The Weight of Love: An artistic tribute to Wong Kar Wai’s cinematic masterpiece

In The Weight of Love, gallerists Arjun Sawhney and Arjun Butani curate a deeply meditative homage to In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 film that has long held a hallowed place in the cinematic canon. The exhibition, featuring the works of artist Varad Bang, invites audiences to revisit the quiet ache and visual poetry of the film through a series of hauntingly atmospheric paintings.

Set in 1960s Hong Kong, In the Mood for Love follows two neighbours bound by betrayal and longing, sharing a silent emotional intimacy that never fully resolves. Varad Bang’s artwork captures this same restraint and intensity, translating the film’s aesthetic into painterly compositions that speak in glances and pauses rather than grand gestures.

Each canvas slows time, mirroring the languid pacing of the film and its dreamlike transitions. The presence of red—a recurring motif in both the film and the paintings—becomes more than a colour; it is a pulse, a breath, a signifier of desire held just out of reach. Whether in the flowing dresses of Maggie Cheung’s character or the glowing hotel corridors, the red hues in Varad Bang’s pieces echo the film’s emotional undercurrents: yearning, regret, and the weight of what remains unspoken.

Varad doesn’t merely reproduce the film’s scenes—he distills their emotional essence. Hallways, door frames, and stairwells return again and again, just as they do in Wong Kar Wai’s cinematic language, as visual metaphors for repetition and emotional entrapment. Time, too, is a dominant force here. In both film and painting, it is something elusive, stretching and folding upon itself, refusing linearity or resolution.

Beyond romantic longing, the exhibition also gestures towards larger existential themes—identity, midlife disorientation, and the melancholic awareness of choices unmade. As Wong’s film moves from urban Hong Kong to the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat in its final act, it expands a personal story into something mythic. Similarly, Bang’s paintings offer viewers an introspective space, suggesting that the ache of love lost is also a metaphor for the wider human condition.

The Weight of Love is not a loud exhibition. It does not seek to overwhelm or dazzle. Instead, it lingers, much like the final note of a melody, hanging in the air long after the music ends. In its quiet devotion to mood, texture, and memory, it pays fitting tribute to one of cinema’s most emotionally resonant films—allowing us, once again, to get lost in its shadows.