When a Cuban looks at the sea, it evokes the isolation and pain of thousands of families, the anxiety, and the psychological frustration of living in a divided country. The sea becomes a wall or a barbed-wire fence delimiting one’s destiny. - Yoan Capote

Ben Brown Fine Arts Hong Kong is delighted to announce Yoan Capote: Mixed Feelings, an evocative exhibition of new works by acclaimed Cuban artist Yoan Capote on view from 22 March to 21 June 2025. In this presentation, Capote weaves together the sublime beauty of the Cuban landscape with the weight of its turbulent socio-political history. As its title suggests, Mixed Feelings explores duality – love and disillusionment, belonging and estrangement, hope and despair – and captures the paradoxes of the artist’s homeland in works that speak to global themes of migration and political turbulence. Capote’s meditations on Cuba’s fraught realities extend far beyond its physical and ideological borders, resonating powerfully with the shifting political landscape of Hong Kong – a city and an island where the erosion of autonomy has fostered an increasing sense of insularity. Through his exploration of the ambivalent and often contradictory emotions that arise from living at the threshold of self-governance, Capote reveals the universal tensions of contested identity and political uncertainty.

Since his inaugural exhibition in Hong Kong in 2019, Capote has refined his practice with extraordinary dynamism. The exhibition features new works from Capote’s ongoing series – Isla, Purificación, Palangre, Aguas Territoriales, Requiem, and Sentimientos Encontrados – as he continues to develop his signature engagement with seascapes and cloudscapes as a site of profound emotional and conceptual exploration.

At the heart of the exhibition are new works from Capote’s seminal Isla series which first introduced the fishhook motif in 2006, culminating in his first major fishhook painting in 2010. These vast seascapes, serene from a distance, bristle with thousands of fishhooks, their barbed edges symbolic of the psychological toll of migration and exile.

Capote incorporates salvaged materials into new works from his Purificación series, debuting in Hong Kong for the first time, which depict billowing clouds – vast, ethereal formations that swirl and undulate with a moody, theatrical presence, as seen in Purificación (Sutil) (2025). Chains, barbed wire, and rusted metal – objects steeped in histories of division, control, and oppression – are repurposed
into striking compositions. These utilitarian materials are transformed into poetic imagery, their oxidised surfaces forming spectral silhouettes against the plaster-primed wooden panel. Through a laborious process of hammering, warping, and burnishing, Capote imbues these industrial remnants with a haunting elegance, their corroded patinas mirroring the passage of time and the scars of history.

Capote extends this material tension with two new works from his Aguas Territoriales series, Aguas Territoriales (Totalitarismo) (2025) and Aguas Territoriales (Impedimento) (2025), furthering his exploration of the seascape as both an iron curtain and an impassable boundary through the incorporation of saw blades into his material lexicon. While creating the series, he was drawn to the ancient Greek myth of Procrustes, whose brutal method of imposing uniformity – stretching or severing the bodies of his victims to fit an arbitrary standard – echoes the experiences of the Cuban population under restrictive political conditions. This parallel amplifies the psychological tension within Aguas Territoriales, transforming the sea from a mere physical barrier into a symbol of control, conformity, and the sacrifices imposed on those who seek freedom.

Another striking inclusion is Requiem (Anagogía) (2024), a new addition to Capote’s series that demonstrates his deepening engagement with gold leaf – a medium he first explored after a 2019 visit to Florence. The series draws on the rich visual language of Italian Renaissance altarpieces. Here, the radiant luminosity of gold – traditionally symbolic of sunlight, divinity, and transcendence –
takes centre stage, transforming the work into a poignant tribute to the victims of emigration.

The exhibition also features new works from the Sentimientos Encontrados series, in which Capote incorporates electrocardiograms into paper collages, reimagining the delicate lines of the medical charts – recordings of the human heartbeats of multiple individuals – as undulating ocean waves. In works such as Sentimientos Encontrados (Diasporas) (2024), the use of electrocardiograms forges an
emotional connection between Capote and his social environment – drawings, in a sense, made by the hearts of others, representing a collaboration between the artist and the collective emotions of everyday people. The works are a poetic dialogue between the rhythms of the body and the vast, untameable force of the sea, a reflection of human fragility set against nature’s grandeur.

Also included is Palangre (Mar Caribe) (2024), marking the debut of this celebrated series in Hong Kong. In this new iteration, Capote has cast a bronze plate where molten bronze envelops thousands of steel fishhooks, departing from the canvas medium used in previous works. These elements converge to form an undulating seascape, with the gleaming bronze surfaces evoking the luminous
allure of traditional sculptural reliefs.

Capote’s rigorous seriality and his commitment to the seascape as a site of endless exploration align him with a lineage of artists who have returned repeatedly to a singular subject under shifting conditions. From Caspar David Friedrich’s brooding Romantic vistas to Monet’s luminous studies of light and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s meditative ocean horizons, Capote’s work resonates with this tradition. Yet, while his predecessors often sought transcendence, Capote infuses his seascapes with an urgent sociopolitical dimension, making the waters he depicts as treacherous as they are seductive.

In Mixed Feelings, Capote transforms the seascape into a charged arena, rendering the ocean as a political and psychological threshold that reflects the ambivalent realities of both Cuba and Hong Kong. Capote expands his ongoing dialogue with history, migration, and the shifting nature of autonomy, compelling viewers to reckon with the tides of change that shape our world. At once hauntingly beautiful and deeply confounding, Mixed Feelings compels us to navigate these dualities and confront the siren call of the horizon – dazzling, dangerous, and never as simple as it seems.