The Night Blooms
May 15th – July 5th 2025
Bradley Ertaskiran is pleased to present, The Night Blooms, a solo exhibition by Rick Leong.
Made over several years, Rick Leong’s The Night Blooms is a meditation on tangled ecosystems, natural, cultural, spiritual, and otherwise. Across his rich, layered landscapes, little canvas is left bare; we are completely engrossed in the swirling branches, unfurling vines, and flowing freshwater streams of old-growth forests, a longstanding subject in Leong’s work. In the tradition of Romanticism, Leong’s landscapes show the sublime grandeur of nature beyond human interference while borrowing from Daoism’s emphasis on our inherent connection to the natural world. His moody, detailed scenes are quiet but animated, captured right before the onset of nocturnal activity, when life bursts anew even with the sun’s setting.
Leong, a Chinese Canadian, melds personal memory, observational painting, and traditional iconography into his landscapes. In this series, his use of a blue monochrome palette draws inspiration from blue-and-white pottery—an ancient Chinese tradition distinguished by its intricate cobalt motifs. This style was widely copied across 17th-century Europe alongside the development of Chinoiserie. One common design, the willow pattern, became mass-produced in Britain as a distilled imitation of Chinese pottery, coveted for its whimsical depictions of birds, flora, and other imagined semblances of Chinese culture and craft. The willow tree, an enchanting symbol of this prized tableware and a frequent character in Leong’s paintings, also bears a distinctive story, as it was once native to Northern China, later transplanted to North American shores. Leong sees these interwoven material histories as apt analogies for the diasporic experience, through which visual culture is carried, continuously evolved, and transformed through its relationships with the new lands it inhabits.
Leong takes great interest in the interconnectedness of things. His canvases are bursting with dense foliage, intertwined branches, and burrowing animals, a paradisiacal portrait of a thriving, symbiotic ecosystem that seems to grow reciprocally in real-time. This magic of ecology reveals itself through chimeric creatures, such as in Spell of the Sensuous (2025), comprised of swathes of imagined floral hybrids. Within the grotto-like Bunker space, Leong’s work reaches its peak fantastical splendour: free-flowing streams move through dark caverns and across thick undergroves towards hidden worlds. In these glimpses into untouched life, we sense that things are flourishing together in our absence, no less alive without our having witnessed them.