THE SHOPHOUSE is pleased to participate in the 13th edition of ART021 Shanghai, presenting a solo exhibition by London-based artist Sam Creasey, featuring a new body of work on canvas and mixed media works. Creasey’s paintings occupy an uneasy territory between familiarity and estrangement, showcasing his profound concern for place and identity. It interrogate how the physical structures we inhabit—streets, offices, public utilities, and governmental buildings—both reveal and conceal the system of power that shape everyday life. The exhibition extends to consider not only the psychic weight of built environments but also reflecting on underlaying issues rooted in late-stage capitalism, rapid technological change, public services, or urban expansion, while highlighting how privatisation and profit routinely overshadow the public good.

Creasey’s visual language—jagged, steel-edged, and imbued with an uncanny representational quality—echoes the raw surfaces of the metropolis. Architecture, symbols of authority, and institutional rituals seep into the work, drawn from his experience within government buildings. These glimpses into backroom offices provide direct encounters with the regalia of power, which he reconfigures into painted and ceramic forms. While also being informed by psychogeographic wanderings, motifs of motion, journey, and transition thread recurring through the work, mapping the idiosyncrasies of places within an increasingly homogenised landscape. His canvases, hybrid frames, and ceramic vessels act as microcosms of contemporary life—both relics and stage sets, ancient and modern—depicting the relationship between place and meaning. The fragility of clay becomes a metaphor for human and institutional vulnerability; geometric planning collides with the unruly uncertainties of material, much like the precarious balance between civic ideals and consumerist imperatives.

The exhibition title Dark Waters resonates on multiple registers. It alludes to the insular geography of islands but also gestures towards a broader turbulence. The exhibition explores a modern identity crisis on both personal and national level, torn between attachments to the past and the uncertainties of the future. This is often most apparent in the crises afflicting public infrastructure: privatised utilvvvities, for instance, have been widely criticised for prioritising profit over service, making the very substance of life a site of financial extraction. Water, in this sense, becomes both literal and metaphorical—an element that surrounds, sustains, and endangers, while also symbolising opacity, hidden systems, and the difficulty of seeing clearly through a fog of uncertainty. This is represented in the ceramic elements of the paintings, which feature pipe-like shapes evocative of drainage and sewage systems. For example, the painting titled Dark Waters (2025) depicts a peripteral structure at the top of the painting similar in design to an ancient Greek vernacular of columns and a pitched roof. The distinctive turbine at its center is inspired by a sewage pumping station in The Isle of Dogs, East London, designed by the post modern architect John Outram.

THE SHOPHOUSE欣然參加第十三屆上海廿一當代藝術博覽（ART021 Shanghai），呈獻駐倫敦藝術家山姆·克里西（Sam Creasey）個展，展出一系列全新的繪書及混合媒介作品。克里西的繪畫佔據了一個介乎於熟悉與疏離之間的不安地帶，是次展覽呈現他對地方與身份的深刻關注，詰問人所居住的物理結構——街道、辦公室、公共設施及政府建築——如何同時揭示與隱匿形塑日常生活的權力體系，並進一步延伸至審視建成環境的精神重負，思考其背後蘊含晚期資本主義、科技迅速變革、公共服務與城市擴張的議題，並其中私有化與利潤如何慣常地凌駕於公共利益之上。

克里西那鋸齒狀、鋼鐵般鋒利且充滿詭異再現質感的視覺語言，呼應著大都市粗糲的表面。建築、權力象徵與制度儀規滲入其作品，靈感源自他於政府建築內工作的經驗。這些對辦公室後室的驚鴻一瞥，讓他直接遭遇權力的標誌物，並將之重塑於繪畫與陶瓷形式之中。同時受心理地理學漫遊所啟發，運動、旅程和過渡的反覆主題貫穿作品中，在日益同質化的景觀中繪製地方的獨特性。他的畫布、混合媒介框架與陶瓷器皿如同當代生活的縮影——是遺跡亦是舞台佈景，是古老的亦是當代的——描繪地方與意義之間的關係。陶土的脆弱性成為人類與制度脆弱的隱喻；幾何規劃與材料難以駕馭的不確定性相互碰撞，恰似現代社會中公民理想與消費主義需求之間的脆弱平衡。

展覽標題「暗流」於多重向度上引起共鳴。它暗示島嶼的孤立地理，亦指向一種更廣泛的動盪。展覽探索現代的個人與國家身份危機，糾纏於對過往的依戀與未來的不確定性之間。這一點常在公共基礎設施的危機中最為明顯：例如，私有化的公用事業因將利潤置於服務之上而廣受批評，使生命之本源淪為經濟榨取的場域。水，於此既是字面意義亦是隱喻——它環繞、滋養亦危及生命，同時象徵著不透明性、隱藏系統，以及在迷霧般的不確定性中難以看清的困境。此主題體現於畫作中的陶瓷元素，其管狀形態令人聯想到排水與污水系統。例如，與展覽同名的畫作《Dark Waters》（2025）描繪了一個圍柱形結構，型似於古希臘的柱子和斜房頂。結構中央的獨特渦輪，則受到東倫敦狗島一個由後現代建築師約翰‧奧特拉姆所設計的污水泵站所啟發。