THE SHOPHOUSE is pleased to announce the 6th edition of its annual residency programme, DOOR, featuring Hong Kong–based artist Kan Ka Kin and Tokyo-born artist Masamitsu Shigeta. Since its inception in 2021, DOOR has transformed the gallery’s historic shophouse into an active studio environment, fostering a tripartite dialogue between artist, audience, and space.

Conceived around the metaphor of the door as both physical and psychological threshold, DOOR frames art as an entrance—into a building, into a process, and into the interior world of another. The programme foregrounds artistic process, displacement, and exchange.

Although shaped by different personal histories and geographies, Kan and Shigeta share a similar approach: both begin with photographs taken in their everyday lives—often using their smartphones, as most people do.

The images are not staged or spectacular. They are fragments of the ordinary: a quiet corner of a room, a city facade, a tree glimpsed during a commute, a fleeting posture, an unnoticed threshold. Yet from these casual snapshots, each artist constructs a highly individual visual language.What others scroll past becomes, for them, a site of sustained attention.

Kan translates photographic sources into layered paintings that probe ambiguity and psychological tension within daily experience. His previous body of work grew out of the repetition embedded in his everyday routine. Within that cyclical rhythm, he became acutely aware of subtle spatial patterns and quiet shifts within his immediate environment—details often overlooked through familiarity.

During his month-long residency at THE SHOPHOUSE, Kan established a studio away from home for the first time. This shift expanded his focus beyond the domestic interior toward spaces encountered in transit, particularly along the daily commute between studio and home. Familiar motifs reappear in altered contexts: a vase repeatedly filled with the same flower, door handles habitually opened and closed, the circulating water of a fountain tracing continuous motion. Through displacement, his attention to repetition extends outward, connecting private habits with shared social rhythms.

Shigeta begins with everyday photographs, capturing geometry and light in the cities he moves through. His anti-pastoral urban landscapes reframe overlooked architectural moments—gardens, fences, facades—through shifts in pictorial perspective. Obstructed views, compressed backgrounds, and absent foregrounds create spatial tension and highlight moments one might otherwise simply walk past.

Throughout the residency, Shigeta further developed his exploration of artist-made frames in response to local scenery and material culture. A
highlight is his incorporation of a 1960s iron door with oriental detailing, transformed into an integral framing device for a painting. Alongside this, he created a sculptural stool whose cylindrical form poetically recalls the iconic design of Lai Tak Tsuen—Hong Kong’s first cylindrical public housing development. By integrating found architectural elements into his works, Shigeta extends painting into lived urban history, allowing frame and structure to carry equal visual weight as image.

DOOR continues to transform the gallery into a living studio, inviting audiences to step across the threshold—into process, dialogue, and the
overlooked details of daily life.