Perrotin Hong Kong Presents Emma Webster's ‘Vapors’ Solo Exhibition
Featuring 11 ethereal landscape paintings created during the Los Angeles wildfires.
Emma Webster’s solo exhibition, Vapors at Perrotin Hong Kong marks her debut in the city and features 11 ethereal landscape paintings, created during the January wildfires in Los Angeles. Through misty grays and delicate brushstrokes, her work explores themes of impending disaster and aftermath, blending plein-air landscape, still life and virtual reality into a new artistic genre. The title draws on the fleeting nature of vapor itself, symbolizing the transient qualities of change and the collision between the inner and outer worlds.
Webster’s artistic process merges traditional methods with advanced technology, combining sculpture studies, virtual reality and digital rendering. She begins by crafting wax and plaster objects, which are scanned and incorporated into digital dioramas to create intricate compositions. Utilizing tools like Oculus and Blender, Webster projects these virtual designs onto canvases, challenging viewers to reflect on the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy.
In her paintings, Webster frequently employs birds as symbolic figures frozen in unnatural postures, reflecting themes of isolation and displacement. Works like “Alaska” and “Sparrow” emphasize static poses, while “Odette” presents a fragmented swan beneath a dolmen. By integrating Romantic-era portraiture and the eerie dimensionality of 3D rendering, Webster gives these figures a mythical presence. Her terrains, often digitally generated, contrast with manipulated bonsai shrubs adapted from scans, further heightening the tension between nature and artificiality.
Concurrent with Vapors, Emma Webster will reveal “Hunter’s Garden,” a large-scale landscape painting, at the gallery’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong. Vapors opens on March 25 and will remain on view until May 17, 2025.
Perrotin Hong Kong
807, K11 ATELIER Victoria Dockside,
18 Salisbury Road,Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong
