Cary Kwok swaps hardcore for heartache

When the rest of London is winding down and switching off for the night, Cary Kwok is just getting turned on. To paint, that is. In his Hackney studio, the city’s quiet becomes his cue. “Everyone’s in bed. Everything’s silent. No one is texting. It’s peaceful.”

It’s out of this stillness that ‘Is This Love?’ has taken shape – the Hong Kong-born artist’s latest solo exhibition at Herald St in Bethnal Green. The show is his sixth with the East London gallery – a partnership that dates back to 2005, when Ash L’ange and Nicky Verber first launched the space and Kwok was among the first on their roster.

Those who’ve followed Kwok will recall his hyper-charged, erotic biro drawings from the early shows in 2005 and 2007. Vascular phallic monuments rendered in blistering detail. Comic book heroes – Spiderman, Superman, Popeye – caught mid-ejaculation; a jetstream of spunk arcing skywards before splattering across their Hulk-like physiques. Then came the series of fantastical architectural erections, the steampunk cityscapes, and that gang bang painting, perfectly captured by editor Matthew McLean as an “imagining of Tom of Finland taking industrial-strength poppers with the Kuchar brothers, on a tour of Disneyland led by Paul McCarthy”. One 2016 show saw the exceptional draftsman try his hand at sculpture, presenting a freestanding wooden phallus that ejaculated into a globular cloud, which doubled up as the shade for a fully functioning lamp.

If it shocked you, it wasn’t meant to. “That’s not who I am,” Kwok shrugs. “I just paint what I enjoy – what fascinates and amuses me. And I feel that erotica is somewhat crucial to how I feel about romantic love.”

So I guess if we were to call those the X-rated years, then ‘Is This Love?’ offers the PG version. The ten framed, A4-sized acrylic and ink paintings lean into something softer, but are by no means diluted. Here, eroticism lingers, but it’s tempered, rechanneled into quieter, more introspective forms of longing. The cinematic moments are not so much lust as memory, missed chances, and the kind of intimacy that aches deeper than the cocks that once embodied it.

“Like everyone, I go through sentimental moments,” Kwok says. “Remembering experiences I’ve had. Regretting decisions I have and haven’t made. Reminiscing about the good times I’ve had with certain people.” This sense of reflection is clearest in The Reunion (2025), where two darkened figures embrace beneath a sullen canopy of clouds. It feels heavy; their forms echoing the cold, urban monoliths visible in the distance. Soft shards of moonlight break through, in suggestion of hope. And then again in Every Time We Say Goodbye – Chapter 3 (2024). A shadowed building slices diagonally across the frame beneath that same brooding sky. A single window glows orange, and within it, a lone figure stands, gazing out.

“Every time you part with someone you love, you look forward to the next time so much that it’s all you think about,” Kwok told Herald St director, Émilie Streiff. “That yearning is so intense, it’s like a little bit of you dies until the next time you see each other.” If that’s struck a chord, it’s because the work borrows its title from the first line of Ella Fitzgerald’s 1965 song Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.

Music has long been a quiet force throughout Kwok’s practice – his signature orange headphones rarely leaving his neck – and the show’s opening was no exception. ‘80s/90s Canto-pop, Brit-pop, Bowie, The Smiths, Motown, Bollywood soundtracks: he listens to them all. Cinema too fills his thoughts and his canvases, describing cinematic tropes such as light and shadow as “props” in his storytelling. Take Rouge (2025), for instance. A feminine hand holds a mirror reflecting a woman’s lips as she applies red lipstick. Behind her, the shadow of a man with a cigarette in his mouth. What could have been an intimate act of self-adornment becomes a performance of desire, witnessed in the shadows. The show’s title work, Is this love? (2025) depicts a cropped view of a man’s head, a hand gripped into his hair. What could seem, at first, like a portrait of physical intimacy gains clarity – and erotic charge – only in the shadow behind them.

So yes, there’s still a bit of sex. But it’s gone fairly flaccid if one were to compare it to his earlier works. Among the randiest is a clipped frame of a man’s crotch, titled Is This Love? (Holiday Edition) (2025). A broad, wedding-ringed hand clutches the outline of an erection pressed up against a pair of bubblegum pink-coloured trousers. Whether the rock-on is being tethered at the hand of its owner or that of his lover is left open to interpretation, yet its framing captures an intimacy that is both tender and territorial, suspended somewhere between possession and restraint.

Are these fantasies? Realities? Perhaps memories, I wondered. “It’s everything,” explains Kwok. “It’s happened to you. You play it out in your head. You play it out in different scenarios. Thinking back on what you wish you’d had the courage to do. Or the confidence to say. Maybe, just maybe, your path in life would’ve turned out differently.”

So, is this love? Maybe. But what once burst forth in jets of cartoon climax now hides in the shadows, under trousers. He hasn’t abandoned desire – he’s simply rerouted it. Into memory. Into melancholy. Into the ache that lives not just in the body, but in the things we didn’t say, or couldn’t do, or never got to finish. If love exists in these works, it’s not declarative – it’s conditional, suspended, and all the more affecting because of it.