Hoo Mojong: Apples in Spring

This exhibition is co-presented by BAO ROOM by BAO FOUNDATION and AYE. Following the retrospective held for Hoo Mojong at the Shanghai Art Museum in 1996, this marks the artist’s return to Shanghai after thirty years, unfolding a renewed narrative across time and space. Curated by Wang Conghui under the title “Apples in Spring,” the exhibition adopts a fresh, light, and focused approach, presenting 37 works.

From “Toys” to “Apples in Spring”: the deepening of the apple motif

The 2025 centennial retrospective of Hoo Mojong, “Toys,” not only filled a gap in the international reassessment of her artistic legacy, but also marked the official founding of the BAO Foundation, centered on the concept of “reconstructing Eastern imagination.” Structured around five chapters—“Journey, Play, Grind, Return, Carve”—the exhibition traced the trajectory of Hoo Mojong’s artistic development. In the 2026 solo exhibition “Apples in Spring,” curator Wang Conghui distills from the myriad everyday objects associated with “play” the apple as the most vital and symbolic image of life.

Research indicates that the apple holds a particular personal significance for Hoo Mojong. “In her early years in Paris, she lived in hardship and isolation; her table was most often set with inexpensive apples and French bread. It was her passion for artistic nourishment that sustained her through those difficult times.” As such, the apples in her paintings “are neither the sweet fruits of Impressionist or bourgeois taste, nor the wild sensuality of Fauvist or Bohemian aesthetics. They belong to the land and the table, yet the artist imbues them with a distinctive emotional hue.” The green apples spilling from a basket, the red apples juxtaposed with green bananas and scallions, the purplish-red apples resting in a bowl—what she expresses is gratitude for the gifts of the earth, a maternal steadfastness, and a truthful record of her limited means. In Hoo Mojong’s artistic universe, the apple is not merely an everyday object but a spiritual symbol—linking hunger and abundance, solitude and companionship, the ordinary and the sacred—becoming a microcosm of her lifelong artistic pursuit. Hoo Mojong stands as a solitary figure of her time, an incomparable independent presence among 20th-century Asian women artists. The legacy she left—timeless, serene, and transcendent—remains strikingly contemporary today.” —Wang Conghui

This exhibition focuses on Hoo Mojong’s works in copperplate printmaking and on paper. Her works on paper also reveal a diversity of stylistic languages. Yet regardless of stylistic shifts, her art consistently conveys a distinctive sense of brushwork and ink rhythm, along with a refined psychological sensitivity.