A BARE bulb, dangling from a bamboo chandelier, is suspended above a headless figure that is sitting on top of a totemic structure resembling a temple. Elsewhere, another temple rises from the curve of a glazed turtle shell, and four feline feet poke out from beneath a rounded bamboo skirt and red ceramic bodice with a high collar and delicate floral design.
These unusual sculptures in pinks, greens, and reds are dream-like structures, blurring reality and fiction; like fragments of a distant memory pieced together and frozen in time, both unsettling in their strangeness but comfortable in their playfulness. Together, they are part of the world Alison Poon is creating in her first solo exhibition, A Constructed Home, at Tache Gallery.
Alison Poon (2025). Photograph: Reliant Imaging | Courtesy of the artist and Tache Gallery
“My practice is very much an assembly and trying to construct a space and a world where I feel that I belong completely,” London-based artist Alison Poon explains. Of Malaysian Chinese and English heritage, Poon, who grew up in the UK, is exploring the concept of home, looking to objects, photographs, and spaces from her childhood as points of inspiration and reflection.
“I think being mixed heritage, there’s always a side that is yearning to be connected with where you’ve not been residing. The experience of being in Malaysia, where my Chinese family is based, feels familiar and like I’m more than a tourist, but I’m also aware that it isn’t my home. A lot of those feelings of being in between is what the exhibition is about and what my work is about,” she continues.
Poon’s works, which she describes as somewhere between an artist’s sculpture and an artefact, usually start by extracting memories and stories from photographs, often depicting everyday things, “it might be something that the family has done or it might be a particular place that we’ve visited, but I’m always building on those memories and adding to them and remembering” she explains.
The Headless Guardian (2024). Photograph: Reliant Imaging | Courtesy of the artist and Tache Gallery
The Headless Guardian, unsurprisingly, the title of the sculpture with the headless figure, comes from two photographs taken ten years apart of a crumbling temple roof in Malaysia. Despite exploding into a kitsch, commercial operation, vastly different from the quiet, run-down space with a turtle pond Poon visited as a child, the temple roof has remained in disrepair. “It was a real moment of coming upon these images and discovering that I’d looked from the exact same vantage point 10 years on, but the temple was stuck in this moment of transition,” she explains.
Whilst commenting on her own personal experiences, the works speak to something wider, “a lot of the change I’ve seen in Malaysia has been positive, but some of it is the country trying to grow a little bit too fast,” she continues. The lightbulb, suspended as if to replace the figure’s missing head, was one of the few elements fixed in the temple, whilst the figure itself, often symbolic protectors of the temples, was left to the elements —a commentary on the prioritisation of commercialisation over the preservation of history.
Outgrown (2025). Photograph: Sergey Novikov | Courtesy of the artist and Tache Gallery
Amidst this rapid change in Malaysia, Poon’s grandfather’s home in Penang has remained constant and is the inspiration for a new site-specific installation created for the exhibition. “My grandfather’s house is something that I’ve become interested in as this kind of safe, unchanging space amongst everything else going on,” she explains.
Drawing on the quirks of her grandfather’s house, including the fact that a sink occupies the corner of his living area, Poon has interpreted this safe space by creating a private corner within the architecture of the gallery. Using the distinct round window of the gallery as a focal point, Poon is commenting on safety, daily rituals, and the convergence of private and public spaces. “I think windows and doorways are really interesting conceptually, as thresholds, viewpoints, this kind of boundary or transitionary moment where you’re travelling through or looking through, in relation to the home and particularly in Malaysia,” she explains.
Potluck (2024). Photograph: Sergey Novikov | Courtesy of the artist and Tache Gallery
Another work in the exhibition, Pot Luck, considers the commercialisation of Malaysian Chinese culture and history through referencing a Chinese Cheongsam dress. The dress, once a symbol of women’s emancipation with its signature high collar and straight lines, has since become westernised by countless fast-fashion reproductions. By re-imagining the garment as an artefact, through intricately and playfully weaving ceramics, silk, and rattan together, Poon is re-centering the liberating history of the dress.
Throughout these three works, and the others in the exhibition, Poon uses found pieces of rattan and bamboo, layering these with her ceramics to create new meanings and explore the values we assign to objects. Both rattan and bamboo were traded between Malaysia and the United Kingdom during the colonial era and are now commonplace in homes across the globe.
“A lot of the crafts that I do, like the rattan weaving and ceramics, are for me to find a connection to my heritage and think about the crafts people who’ve come before me,” she explains. Continuing, “I like to use found objects, for their unknown histories. I like to find things that look like they have an age to them, as if there’s a history there. There’s a gap where I can superimpose my stories and my own history upon them.”
Window into the Wood (2025). Photograph: Sergey Novikov | Courtesy of the artist and Tache Gallery
Currently undertaking a fellowship at City & Guilds of London Art School focusing on traditional Decorative Surfaces techniques, and having only exhibited in group exhibitions previously, this is Poon’s first experience of putting together a solo exhibition. “It’s been really fantastic, and it’s come around so quickly. Having a solo show is not something I thought would be on the cards for me for another five, 10 years, if that. So it’s really exciting and it’s been incredible working with Tache,” she says.
Tache, a contemporary art gallery working with artists to develop their first solo exhibitions, is building a programme of exciting and ambitious works. “Alison Poon, whose work is timely, poetic, and embodies the spirit of experimentation central to our mission,” Lauren Fulcher, Director at Tache, comments.
Alison’s first solo exhibition is a playful, intricate, and touching homage to finding and creating a space to belong and call home. “I want people to find it joyful, even though the works are very personal to me, I don’t need everyone to understand the exact stories or memories just to experience a sense of comfort and home,” she finishes.
by Sadie Pitcher
Alison Poon: A Constructed Home is presented at Tache, London, 12 November – 16 December 2025, tachegallery.com