Deja vu is the first feeling of Anna Nganleong Cheung's paintings, the ambiguity of the images makes her work "not immediately recognizable".

Although most of the images in Anna Nganleong Cheung's paintings originate from real scenes in the artist's life, the images seem to have a sense of strangeness beyond reality and a sense of detachment from the present. In my opinion, Anna Nganleong Cheung seems to be an "outsider" who bravely walks outside the world, and at the same time, she is also an observer who calmly observes our life and the world.

In Anna Nganleong Cheung's works, seemingly commonplace landscapes are otherworldly spaces that have been drained of the flavor of life. The dream-like familiarity and strangeness makes the viewer always keep the perspective of the other to gaze at the landscape of different cultures constructed by the artist in the image, which is both real and unreal.

Since her middle school days, Anna Nganleong Cheung has been deeply interested in the relationship between nature, individuals and architecture; while attending graduate school at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, she had already decided to take these three as the subject of her paintings. It may seem that Anna Nganleong Cheung is painting individuals and cities, but more accurately, what Anna Nganleong Cheung has always been interested in and depicted has always been public space - a contemporary scene where people, buildings and plants are placed.

The nine new works on display in “Spiral Voyage”, all created in 2023, present several issues that Anna Nganleong Cheung is exploring from the perspective of painting: the first is the scheduling of colors. In the new works, there is a great deal of use of strong contrasting and complementary colors - especially some common color schemes in traditional Chinese aesthetics, such as red and green, yellow and purple, etc. The choice of such color schemes is undoubtedly a dangerous one, and once used poorly it can fall into a cliche, whereas Anna Nganleong Cheung maintains a subtle balance in her images. Secondly, in the treatment of space, there is a strange sense of time and space interlacing in the work. The artist does not follow the traditional perspective method: she deforms and co-locates different buildings in the same image; most importantly, the people in the picture also expresses the artist's understanding of space: "People themselves also have positive space and negative space". Based on this, the figures in Anna Nganleong Cheung's works are both real and imaginary, and you may be confused as to whether you are seeing a human being or a shadow of a human being. Sometimes the people are even abstracted into blocky geometric shapes.

Anna Nganleong Cheung's paintings are devoid of narrative. The themes of her artistic creation are scattered in each painting, like an umbrella structure; therefore, her paintings need to be juxtaposed for presentation and viewing. If we use a movie as a metaphor for Anna Nganleong Cheung's paintings, it conveys the artist's perception of diverse forms of existence. Each piece of work is like a scene or a fragment in a movie, all of them are partial; and only when all her works are combined together can the movie be seen.

"Life is not a cycle but a spiral," American author Karen Thompson Walker stated in her science fiction novel The Age Of Miracles, "Every life lesson that has ever been presented to you will come back again, until you learn it. "

"Spiral" has been interpreted differently from different perspectives such as aesthetics, philosophy, literature and biological science. The choice of "Spiral Voyage" as the theme of Anna Nganleong Cheung's solo exhibition is inspired by the her artistic creation and life trajectory. Anna Nganleong Cheung has grown up and traveled through many different cultures since she was a child: she was born in Quanzhou, grew up in Hong Kong, went to the UK to study at university, and lived in Beijing after returning to China. Like a quiet traveler, she soars through different regions and cultures, drawing nourishment and observing the world. If life is a great voyage, a journey of continuous spiral - just like the DNA in each of our cells - presenting a double-helix structure; for a painter, "the exploration of the language of painting itself" is the most important part of her work. For a painter, "the exploration of painting language itself" is the core of Anna Nganleong Cheung's creation. Taking this as the starting point, no matter how she changes the theme, content and form of her paintings, no matter where she sails to, she always spirals upward around this core.

The solo exhibition "Spiral Voyage", on the one hand, presents some of the questions that Anna Nganleong Cheung has been thinking and caring about in his paintings, such as "What are the meaningful forms in an image? What are the guidelines for the formation of a picture?" On the other hand, it also presents Anna Nganleong Cheung's exploration of art creation, which is different from the previous one: "In the end, what I paint is not the object's image, but the perception and association". In “Spiral Voyage”, we can see the artist's observation of the transition from human survival in a natural environment to human survival in a man-made environment, and the artist's exploration of the evolution of human beings from being a living body to being a cultural body.