THE SHOPHOUSE is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of London-based artist Sam Creasey in Hong Kong, Dark Waters, featuring a new body of work on canvas and mixed media works. Creasey's paintings occupy an uneasy territory between familiarity and estrangement, showcasing his profound concern for place and identity. It interrogate how the physical structures we inhabit—streets, offices, public utilities, and governmental buildings—both reveal and conceal the system of power that shape everyday life. The exhibition extends to consider not only the psychic weight of built environments but also reflecting on underlaying issues rooted in late-stage capitalism, rapid technological change, public services, or urban expansion, while highlighting how privatisation and profit routinely overshadow the public good.

Creasey’s visual language—jagged, steel-edged, and imbued with an uncanny representational quality—echoes the raw surfaces of the metropolis. Architecture, symbols of authority, and institutional rituals seep into the work, drawn from his experience within government buildings. These glimpses into backroom offices provide direct encounters with the regalia of power, which he reconfigures into painted and ceramic forms. While also being informed by psychogeographic wanderings, motifs of motion, journey, and transition thread recurring through the work, mapping the idiosyncrasies of places within an increasingly homogenised landscape. His canvases, hybrid frames, and ceramic vessels act as microcosms of contemporary life—both relics and stage sets, ancient and modern—depicting the relationship between place and meaning. The fragility of clay becomes a metaphor for human and institutional vulnerability; geometric planning collides with the unruly uncertainties of material, much like the precarious balance between civic ideals and consumerist imperatives.

The exhibition title Dark Waters resonates on multiple registers. It alludes to the insular geography of islands but also gestures towards a broader turbulence. The exhibition explores a modern identity crisis on both personal and national level, torn between attachments to the past and the uncertainties of the future. This is often most apparent in the crises afflicting public infrastructure: privatised utilities, for instance, have been widely criticised for prioritising profit over service, making the very substance of life a site of financial extraction. Water, in this sense, becomes both literal and metaphorical—an element that surrounds, sustains, and endangers, while also symbolising opacity, hidden systems, and the difficulty of seeing clearly through a fog of uncertainty. This is represented in the ceramic elements of the paintings, which feature pipe-like shapes evocative of drainage and sewage systems. For example, the painting titled Dark Waters (2025) depicts a peripteral structure at the top of the painting similar in design to an ancient Greek vernacular of columns and a pitched roof. The distinctive turbine at its center is inspired by a sewage pumping station in The Isle of Dogs, East London, designed by the post modern architect John Outram.

The themes that animate Dark Waters are global in scope. By presenting this work in Hong Kong—a city where architecture, infrastructure, and ideology are intensely intertwined—Creasey invites viewers to consider their own relationship to the environments they inhabit. THE SHOPHOUSE, itself a heritage site marked by adaptation and layered histories, becomes an ideal stage for these questions.

Ultimately, Dark Waters does not resolve the contradictions it surfaces. Instead, it submerges the viewer in them, insisting on the need to look beneath the surface of our constructed worlds. Creasey’s imagery offers not answers but atmospheres—fragments of cities, systems, and identities in flux, through which viewers may gain a clearer perception of the undercurrents that govern our shared future.