Michele Chu’s Immersive Installation Confronts Anticipatory Grief

Michele Chu’s debut solo exhibition “You, Trickling” at PHD Group in Hong Kong transforms the gallery into a multisensory space exploring anticipatory grief. The artist, trained in Global Innovation Design at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College, creates works from fragmented glass, metal, family photographs, and her own hair and fingernails. Visitors pass through a fog shower and heat lamps before encountering objects like glass chains shattered and soldered into pendants, and a water installation titled “Seeping” where water drips unpredictably onto buckets around a massage bed. Chu’s mother’s terminal diagnosis inspired the show; one work uses metal repoussé to trace her chemotherapy blisters. The exhibition builds on Chu’s earlier public interventions and workshops on grief, including a 2021 workshop with dancer Sudhee Liao. The title emerged from a collaborative exercise with PHD founders Willem Molesworth and Ysabelle Cheung, who cut up Chu’s stream-of-consciousness writings. Entry is by appointment only through May 13.