Filling White Cube Hong Kong with reflections on memory and belief, Nine nights; Strange fruit presents a new body of large-scale paintings by London-based artist Shaqúelle Whyte, on view from 6 February to 14 March 2026. The exhibition draws on the Jamaican funerary tradition of Nine Nights and the legacy of the protest song Strange Fruit, weaving personal experience and diasporic history through fractured figures, shifting scenes and dream-like spaces.

Rather than following a single story, Whyte’s paintings bring together different moments and emotions within the same frame. Figures appear to repeat, overlap and dissolve, creating images where grief, love and memory exist at once. Working intuitively, the artist allows each painting to develop on its own terms, resulting in compositions that feel emotionally charged and carefully balanced.

Works such as On to the next: the break up (2025) and In the shubz (2025) reference rituals of mourning and moments of reflection, evoking both shared loss and quiet intimacy. Elsewhere, paintings like Worst things happen at sea (2025) focus on family and connection, offering softer, more personal scenes that ground the exhibition in everyday experience.

Through its layered imagery and fluid sense of time, Nine nights; Strange fruit treats painting as a space for remembering and reflection, a thoughtful exploration of loss, identity and the ways personal and collective histories continue to shape one another.