned to these hidden correspondences, the everyday opens onto an inexhaustible field of discovery.
The sun and moon, flowers and grasses, insects and birds, together with the trees and unremarkable traces of daily life, form recurring points of departure. Liu asks what these overlooked fragments—occupying the margins and crevices of the visible world—might carry. As the gaze shifts between the minute and the immense, seemingly disparate forms begin to echo one another. His compositions hover between the observed and the imagined, evoking primordial moments that were never recorded yet appear to reverberate across time.
Born in Hong Kong in 1996, Liu draws upon acute observations of nature, the rhythms of urban life and the human sense of presence. Combining the material vocabulary of oil painting with modes of seeing informed by Chinese painting and Western pictorial traditions, he transforms fleeting sensations into images that reward prolonged contemplation. Freehand gestures, saturated colour and shifting spatial relationships allow structural affinities to emerge gradually—often registered by the body before they can be articulated through language.
The exhibition’s title traces a movement between two extremes: stardust, associated with cosmic origins and immeasurable time, and pollen, a minute carrier of life, movement and renewal. Within this expanded field, the monumental and the negligible become inseparable. Countless minor incidents, passing sensations and neglected details converge to form a larger, interconnected world.
With From Stardust to Pollen, Volery Gallery presents an exhibition that quietly recalibrates the distance between humanity and its surroundings. Liu’s paintings propose the act of looking as a passage between scales—from the intimate to the infinite, and from the fleeting instant to the deep structures of time.
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Exhibition Dates: November 12 – December 10, 2026
For inquiries and to register interest on the Preview List, please email info@volerygallery.com.