Artist: Sofia Huang (Year 13, AISL Harrow Talent Awardee)
Date of Exhibition: 28 October 2026
Venue of Exhibition: AISL Harrow International School Hong Kong
When Paintings Breathe presents bio-art works by Sofia Huang made with living and once-living materials, including algae and cyanobacteria. The exhibition, hosted by the AISL Harrow Talent Awardee for Creative Arts and Design, is open to the AISL Harrow community at AISL Harrow International School Hong Kong.
The title takes the familiar expression “when pigs fly,” a phrase used to mark something as impossible. Huang treats the climate crisis as a condition that has already made many former impossibilities ordinary. The works ask what follows when art no longer only depicts the natural world but incorporates it. Photosynthetic surfaces grown from cyanobacteria and algae pigments form the core of the project. These surfaces are both image and organism: they register light, change over time, and remain materially continuous with the environments they address.
Huang’s practice has long joined technical training with an interest in the social uses of art. At AISL Harrow Hong Kong she has led the senior co-curricular activity Bringing Characters to Life, designing workshop curricula for older pupils, and directed the Digital Design Studio and the Prep School initiative Canvas Collab. Outside the school she exhibited the work Come Back to Me at the United Nations Asia-Pacific Office in Bangkok and founded Refyber, a project that filters microfibres from washing-machine effluent and reworks them into paper and art materials. The present exhibition continues that line of inquiry by treating living organisms themselves as both medium and subject.
The resulting pieces are intended to function as more than representations of environmental concern. Because the materials continue to metabolize, the works remain open to change after they leave the studio. Huang has described the project as an attempt to move art and nature from separate categories into a single field of activity, so that what once seemed out of reach becomes a practical method of making. The exhibition at the school marks a stage in that process, linking laboratory and studio experimentation with a public presentation for the local community.
Further information and tickets are available through the event page for When Paintings Breathe: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/when-paintings-breathe-aisl-art-exhibition-tickets-2003273885117?aff=oddtdtcreator