EY PROJECTS is pleased to announce Black Whimsy, the first solo exhibition in Asia by British Zambian artist Kay Gasei, opening on April 11, 2026. The exhibition will present 12 newly created small-to-medium-sized oil paintings, continuing Gasei's long-standing inquiry into narrative fracture, mythic rewriting, and the mechanisms of image generation.

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In the artist's own statement, he sketches the core character of this body of work — a figure born in "solace," wandering between mundane reality and fantastic hallucination, sometimes on the verge of a solipsistic breakdown, at other times revealing the wondering, empty revelations of an idle mind. As lightly written in pencil across one of the works: "Absurdity is the order of the day but beauty could save us." Gasei grounds his work in the absurd, yet does not descend into nihilism; rather, within the clear-eyed recognition that "absurdity is the order of the day," he holds onto the faint yet steadfast belief that "beauty could save us."

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The title Black Whimsy speaks directly to the dual nature of these works. The "black" points to the pervasive darkness, ambiguity, and obscurity that permeate the compositions — the shadowy psychic territory between fantastic hallucination and the edge of solipsistic breakdown. The "whimsy" captures the playful, unpredictable, and seemingly capricious quality of the imagery: the artist's recent preference for "simpler imagery like equations, drawings, or relic-like petroglyphs." Together, Black Whimsy names the strange tension at the heart of Gasei's practice — an unsettling fusion of the ominous and the lighthearted, the primal and the improvisational. 

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For Gasei, painting is not a depiction of reality but an act of inscription—a trace between consciousness and the subconscious. He calls these works "empty revelations," stressing the contingency and self-referential nature of their image-generation, while juxtaposing contemporary painterly language with ancient petroglyph-like signs to create a familiar-yet-obscure temporal layering that engages debates on image archaeology and the phenomenology of the trace.

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In terms of exhibition design, the curatorial team introduces a duet-like spatial structure. The artist’s brightly colored, boldly brushed works are placed in a high‑light gallery, where even illumination amplifies their energy and expansiveness. Meanwhile, the darker, more mysterious pieces are installed in an almost dark room, lit only by precise spotlights that make the details and textures gleam faintly in the shadows — like petroglyphs examined by torchlight in a cave. These two alternating lighting conditions and rhythms mirror the tension in Gasei’s work between “absurd daily life” and “beauty could save us,” allowing viewers to experience a visual and spiritual duet as they move between light and dark.