Alison Wing Yin Poon: A Constructed Home is on view at Tache Gallery, London
November 12 – December 16, 2025
Tache presents A Constructed Home, the debut solo exhibition of London-based artist Alison Wing Yin Poon. The exhibition explores the nuances of mixed-heritage identity, material memory, and belonging, while engaging with contemporary debates surrounding cultural heritage and authenticity. Through sculptural installations, ceramics, and etchings, Poon examines our connection to the spaces we inhabit, combining found objects with ceramic, lacquer, and faux bois to evoke a sense of cross-cultural familiarity.
Poon, of Malaysian Chinese and English heritage and raised in the United Kingdom, grounds her practice in tactile experimentation, playful storytelling, and curatorial thinking. Drawing on personal experiences and archives, domestic spaces, craft traditions, and cultural interactions, she creates installations that weave together lived experience and fiction. Her work explores how memories can romanticise the past, how cultures navigate and represent their histories and notions of “The Other,” and how these narratives evolve under the pressures of modernisation, capitalism, and questions of authenticity.
The artist examines Chinese culture through a distinctly Malaysian lens, animating her sculptural pieces with hybrid animal figures drawn from the iconography of Penang’s temples, alongside motifs inspired by everyday objects such as roof tiles, lightbulbs and dressing room mirrors. Her large-scale sculptures draw structural support from found furnishings in rattan and bamboo: materials traded between Malaysia and the UK during the colonial era, which remain commonplace in households around the world.
Exhibition highlights include: The Headless Guardian, a totemic assemblage sculpture that reflects on the enduring presence of sacred architecture and the illusory nature of change; Pot Luck, a sculpture inspired by a traditional Chinese Cheongsam dress, that reimagines the garment as an artefact to explore how clothing shapes identity; a limited edition aquatint produced exclusively for this exhibition; and works created during the artist’s Decorative Surface Fellowship at the City & Guilds of London Art School, debuting for the first time. These pieces incorporate techniques such as faux bois, gilding, and japanning – historically cross-cultural crafts that Poon reinterprets for a contemporary context.
Outgrown, a sculptural work, is inspired by the artist’s frequent visits to a renowned Buddhist temple in Malaysia. It reflects on the site’s transformation over two decades, from a modest, somewhat neglected place of worship with few visitors into a bustling tourist destination. Drawing on her own experiences, such as returning to feed the temple’s turtles only to find their pond fenced off by a pay machine and overshadowed by a kitschy statue, Poon meditates on the vulnerability of space, memory, and ritual in the face of commercialisation and change. A Coiled Connection weaves together tableaux of the artist’s ancestral village in rural China with precise reproductions of the serpentine ornamentation found in Malaysian temples. From geckos on bedroom walls to monitor lizards sheltering in drainpipes and snakes taking refuge in abandoned homes, reptiles come to represent the resilience of everyday life, quietly persisting and adapting even as globalisation reshapes the world.
Additional highlights include a new, site-specific installation that responds to the shifting natural light and townhouse architecture of Tache’s gallery, while reflecting on the domestic spaces of Poon’s grandfather’s home in Penang.
About Alison Wing Yin Poon
Alison Wing Yin Poon (b.1996) lives and works in London. She was the 2024-2025 Decorative Surfaces Fellow at City & Guilds of London Art School, supported by the Company of Painter Stainers. She received the Leverhulme Scholarship to undertake an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds of London Art School, completing in 2024. Alison also holds an MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics from Goldsmiths College, and a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art for which she received the 2018 Rossi Asiaghi Art Ward. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Seem Both Distant and So Close’ Warbling Collective (London, 2025); ‘Apocalyptic Changes of State’ with Brushes with Greatness (London, 2024), and ‘See|Me Roots’ at Gallery Arte Azuejo (New York, 2022).
Contact
info@tachegallery.com
Tache Gallery
33 Percy Street
London W1T 2DF
United Kingdom
Photos by Sergey Novikov. Courtesy of Tache Gallery
