Everyone needs a place to return to—a place to take shelter from harsh winds and to lay down a weary heart. Its form does not matter. It may be large or small, with a roof or without one; it may be an intangible weave of memories and emotions, or even a single person. We call all of these “home”: a refuge that becomes both the destination we return to, and the point from which we step back into life.
Through the perspectives of two artists, Goh Cha Boon and Shim Bong Min, Gallery Belle Vie guides viewers to that place—The Way Home.
Goh Cha Boon builds homes on canvas. As he cuts, carves, and pares down roughly layered masses until they finally take the shape of a rounded house, he comes face to face with scenes from childhood and emotions buried deep within. Like the adventure in Maurice Maeterlinck’s fairy play The Blue Bird, in which the characters wander in search of the blue bird that symbolizes happiness, the artist’s process becomes a contemplative journey—an inward passage toward a shelter that can hold him wholly. For this reason, Goh Cha Boon’s houses are not merely houses, but homes.
Shim Bong Min believes that deep within each of us lives a garden—and a gardener who tends it. In the rush of everyday life, the gardener gently gathers the scattered fragments of memory we have carelessly cast aside, and patiently nurtures them. And when the moment comes that we need rest, the gardener quietly leads us to a small house. There, we can look upon the garden that has grown alongside our memories—where light trembles on a calm lake, where a winter night falls into snow and stillness—until every one of those moments becomes home.
At the close of 2025, it is time to set down the weight in our hearts and return to a place where we can pause and breathe. Standing alongside that passage, Gallery Belle Vie’s exhibition The Way Home seeks to offer a quiet yet unmistakable warmth—an enduring gesture of comfort
