Beyond the Veil

We understand the world through what we see, and in turn, come to understand ourselves through the meanings we attach to it.

A Buddhist image is a form. The image of Guanyin is a form. A photograph is a form. An AI-generated image is a form. Identity, achievement, relationships, loss, and even our understanding of ourselves are formed through which meaning is continuously constructed.

Drawing upon the Diamond Sutra, Beyond the Veil considers form not merely as what appears before us, but as the means through which reality is perceived, interpreted, and ultimately held onto. Attachment does not arise from the world itself, but from the meanings we project onto it.

Centred on Pierre Au-Yeung's photographic works of Guanyin and Buddhist imagery, the exhibition integrates artificial intelligence into the photographer's creative process, through which the enduring wisdom of the Diamond Sutra is rearticulated in the visual language of the present.

Structured around four unfolding stages—Attachment, Perception, Form, and Release—the exhibition traces a gradual movement from perception to insight. Beyond the Veil proposes that what shapes our experience of reality is never the world alone, but the meanings through which we choose to perceive it.