Join Dutch-Chinese visual artist Tja Ling Hu as she reflects on the role of listening within her practice, presented in the SOLO section of the 2026 Investec Cape Town Art Fair under the theme “Echoes of Humanity.” Working across painting, works on paper, and ceramics, Hu explores how memory, displacement, and intergenerational identity are carried and transformed over time. Drawing from family archives and imagined narratives, her work creates intimate yet expansive spaces where personal and collective histories intersect—inviting a deeper attunement to the stories held within bodies, materials, and place.
A sound piece created especially for the fair by the artist is available at the end of this interview.
The theme of SOLO 2026, Echoes of Humanity, places listening at the centre of its curatorial vision. In your practice, which often explores memory, displacement, and the traces left by human presence, how do you understand listening as part of your artistic process? What does it mean for you to listen to a place, a material, or a history?
Listening helps me to understand and reflect on the human experience. By listening to the stories of people — but also of things — knowledge, traditions, and lived experiences are passed on. Without this transmission, much of what defines us as human beings risks being lost.
Everything around us carries a story: people, places, objects, materials. Only by listening do these stories have the chance to surface. It helps me to see beyond what is immediately visible and to understand how personal memories, collective histories, and traces of human presence form the way we view the world and our place within it. In that sense, listening is very much connected to time. It shows us what has been, what is, and what will be carried forward into the future.
There is a palpable tension in your paintings between intimacy and distance, dissimulation and exposure. Do you see the female figure in your work as carrying personal histories, collective memory, or both?
They carry both. As humans, we constantly move between the individual and the universal, searching for a balance between our personal experiences and our place within a larger social and historical context. We don’t exist in isolation, but at the same time, each of us carries a personal inner world.
In contemporary society, there is a strong emphasis on the mind, on intellect, rationality, and productivity. It has become common to seek therapy as many people feel disconnected to our emotional and physical selves, with the desire to learn to feel again. To feel begins in the body. To be aware of the body is in itself a form of listening. To relearn this skill is part of the process of becoming whole. Overwork, screen-time, constant distraction, and substances become ways to avoid reconnecting with the body, with what lives underneath.
I believe that even the most intimate emotions are not purely individual. They have become the way they are through our ancestral histories and collective experience and live on within us. The female figure in my paintings holds this layered reality. She is trying to make sense of it, releasing what no longer serves her and adjusting in order to resonate more and more authentically into the future.
Presenting your work in Cape Town, within a context shaped by layered histories and complex social realities, adds another dimension to this notion of echo. How do you imagine your work resonating in this specific place?
Presenting my work in Cape Town offers a new perspective on the idea of an echo. It is a place of complex history, where personal and collective stories are woven. I hope my work can create a space for reflection and recognition beyond cultural differences. Maybe viewers can encounter their own memories and experiences within it, to give them space and eventually let them go when it no longer serves them — adjusting where needed and becoming more whole through the experience of the work.
This presentation is particularly meaningful to me, as it is the first time my work travels outside of Europe with Namuso Gallery. Showing the work in a non-Western context opens it to new perspectives and ways of looking at it beyond the cultural frameworks in which it has previously been shown. I am curious to see how the themes of memory, reconnecting to the body, and passing on experiences will resonate in a different historical and social environment and what new meanings may emerge through that encounter. In the end, the work aims to connect on that human level, whatever the context may be.
Tja Ling Hu is represented by Namuso Gallery
Tja Ling Hu: Intuitive Language (2026). Credit: Kikan Massara, 12 Steps. Courtesy of the artist.