Marcelle Rosfelder-Leu is a Swiss–Japanese artist based in London and Zurich. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2025), and an earlier MA in Archaeology from SOAS, University of London. Before establishing her full-time painting studio in Hong Kong, she worked across early Asian art and contemporary initiatives in London, Zurich, and Hong Kong. Her studies in art history and early Asian art inform her sensitivity to layered histories, trace, and legacy—an influence that underpins her approach to painting.

Her practice unfolds where language dissolves—between presence and absence, memory and becoming. In her ongoing series Skin Acts, she navigates this liminal space through layering and erasure. Each work begins with intuitive charcoal gestures—the “bones” of the composition—overlaid with translucent “skins” of oil. These surfaces do not conceal but reveal through obscuring.

Influenced by Chinese ink traditions and their philosophical reception by François Jullien and John Hay, Rosfelder-Leu treats the stroke as breath: a gesture of becoming rather than boundary. Her process combines sweeping brushstrokes, transparent washes, and stains with slower, deliberate marks made with oil stick or brush. These material acts embody a hybrid, postcolonial sensibility rooted in her Zainichi (Korean and Japanese) heritage. Through anatomical fragments and gestural abstraction, she explores ancestral absence, intimacy, and fractured language. Dripping becomes a way to evoke the ephemeral and the sublime—what is felt rather than seen.

Each painting becomes a site of transformation. To return to the surface is to begin again, to map the internal onto the visible world.

Exhibitions include the Royal College of Art Degree Show (London, 2025), Faith in Humans (group show at Art Roof Top, Hong Kong, 2023), and Art Central (Hong Kong, 2022–2024).