Liste Art Fair, Basel: Tom Hardwick-Allan & Kin Ting Li

16—22 June 2025

For Liste 2025, South Parade presents new cast iron sculptures and paintings by London-based Tom Hardwick-Allan (b.1996, UK) and Kin Ting Li (b.1991, Hong Kong). These two artistic practices coalesce with surfaces worked on and stripped back continuously, until both artists relinquish an enlivened form, revealing new insights via a deeper delve into worlds, times, bodies and feeling.

Kin Ting Li’s paintings synthesise departure points from daily life which range from observations of nature to literature and film, architecture and science fiction. The dry and grainy accumulation of paint with which Li likes to work, creates a viscosity and friction that elicits new and unexpected forms - creating evolving organic and inorganic structures that suggest both the microscopic and the astronomical. Across his evolving practice, the gestural and more abstract shapes convey futuristic organic forms, but also figurative structures that lean towards more human tendencies. For Liste, Li has created a suite of new paintings that shift and flow through expressive mark-making, making exact subject matter and location uncertain, and destabilising clear interpretation.

Tom Hardwick-Allan carves away at various surfaces, employing a principle of negation to trace links between printmaking, falconry and augury. Hardwick-Allan has produced a series of cast iron low reliefs, through which he focuses on the notion of Imprinting, the initial association made by a newly born by which a social image is projected and shaped. By pressing carved wood into a mixture of sand and petrol to leave an imprint into which iron is poured from a furnace, the regulation of which echoes the extra-uterine maintenance of a premature chick with the balance of fuel, fluid and oxygen. The use of iron is particular for its historic connotations but also for its symbolism of obsolescence — it cannot sustain the accelerations in agriculture and industry that is brought about.

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Kin Ting Li (b.1991, Hong Kong) lives and works in London. Li gained Bachelor of Science (Honour) in Applied Physics from City University of Hong Kong in 2013 and BA in Fine Arts from The Slade School of Fine Art in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include South Parade (London, 2025) and South Parade (London 2021). Recent group exhibitions include Nova Contemporary (Bangkok, 2024), Podium Gallery (Hong Kong, 2024), South Parade x Sadie Coles HQ (London, 2022), Super Dakota (Brussels, 2022), The Artist Room (London, 2022), Pradiauto (Madrid, 2022) and VO Curations (London, 2020). Li’s work can be found in the permanent collection of the X Museum in Beijing.

Tom Hardwick-Allan (b. 1996, Derbyshire, UK) lives and works in London, UK. He graduated with a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art in London (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include South Parade (London, 2025), NADA, South Parade (New York, 2023) and South Parade (London, 2022). Recent selected group exhibitions include The White Ermine (Düsseldorf, 2024), Galerie Khoshbakht with Stanislava Kovalcikova (Cologne, 2023), Lady Helen with Elif Saydem (Berlin, 2022) and Ca’Pesaro — Breathless: London Art Now, curated by Norman Rosenthal (Venice, 2019). Hardwick-Allan will participate in a group exhibition at Triangolo, Cremona in September 2025.

As a musician, Hardwick-Allan is a member of the bands Gentle Stranger and Shovel Dance Collective. Recent performances have taken place at South Parade (London, 2025), CCA (Glasgow, 2024), Kunstverein St Gallen with Agnes Scherer (St Gallen, 2024), Roskilde Festival (Roskilde, 2024), Re-Wire Festival (The Hague, 2024), Cafe OTO (London, 2024), Pudel Club (Hamburg, 2024). Selected albums include The Shovel Dance (Shovel Dance Collective, 2024), Inner Winter (Gentle Stranger, 2023), Upon Return (Gentle Stranger, 2022) and Love and Unlearn (Gentle Stranger, 2020). Recent artist books/publications include Low Relief and Foil, South Parade (London, 2025), After the Numbers, Before the Numbness, South Parade (London, 2023), Catching the First Mute Sliced in the Morning, South Parade, (NADA, New York 2022), Studio Log, South Parade (London, 2022) and Vogel, Weinspach (Cologne, 2021).