16 april 2026, Flor Linckens
Last chance: painting as a mode of inquiry
Until 26 April, KERSGALLERY in Amsterdam is showing ‘States of Becoming’. This group exhibition brings together four distinct painting practices. Eline Boerma, Lok Yan Chau, Julia Moon and Samir Salim are all connected to the Royal College of Art in London, but they also share a clear conceptual affinity: they approach painting as an open process. Rather than focusing on a final outcome, their work centres on how a painting comes into being, as a sequence of actions, decisions and responses through which meaning gradually emerges.
Eline Boerma creates paintings that are not intended to depict something concrete: they come into being through the act of making itself. The artist works intuitively and physically, allowing space for chance and imperfection. Her work often begins with sensory experiences of water, wind and light, which she subsequently translates into rhythm, speed, materiality and movement. The result is primarily experiential: you feel more than you recognise in her paintings. In her large, energetic canvases, she attempts to hold on to fleeting moments and memories. In an interview with Wouter van den Eijkel for GalleryViewer, she stated: “I don’t want to tell a story, just as you can’t really describe what it’s like to dive forty metres underwater. I want to create something to disappear into, like you can in the sea or at night.”
Eline Boerma was born in 1999 in Culemborg and studied Fine Art at HKU. She is currently completing a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art in London. Shortly after graduating from HKU, her work was selected for the Best of Graduates presentation by the Ron Mandos Young Blood Foundation. She received the Dooyewaard Stipendium and was nominated for the Royal Award for Modern Painting and the Buning Brongers Prize.
Julia Moon explores how objects and bodies lose their fixed meaning once they are removed from their familiar context. Her work centres on what happens in that shift, when something remains recognisable yet begins to feel unfamiliar. She shows how boundaries between body, object and space are constantly in flux and change under pressure. This results in fragmented images that she carefully constructs, dismantles and reconfigures.
Julia Moon was born in South Korea in 2002 and grew up in Canada. She studied Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford and is currently pursuing a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art in London. Her work has been shown at the CICA Museum and the Hongik Museum of Art (ASYAAF).
Lok Yan Chau investigates how early experiences and trauma shape how we later feel, think and perceive the world around us. She is interested in the fragmented, layered and non-linear nature of memory, which rarely fits into a clear narrative. In her paintings, internal sensations such as tension, energy and bodily memory take on a tangible form. These images develop step by step through a careful process of responding, adjusting and rebuilding, through which she effectively visualises the complexity and opacity of our inner worlds.
Lok Yan Chau was born in 1996 in Hong Kong. She studied Visual Arts at the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University and is currently completing a master’s degree at the Royal College of Art in London.
Samir Salim begins his non-figurative paintings with recognisable forms and symbols, but alters them in such a way that their meaning shifts and their apparent certainty is called into question. He works with simple forms, vivid colours and repeating decorative patterns that are visually appealing, but also carry a certain friction. Through collage and physical interventions in the canvas, ranging from folds and creases to cuts and tears, his paintings take on a three-dimensional quality, prompting the viewer to consider what lies beneath the surface.
As Salim puts it: “Rather than presenting the canvas as a flat, passive surface, I treat it as a site of rupture and reconstruction, what I call a reconstitution of surface. This approach destabilises the traditional surface-subsurface hierarchy and opens up new visual and conceptual narratives within the painted work.”
His work engages with broader cultural and societal themes such as power, consumption, belief and identity, drawing on influences from myth, popular culture and magical realism. The British artist graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 2025.
