“When in love, the sight of the beloved has a completeness which no words and no embrace can match.”
—John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Olympia’s gaze across art history meets a lover’s wandering eyes on brass. When I painted her, we still shared a life; our gaze within the painting continued our intimacy beyond it. The eyes remain, but we have entered different times.
Chemical reactions accumulate on brass; colours quietly shift. Historical images seem unchanged, yet matter, feeling and life never cease to move. These gazes share a surface where permanence meets the fleeting. We try to hold a gaze, while time keeps changing its colour and what it means to us.
Sparro Chen is a Chinese artist based in London. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art (2026) and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in oil painting from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Working across brass painting, sound installation and live performance, he explores material transformation, temporality and technological feedback. He combines oil paint with chemical reactions on brass, allowing corrosion and chance to shape images. Using modular synthesis, metal resonance and voice, he creates feedback environments where sound acts on matter. Through emergent mythologies and ritual structures, he examines how technology reshapes belief, perception and collective imagination.