Whitestone Gallery Hong Kong is giving Japanese painter Karen Shiozawa her first solo exhibition in the city. Titled Twilight Planet, the show opens on October 24 and runs through November 28, 2026, continuing the young artist's sustained investigation into light: not only the light that falls on surfaces, but the light carried in memory and feeling.

Born in 1998, Shiozawa spent her childhood in the Netherlands, an upbringing that left its imprint on her visual vocabulary. Windmills, classical arches, and church spires recur through her paintings, lifted from European architecture and set into dreamlike spaces. Working in the tradition of chiaroscuro, she pushes the contrast between light and shadow to an extreme, layering vivid color over darkness so that her scenes feel less like observed landscapes than remembered ones.

Her process is physical and subtractive. She covers the entire canvas in oil paint, then scrapes back the upper layers to release the colors buried beneath, as though kindling a light inside the darkness. She scratches the surface with a needle and taps it to build fine variations of texture, so the glow in the work seems to flicker. The result is painting that refuses to settle into a single place or time: the sky at dusk, she suggests, is also the boundary between past and future.

At the center of Twilight Planet are three kinds of light: the light of the stars on the visible world, the faint light that lingers in memory, and the light by which we sense our own contours from within. Shiozawa's interest lies in the places where these lights intersect, the transitional moments, like twilight itself, when one state gives way to another and something unspoken briefly becomes visible.