exploring how the actual work of art happens in the encounter
Galerie de Nuage, a cultural platform that works between New York and Hong Kongit positions contemporary art as a context for encounter rather than spectacle. Through exhibitionscuratorial planning, and interdisciplinary collaborations, h stoa explores how artworks shape experiences of attention, memory and participation in different cultural contexts. The practices of artists Rita Bernstein and Amber Stokie exemplify this curatorial direction. Although formally distinct, both artists explore how intimacy, repetition and perception can be communicated through material and process.
Based in Philadelphia and New York, Rita Bernstein produces small-scale works on paper using washi. Her compositions are restrained and minimal, based on subtle marks, layered textures and close-up conditions rather than visual immediacy. Bernstein came to art after a career as a civil rights attorney, and her practice reflects an attention to duration, concentration, and calm observation. The work recalls aspects of minimalist and meditative abstraction associated with artists such as Agnes Martin and Park Seo-Bo, while maintaining a distinctly intimate scale and material sensibility.
Australian painter Amber Stokie approaches abstraction through repetition and two-handed marking. Her paintings begin with simultaneous gestures produced with both hands before evolving through additive and subtractive processes. Organized through layered grids, color shifts and repeated forms, the works explore the relationships between individuality and collective experience. Drawing in part from her identity as one of triplets, Stokie’s practice examines how personal identity is constructed alongside systems of connection, overlap and variation. While Bernstein’s work operates near the threshold of extinction and Stokie’s paintings build density through accumulation, both practices explore how emotional and spatial experiences can be shared through visual language. This intersection aligns with Galerie de Nuage’s broader curatorial approach, which showcases slower forms of engagement and sustained attention.
works by Amber Stokie | all images courtesy © Galerie de Nuage, and the artists
contemporary art that works through shared experience
Founded by curator Yulin Peng, Galerie de Nuage approaches exhibition creation through a spatial and experiential framework based on architecture. Peng studied architecture at Columbia GSAPP and later attended Columbia Business School before engaging in integrated architectural design in New York. This background informs the gallery’s emphasis on sequence, atmosphere, proportion and the relationship between movement and perception in exhibition environments. Rather than focusing primarily on stylistic trends, the platform emphasizes how artworks create encounters and accumulate meaning over time. Exhibitions are structured less as individual presentations and more as experiential environments in which viewers move gradually between works, materials and emotional catalogues.
This curatorial methodology is increasingly extended to wider cultural and architectural discourses. Galerie de Nuage was recently invited to contribute to the public programming of the London Architecture Festival 2026, organized around the theme of ‘Belonging’. The invitation reflects the platform’s ongoing interest in how cultural experiences shape collective identity, inclusion and urban life in global cities.
The gallery’s name, loosely translated as ‘cloud gallery’, reflects this adaptive and atmospheric approach. Clouds shift with light, geography and time, remaining in constant transformation while quietly shaping environmental conditions. Galerie de Nuage adopts a similar position through programming that privileges openness, change and interpersonal connection over fixed narratives. Throughout Bernstein’s and Stokie’s practices, these ideas are made materially present through washi surfaces, layered gestures, repetitive marks, and incremental acts of viewing. Within these restrained visual systems, the gallery frames art not as an object of immediate consumption, but as a space where attention evolves into encounter and encounter into shared experience.
“A Private Sea” by Amber Stokie, 52” x 39.3”, oil on canvas
‘Moments’ by Amber Stokie, 52” x 39.3”, oil on canvas
‘Reverberate’ by Rita Bernstein, pastel and charcoal on folded paper, 5″ x 8″
‘Stain, no.24’ by Rita Bernstein, natural pigments and botanicals on paper, 6″ x 4.25″
Galerie de Nuage’s work is interpreted as a practice that frames art through personal and cultural experience | Yulin Peng in the showroom
project information:
artists: Amber Stokie, Rita Bernstein
curator: Yulin Peng
stoa: Cloud Gallery | @galerie.de.nuage
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edited by: Christina Vergopoulou | designboom
