The art of Wing Po So is often ascribed to her origin story: the ‘family business’ over several generations was selling Traditional Chinese Medicine – also known as TCM – and the artist spent long hours while growing up helping her parents as well as other shopkeepers in her neighborhood in Hong Kong.

Certainly, So’s artistic legacy to date has taken her familial lineage as an anchor point. In fact, TCM may be considered key to understanding So’s work, including ‘Six-Part Practice’, her 2018 breakout solo exhibition and accompanying publication at Tai Kwun Contemporary, a former prison and police station turned Hong Kong culture and heritage site. 

So approaches art as an alchemical mix, using the roots, seeds, and powders found in TCM shops, and increasingly deploying them as a raw material to play with the narrative around her practice. Her process has also remained consistent, often combining multiple base elements to configure meticulously crafted sculptural works on different scales. 

In March 2026, So was selected as a featured artist for One of One, a Four Seasons–hosted Art Basel event. Inside Caprice, one of the hotel’s restaurants, guests were invited into a newly commissioned immersive installation conceived specifically for the occasion, extending the artist’s exploration of circulation and life force. In the hotel’s lobby, viewers encountered Seed of Damocles (Flow), an installation commissioned by HART HAUS, Hong Kong, in which luminous tubes and pulsing red LED lights evoke the movement of vital energy.

Similarly, So’s series ‘Hidden Terrains’ (2025) incorporates tubular infrastructure as an interplay between internal and external systems. Readymade brass piping is attached to the walls and floors following the growth patterns of ginger roots – a known healing agent – with ginger skins covering the open pipe ends. Illuminated from within, the work mimics the act of examining microscopic organic matter, while viewers can also hear the recorded sound of water dripping.

While TCM traditions have been there since the start, So’s art continues to evolve. Recent exhibitions like ‘Polyglot’(2025) at Blindspot Gallery in Hong Kong, reveal the languages of nature, but also the growth within the artist’s work. Using the inner logic, codes, and structures present in natural systems, So accentuates these patterns, finding ‘interconnectivities hidden in our everyday,’ as she explains.

This includes Removed Coral (2025), where variously colored cellular shapes emerge from a gallery wall. Using leftover 3D-printed materials, a contemporary industrialized process turns potential discarded matter into new pseudo-natural forms. Elsewhere, Polyglot: Mulberry (2023) comprises large glass canisters, much like those found in stores, replete with dried goods. Grouped together as an expansive floorspace, they play host to the evolution of the mulberry in various states of growth and decay. 

Similarly, The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species (2025) which debuted at So’s 2025 exhibition ‘Take Turns’ at Para Site in Hong Kong, comprises a conglomeration of wooden drawers. Here, they are reconfigured in multiple units and filled with motorized clamoring shells to form a visual and sonic constellation. Again, the work exposes So’s focus on display techniques using items identified within the Chinese health trade. Whether glass jars, wooden drawers, or her preferred shelving units, all safely preserve and highlight their contents, and are assembled in multiple units designed to create larger structural forms framing the possibility for contemplative experiential encounters.

This is also achieved through the darkened environments necessary for So’s often self-illuminated objects. But if her recent works exemplify a degree of seriousness and quietude, there are still signs of life and humor, although perhaps less the childlike wonder of her earlier playful and surreal ‘Organs’ (2022) sculpture series, with its fruit-like shapes recalling anatomical models revealing the insides of human bodies. 

According to the artist, this is a natural progression in her life and art: ‘Often organic matter is all dried up in Chinese medicine, but even when fermented, it is funny in the sense that when I step back, I see and make work which includes this awkwardness and unpredictability.’ 

‘I still take joy in the process of creating art, but as you grow your tastes shift. Recently, I have been sourcing plants that are prickly and will cling to you, which I find messy and playful at the same time,’ she concludes. The outcome promises to reveal more about our internal body systems in ways that are not merely scientific or analytical, but as a shared experience.