Q&A | This husband-and-wife artist duo are finally doing their first collaborative exhibition – after 19 years together

“I was wandering around campus before classes and started exploring the studios, where I came across her painting. It moved me immediately. There was a sensitivity to it that struck me,” Swope recalls, describing a figurative painting that foreshadowed the portrait-driven work Lai is now known for. “Later, after I met her, I put two and two together and figured out it was her painting all along.”

One subsequent meet-cute in a ceramics class, a wedding, two thriving careers and countless long-distance calls later, Swope and Lai became studio and life partners – and now for the first time in their 19 years together – co-collaborators. Kicking off 2025, the duo staged their first exhibition together, “Sarah & Samuel”, at PHD Group, in Wan Chai.

“We joke around and call it our newborn,” says Swope. “At the opening,” says Lai, “all our friends who came to see the show called it our wedding party, because when we got married, 15 years ago, we had a small ceremony but never celebrated with our friends.”

Trained in sculpture and technology, Swope is known for complex installations that incorporate sound, drones and tech, addressing notions of control, systems, machines and flight, in the context of this digital-industrial world. His aesthetics can be seen in reflective surfaces, geometric forms and a structural linearity.

Lai’s work is starkly different. She often draws from images of 1980s and 90s local pop culture, interpreting them through the female gaze in a manner that evokes a sense of nostalgia and romanticism. Soft and surreal, her paintings address ideas of memory and representation.

Touted “as an exhibition that is not a duo exhibition, but an exhibition about being a duo”, the show features two new works co-created by the pair, as well as older works they revisited and altered to suit the show.