A glass, a flute, and two people painting

A gloved hand holds a stemmed glass upright. That is almost the whole of Furtive Joy. There is no face, no table, and no second person at the edge of the picture. The glass sits directly in front of the hand, dividing the fingers into narrow strips. The person making the gesture and the event around it have been cut away.

The painting is only 21 by 32 centimetres. Its title supplies the pleasure and the secrecy, but not the event.

Fragment Gallery lists the support as silver foil. Huang Chih-Cheng's August 25 post calls it gold foil and gives the Chinese title 《竊喜》. The public image is warm and brown-gold, but screen color does not settle which record is correct.

Overtone is four times wider and nearly four times taller. A nearly full-length figure comes forward through horizontal smears. The person wears a cap and a long garment that opens behind the shoulders. Both hands hold what appears to be a transverse flute at the mouth. The face remains visible, but the eyes are shaded and the scene around the body has been rubbed into motion.

The apparent flute gives the title a direct relation to sound.

Both paintings place an object at the mouth: a glass in one, what appears to be an instrument in the other. Furtive Joy removes almost the entire body. Overtone restores it at a much larger scale but leaves the figure just as difficult to place.

The pairing belongs to a set of sixteen works in Stalker, Huang Chih-Cheng & Hao's first exhibition in New York. Across the public images, hands hold glasses, touch mouths, cover faces, lie across laps, or meet other hands. Clothing often remains more legible than the person wearing it. Faces turn away, disappear behind fingers, or blur before recognition settles.

Huang describes the work as the result of a long conversation with Liou Jyun-Hao. Huang came to it through visual art; Hao studied sociology. Their tastes and habits of thought differ. They talk about films and families, sometimes reaching agreement and sometimes pushing against each other. Their conversations accumulate in sketches that they return to over time.

Huang asks a practical question: how do two people make a painting together? Must painting grow in solitude, or can the strain at the boundary between two people become part of a composition?

Their differences remain active in the collaboration. That may help explain why these paintings preserve gestures while omitting the complete scenes that would place them.

Stalker opens September 4 from 6–8 p.m. and runs September 5–26, 2026, at Fragment Gallery, 39 West 14th Street, Suite 308, New York.

Exhibition overview ↗

Gallery visit information ↗

Google Maps ↗

Furtive Joy work page ↗

Overtone work page ↗