Derrick Adams: Sweet Spot (2022), an exhibition of seven new paintings by multidisciplinary artist Derrick Adams on view at LGDR & Wei in Hong Kong, was the artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia. It unveiled new works from his latest series of Motion Picture Paintings (2020–) that pay homage to the Black figure and draw inspiration from Adams’s observations, imagination, and Black films of the 1990s.

The Motion Picture Paintings depict Adams’s family members, peers, acquaintances, and characters from everyday encounters in his signature cubist style, characterized by color blocks and dimensionality. As an artist with an established and distinctive visual language, Adams has taken a more liberated approach with these new works, offering an expanded context to the narrative urban landscape that has dominated his oeuvre. With the Motion Picture Paintings, Adams beckons the viewer to see what he sees: Blackness in its marvelously varied forms of storytelling, positionality, and excellence, rather than in the burdensome stereotypes that have traditionally saturated the media.

The specific group of paintings exhibited in Hong Kong exists in what the artist deems the “sweet spot”; they are distinguished and exceptional for the tender intimacy and emotional depths they impart. Their encompassing sentiment is feltin Sister Cousins (2022), in which two embracing women convey a powerful sense of reunion. Another double portrait Arting (2022) depicts acquaintances rather than family members. Initially captured in separate photographs, the women appear in Arting side by side. When professor and cultural critic Bell Hooks died in late 2021, Adams instinctively added to the painting the phrase “Art on My Mind,” a nod to Hooks’s significant volume of writings on art and visual culture, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995). Adams says, “I wrote [the title] on the painting because I wanted to make a note to myself of a particular time. I made this painting to document that history.”