16 april 2026, Flor Linckens
Last chance: two ways of looking inward
Until 26 April, Contour Gallery in Rotterdam features the exhibition ‘The Way of Water’, with work by Le Nghi Teng and Kyra ten Brink. This duo presentation centres on a shared interest: photography as a way to pause and attend to what cannot easily be captured in language or image. Both artists work from an open process in which the work takes shape gradually. In this context, photography is not a means of recording the external world, but a means to approach an inner landscape. In a world where images are fired at us at high speed and are expected to be immediately legible, these quiet works invite a slower, more attentive and nuanced way of looking.
Le Nghi Teng’s practice draws on the Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi and Taoism, in particular the principle of wu wei, often translated as ‘acting without forcing’. It refers to a mode of action that responds to the situation rather than attempting to control it. Instead of bending reality to her will, she moves with it, without strain or insistence. Like water, which adapts to any form it encounters while remaining fundamentally unchanged: soft and flexible, but also an unstoppable power. Water runs as a continuous thread through her work, not as a decorative motif but as a way of thinking. She also incorporates clouds and cranes, referencing her cultural background.
Teng’s work is marked by impermanence and imperfection. She approaches the image intuitively, with the process carrying as much weight as the outcome. Chance, timing and surrender play a crucial role in that. This results in images that are light, fragile, fleeting and open, where the personal and the universal meet. For ‘The Way of Water’, Teng invited the poet Jorge R. G. Sagastume to write a series of poems in response to the works. Materiality is an important factor in the end result: marked by the interplay of ink, water and handmade paper. Emptiness does not function as a backdrop here, but as an active element within the image.
Le Nghi Teng was born in 1976 in Vietnam and grew up in the Netherlands in a Chinese family. She studied at the Dutch Academy for Photography in Rotterdam. Her work was previously shown at the Nederlands Fotomuseum and at the Festival Voies Off des Rencontres d’Arles. She received a prize at the Tokyo International Foto Awards, won an edition of British Journal of Photography’s Open Walls and was nominated for a LensCulture Exposure Award.
Where Teng works from a more contemplative and inward-looking position, Kyra ten Brink develops her practice in relation to others. Her photography extends from the conversations she has and the trust she builds with those she photographs. In her ongoing project "Journeying Home" (2023–), Ten Brink explores how women relate to their bodies and their inner worlds. Here, the body appears as a site where memories, tensions and experiences converge. Rather than defining it, she allows space for contradiction and complexity.
Ten Brink translates these experiences into poetic, vulnerable black-and-white images, presented as handmade photogravures on Japanese paper. What started out as a personal search gradually evolved into a collaborative process with women of different ages and backgrounds, in which images emerge through dialogue and shared experience. The resulting works are shaped collectively: her subjects have agency and influence over how they are represented, creating a form of shared authorship.
Kyra ten Brink was born in 2002 and lives and works in Rotterdam, where she graduated from the Willem de Kooning Academy. In 2025, she was selected as one of the Best Graduates by the Ron Mandos Young Blood Foundation.
