art as encounter: quiet abstraction showcased at galerie de nuage

exploring how art’s real work happens in the encounter

Galerie de Nuage, a cultural platform operating between New York and Hong Kong, positions contemporary art as a framework for encounter rather than spectacle. Through exhibitions, curatorial programming, and interdisciplinary collaborations, the gallery explores how artworks shape experiences of attention, memory, and belonging across different cultural contexts. The practices of artists Rita Bernstein and Amber Stokie exemplify this curatorial direction. Although formally distinct, both artists investigate how intimacy, repetition, and perception can be communicated through material and process.

Based between Philadelphia and New York, Rita Bernstein produces small-scale Works on Paper using washi. Her compositions are restrained and minimal, relying on subtle marks, layered textures, and close viewing 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 quiet 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 sensitivity.

Australian painter Amber Stokie approaches abstraction through repetition and dual-handed mark-making. 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 investigate relationships between individuality and collective experience. Drawing partly from her identity as one of triplets, Stokie’s practice examines how personal identity is constructed alongside systems of connection, duplication, and variation. While Bernstein’s work operates near the threshold of disappearance 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 foregrounds slower forms of engagement and sustained attention.

works by Amber Stokie | all images courtesy © Galerie de Nuage, and the artists

contemporary art operating through shared experience

Founded by curator Yulin Peng, Galerie de Nuage approaches exhibition-making through a spatial and experiential framework informed by architecture. Peng studied architecture at Columbia GSAPP and later attended Columbia Business School before working in art-integrated architectural design in New York. This background informs the gallery’s emphasis on sequence, atmosphere, proportion, and the relationship between movement and perception within exhibition environments. Rather than focusing primarily on stylistic trends, the platform emphasizes how artworks generate encounters and accumulate meaning over time. Exhibitions are structured less as isolated presentations and more as experiential environments in which viewers move gradually between works, materials, and emotional registers.

This curatorial methodology has increasingly expanded into broader cultural and architectural discussions. Galerie de Nuage was recently invited to contribute to the public programming of the 2026 London Festival of Architecture, 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 across global cities.

The gallery’s name, which translates loosely as ‘gallery of clouds,’ reflects this adaptive and atmospheric approach. Clouds shift according to 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. Across the practices of Bernstein and Stokie, these ideas become materially present through washi surfaces, layered gestures, repeated marks, and gradual 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 develops 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 being interpreted as a practice that frames art through personal and cultural experience | Yulin Peng in Exhibit Space

project info:

artists: Amber Stokie, Rita Bernstein

curator: Yulin Peng

gallery: Galerie de Nuage | @galerie.de.nuage

designboom has received this project from our DIY submissions feature, where we welcome our readers to submit their own work for publication. see more project submissions from our readers here.

edited by: christina vergopoulou | designboom