Sour Notes, Mostly. Some Sweet Ones.
Hong Kong · 23 August 2026
Before Sour Notes hangs on a wall in Tokyo, I want to tell you where it actually comes from. Because it isn’t a cheerful painting. I know it looks like one.
In 2022 I left a very sensible, well-paid job to find out whether there was an artist in me — or just a person who liked to daydream about one. It was the bravest and most frightening thing I’d ever done. There was no studio. My room in the old house was the studio.
I started filming everything, so I’d have proof I existed outside an office. The first video went up in October 2022 — a person, a camera, and no idea what comes next. It’s still on YouTube. I’m leaving it there.
The lemon arrived about seven months in.
Not the first thing I painted — that’s a story for another day :P — but the first one that felt like me. A basket of lemons in a corner store, watching the door. Nobody buying them. Nobody needing to. Sour and sweet at once, exactly like that year.
I finished it in a few weeks. And then I kept it in the shadows. For years. I don’t have a good explanation for that.
That’s on camera too — May 2023, minute 04:28, messy hair and all.
My initial sketches…
It finally came out of hiding this spring, at my debut solo show at Tiny Space Gallery in Hong Kong, alongside ten other paintings in The Drama Produce-rs. And somewhere along the way it opened doors I didn’t know I was knocking on — some inward, the soul-searching kind. Some very real: a tour, and now NAFAS Festival Tokyo, with 60 international artists.
There’s a newer peek behind the scenes too, if you’d like:
Soon the lemon flies to Tokyo — and this time it’s not staying in the shadows.
I write to my collector’s list before I write anywhere else. It’s where the sneak peeks go, and the occasional note slipped in with them. If you’d like to be on it…
All for now,
kelly
xxx 💋 to all the gentlehumans
