Hsiao-Mei Lin's art has developed dramatically and unpredictably over the ten years I have been aware of her work. Her new collection, Wonderland, is a mysterious assembly of strange beauty, unfamiliar bodies emerging, then escaping, from shapes in turmoil.  Look at these breakaway beings for a little longer and they become recognisable as the very stuff of life, not always fully formed but always more hopeful and enticing than the frenzied combination of rock and cloud they have left behind. Some paintings seem to portray the depths of the ocean, some the depths of space; all illustrate how little we know but how much we can imagine through the eyes of a gifted artist.

Some things have remained the same since she first made an impact in London - her blues and greens, her originality and her ambition. These are massive objects she now shows us - or perhaps massive subjects is a more accurate description. The permanent, the solid, the long established is not what excites us - it is the new, the brave, the ephemeral. Keats got it right when he pointed out that a thing of beauty is a joy for ever but he surely saw that beauty can only last eternally if it disappears from our sight, from our control; the familiar, the obtainable can never be irresistible for long. This is also the paradox of Hsiao-Mei's marvellous pictures.

Tim Rice, March 2008