Kay Gasei: Black Whimsy

EY PROJECTS is pleased to announce Black Whimsy, the first Asian solo exhibition by British Zambian artist Kay Gasei, opening on April 11, 2026. The exhibition will present 18 newly created small-to-medium-sized oil paintings, continuing Gasei's long-standing inquiry into narrative fracture, mythic rewriting, and the mechanisms of image generation.

In the artist's own statement, he sketches the core character of this body of work — a figure born in 'solace,' wandering between mundane reality and fantastic hallucination, sometimes on the verge of a solipsistic breakdown, at other times revealing the wondering, empty revelations of an idle mind. As lightly written in pencil across one of the works: 'Absurdity is the order of the day but beauty could save us.' Gasei grounds his work in the absurd, yet does not descend into nihilism; rather, within the clear-eyed recognition that 'absurdity is the order of the day,' he holds onto the faint yet steadfast belief that 'beauty could save us.'

The title Black Whimsy speaks directly to the dual nature of these works. The 'black' points to the pervasive darkness, ambiguity, and obscurity that permeate the compositions — the shadowy psychic territory between fantastic hallucination and the edge of solipsistic breakdown. The 'whimsy' captures the playful, unpredictable, and seemingly capricious quality of the imagery: the artist's recent preference for 'simpler imagery like equations, drawings, or relic-like petroglyphs.' Together, Black Whimsy names the strange tension at the heart of Gasei's practice — an unsettling fusion of the ominous and the lighthearted, the primal and the improvisational.

For Gasei, painting is not a depiction of reality but an act of inscription—a trace between consciousness and the subconscious. He calls these works 'empty revelations,' stressing the contingency and self-referential nature of their image-generation, while juxtaposing contemporary painterly language with ancient petroglyph-like signs to create a familiar-yet-obscure temporal layering that engages debates on image archaeology and the phenomenology of the trace.

Opening Special Event On the opening day, Li Hongyu (Li’s Kitchen), a chef trained at Le Cordon Bleu, will bring his street food stall 'Li’s Kitchen' directly into the gallery space, making handmade tacos on site. Limited quantities available, first come, first served. As Relational Aesthetics suggests — the value of art lies in creating moments of human co-presence and interaction — this touch of street-side liveliness will sit alongside Kay Gasei’s paintings, inviting viewers to engage in a live dialogue with Black Whimsy through the shared act of eating. The artist’s work explores the traces of absurd daily life and solace; a handmade taco becomes the perfect metaphor for that improvisation and sharing: unpretentious flavor, a fleeting encounter. April 11, see you at EY PROJECTS.