This season, Whitestone Gallery Singapore introduces between realms, a captivating duo solo exhibition featuring Chinese artist Jiang Miao and Singapore-based artist Deborah McKellar. Opening on 8 November 2025, the exhibition invites audiences to step into layered worlds where the tangible and the transcendental meet.

between realms explores how spirituality and the physical presence can be inspired, intertwined, and expressed through visual art. The exhibition will explore how the intangible—our subconscious, emotions, beliefs, and natural energies—be transformed into visible form, and suggest the possibilities of the material world becoming a medium for spiritual reflection and enlightenment.

For Jiang Miao, this duality between the spiritual and the physical unfolds through her distinctive practice of layering and carving. Each layer she applies is a sensory record of her environment—the sun, wind, air, and temperature—in the moment of her creation. The choices of colour and form are intuitive, rooted in the artist’s subconscious. She then introduces carving, a technique that diverges from the traditional act of painting with brushstrokes. Instead of adding, she removes, creating depth with a carving knife on her panel. This absence of paint becomes a striking visual translation of energy, revealing the unseen yet ever-present vitality of her surroundings.

From Jiang’s perspective, the process of making art itself is akin to meditation. The repetitive act of layering and carving functions as a form of spiritual cultivation. Her layers of paint are guided by a mindfulness practice in Zen, which is grounded in awareness of breath, thought, body, and environment. Her process of layering is associated with an objective observation of thoughts without attachment—thoughts are allowed to arise and fade without holding on to any of them. Through carving, she maintains her meditative states and infuses it into each carve of the paint, often resulting in unexpected visual effects. The final artworks, mostly titled by their dates of creation, serve as time capsules and records of her meditations, preserving the atmosphere and energy of the world around her.

In dialogue with Jiang’s spiritual and energy explorations, Deborah McKellar grounds the exhibition in the physical world through a practice deeply inspired by place, architecture, and memory. Her textile-based works feature landscapes from the evolving urban landscape of Singapore to the poetic dreamscape, a search of her belonging as a South African root in Southeast Asian country to a personal and spiritual exploration of her identity as an artist to be essential to the spirit. Through a meticulous process of silkscreen printing, stitching threads, and painting forms, McKellar transforms physical heritage landmarks into poetic reflections of identity and belonging. The tactility of the material she used, fabric and thread, becomes a metaphor for lived experience that is imbued with history, nostalgia, and a sense of the passing time.

If Jiang Miao’s works capture the unseen currents of spirituality, Deborah McKellar’s art anchors us in the tangible and familiar, while simultaneously infusing it with emotion and meaning. Together, their practices weave a conversation between the invisible and the visible, intimate and collective, energy and memory.

Both artists’ textured surfaces invite viewers to explore different realms: Jiang Miao’s work navigates the spiritual and cosmic, where light and shadow embody inner stillness and transformation; McKellar’s art grounds us in the historical and material, where layered memories of place emerge through fabric and print. between realms is thus a poetic meeting point of these parallel narratives—inviting contemplation of the spaces between body, spirit, city, and memory.

In this way, between realms becomes more than an exhibition. It is an exploration of how art can provide an intersectional field between the invisible and the visible, turning spiritual presence into physical form, and offering viewers an immersive experience of energy, depth, and mindfulness.