Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong is pleased to present Out for Summer, a concise exploration of the practice of painting, presented through the lens of nostalgia, a celebration of the quotidian, and of the fleeting, by artists, Qian Jiahua, Guo Hongwei, and Lin Yi-Hsuan. United by their personal, buoyant treatment of colour, line and form, each artist distinctly delivers paintings that are as introspective in their intimacy, as they are inviting in their warm approachability. Guo’s paintings are imbued with the endless sense of adventure and fantasy inherent to summer. Panda Variation exposes a bizarre but amusing scene; a gaggle of pandas tumble one over the other, against a surprisingly stark, and seemingly random, background. The artist takes inspiration from reference images based on childhood photographs, enhanced by his technique of diluting his paintings to mimic the erosion, replacement and deletion of memories over time. Meanwhile, Lin distorts form and line through abstraction, manipulating his medium and taking reference from the South American and Taiwanese cultures that he identifies with to create highly personal and meditative paintings. There is also a visible influence from Matisse in the artist’s earlier works and those seen in the exhibition; the result is a combination of a large number of seemingly irrelevant symbols and overlapping variety of style, shifting between abstraction and repetition. Out for Summer showcases both new and earlier works from the Mosquito series as well as the abstraction of the everyday. Qian explores line, form and structure, sensitive to the impact of space. Her canvases are positioned at the unlikely, but harmonious intersection of deafening structure and restrained silence, gentle movement and bold order, seeking to challenge the conforms of a traditional canvas. Red Edge, a rhythmically balanced composition, goes further, questioning the physical limitations of the flat plane, and seemingly reaching into the viewer’s space, to suggest a third dimension.