According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘set’ has some 430 definitions – until relatively recently, more than any other word in the book – and they have constantly evolved depending on the context. Hong Kong artist Nicole Wong (b. 1990) delves into the potential for such transformations in Once It Sets, her fourth solo exhibition opening at Rossi & Rossi Hong Kong on 7 December. Fixating on natural and artificial crystalline solids, the artist amplifies or repeats processes of material transformation, thus delineating structural changes during these critical states and illuminating the energy that erupts from them.

Amongst the seven works on view in the presentation, The Definition of Rain (2024) translates the dictionary entry of ‘rain’ into binary code. Opal and glass beads, representing 1s and 0s of the coding language, are strung together into a suncatcher curtain that bisects the gallery space. When visitors pass through it, the code represented by the mineral stones becomes distorted as the swaying movement of the curtain disrupts its sequence and the meaning it embodies. Wong thus draws a parallel between the phenomenon of rain and the construction of meaning. Just as rain is made up of water droplets condensed from atmospheric water vapour, language and its meanings are crystallised through a specific sequence of symbols.

The artist further explores the continuous movement of water through our ecosystem in Falling in Reverse (2017), in which a pair of looping videos play from two identical CRT monitors, placed side by side. In one video, rain falls on a window, and in the other, soda bubbles well up in a glass – the two juxtaposed processes are reversals of each other. The proximity of a natural phenomenon and a human-made reaction point us to query the source that drives transformation, whilst another work, Scale Up, Shred Down (2024), places the question in the context of a completely artificial visual effect. Here, skin printed on paper was generated by artificial intelligence, but its exceedingly smooth surface appears to lack authenticity. To bring the image closer to reality, Wong added texture with origami folds, and in the end, the enlarged skin evokes the likeness of an arid land. On top of it, dewdrops or sweat do not evaporate. Instead, they are suspended in a state of condensation. The skin that clads the self is thereby decorticated to be part of the foreign, external world.

Returning to the prescient implication of Once It Sets, language and meaning likewise evolve unceasingly, and in 2011, ‘run’ overtook ‘set’ in the OED with 645 different meanings. The exhibition’s curator Chris Wan encapsulates the recurring juxtaposition of this presentation with the concept of traversée, or ‘crossing’, in which a network, like a crystal, continues to develop new meanings and relationships: it ultimately permeates dichotomies of artificiality and nature, the self and the other, and science and the occult.