Heaven In A Wildflower unfolds less like a duo show and more like two distinct worlds held in the same atmospheric pressure — Marcelle Rosfelder-Leu’s sweeping colour-fields on one side, Stephanie Teng’s soft-spiked sculptural creatures on the other. They meet in the shared air of the gallery, but what they offer is two parallel ways of feeling one’s way through tension, fragility, and the slow negotiations of being human.
Rosfelder-Leu’s paintings move like weather across linen: great swells of aqua, ember-orange and submerged charcoal drifting in and out of visibility. Her marks arrive as breath — expanding, thinning, pooling into currents that hover between emergence and disappearance. Every canvas carries its own micro-climate of intuition, as if the colour remembers how it moved. She speaks of painting as a “living, breathing process,” and the works read that way: fluid gestures softened by transparency, strokes that behave like thought before language. The Samplings, with their cropped windows of drips and beginnings, offer an intimate glimpse into this vocabulary — small in scale but full of quiet force.
Across the space, Teng’s forms gather on the brick wall like shy creatures emerging from tide pools. Despite their gleaming chrome skin, they don’t project threat; their spikes curve with a tender rhythm, more sea urchin than weapon, more curious than defensive. They appear to breathe with the wall, soft-bodied under their metallic finish, inviting touch even as they hold the slight tension of distance. Teng describes them as tracing the delicate terrain where longing meets self-protection, but in person they have an almost sweet pull — odd, adorable, quietly alert to the room. A piano melody, recorded in a moment of insomnia, floats gently through the space, carrying the sculptures’ emotional undertow with a slow, unguarded honesty.
Where Rosfelder-Leu’s canvases expand outward in gesture, Teng’s pieces contract into concentrated nodes of feeling. One moves like atmosphere, the other like a cluster of tiny signals; one opens space, the other punctuates it. Their works don’t merge — and that is the strength of the exhibition. Set within a gallery caught between decay and redevelopment, the two approaches echo the building’s own dual state: soft and sharp, stable and shifting, suspended and becoming. Teng embraces the brick’s imperfections, letting her forms nestle into its irregularities, while Rosfelder-Leu’s paintings generate their own internal architecture of flow and interruption.
What connects them is not medium nor method, but a shared attention to the faint signals that shape how we move through the world. Rosfelder-Leu renders the quiet pull of breath; Teng translates the gentle bristle of feeling. Both remind us that tension is not a problem to solve but a condition to inhabit — that the small, the subtle, the nearly imperceptible might be where our most human moments begin. In this sense, the exhibition becomes its own kind of wildflower: modest in scale, but full of intricate life when you lean in close.
Heaven In A Wildflower, A Duo Exhibition by Marcelle Rosfelder-Leu & Stephanie Teng, The Gallery, 26 Lillie Road, SW61TS
About the artists
Marcelle Rosfelder-Leu is a Swiss–Japanese artist based in London and Zurich. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2025) and an earlier MA in Archaeology from SOAS, University of London. Before establishing her full-time painting studio in Hong Kong, she worked across early Asian art and contemporary art initiatives in London, Zurich, and Hong Kong. Her background in art history and early Asian art informs a sensitivity to layered histories, trace, and legacy—an influence that underpins her approach to painting. Her practice unfolds where language dissolves—between presence and absence, memory and becoming. Following her recent series Skin Acts, Rosfelder-Leu continues in Drip and Flow to explore dripping, soft washes, layered surfaces, and flowing gestural strokes, treating the canvas as a site of emergence; each work becomes a convergence of breath, gesture, and transformation.
Inspired by Chinese ink traditions, she treats the stroke as breath—a gesture of becoming rather than boundary. Her process combines sweeping brushstrokes, transparent washes, and stains with inscriptive marks made with oil stick or brush. These material acts embody a hybrid sensibility rooted in her mixed heritage. With a nod to Abstract Expressionism and East Asian calligraphy, her gestural strokes and fluid washes respond intuitively to what is felt rather than seen, exploring themes of absence, intimacy, and fractured language. Each painting is a site of transformation. To return to the surface is to begin again—to map the internal onto the visible world. Exhibitions include the Royal College of Art Degree Show (London, 2025), Faith in Humans (group show at Art Roof Top, Hong Kong, 2023), Let The Dust Settle, Terrace Gallery (2025) and Art Central (Hong Kong, 2022–2024). @marcellerleu
Stephanie Teng is a Hong Kong born, London based multimedia artist exploring the liminal through the subliminal. Her practice examines the tension and tenderness between emotional states that cultivate resilience in the face of fear. Moving fluidly between sculpture, photography, video, sound, and text, Her work is rooted in experiences of generational displacement, cultural hybridity, and collective healing. Teng’s assemblages explore belonging and erasure; presence and absence; grief and transformation through Plato’s notion of “Metaxy” – the generative space of tension in between opposing states that highlights the paradoxical nature of human existence. Informed by her background in psychology, her work also looks at how perception is shaped by systems of control; how patterns become rituals; and how new narratives of ecology and home can be written through the lens of decolonisation.
Teng’s process is rhizomatic, often starting with rigorous research into ancient philosophies, languages and mysticisms that translate into scores for witnessing, remembering, and reimagining. Through this methodology, Teng challenges prevailing ontologies of the human condition by offering poetic interventions that disrupt the binaries that bind us. By humanising what society often pathologises, she creates spaces for healing through encounters that embody the Jungian idea of synchronicity – activating the collective consciousness and attuning us to new ways of seeing, feeling, and being.
Her work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, Camden Art Centre, Cookhouse Gallery, Royal College of Art, 67 York Street Gallery, hARTslane Gallery, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Square Street Gallery, Art Central, The Mills, Centre for Heritage, Art and Textiles, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Eaton Hong Kong and The Contemporary Art Digest (LA). She has been featured in Artit, Tatler Asia, Prestige magazine, Madame Figaro, City Magazine, Elle Hong Kong, Shado Magazine, The DoDo and PhotoMonitor to name a few. She has also guest lectured at Hong Kong University, City University School of Creative Media, Royal College of Art, Asia Society x Art Central, South China Morning Post and Today at Apple. @stephinitely.tengy
