The first in a series of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work, Fire from the Sun highlights Michaël Borremans’s new work, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence. The image was widely interpreted as a symbol of Hungary’s political circumstance and even showed up on a large banner promoting the show. Like Red Hand, Green Hand, this exhibition is an unexpected, sometimes unwelcome, illumination of the different situations in which we similarly live.

In 2010, he had a solo exhibition at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, as well as commissioned work on view at the Royal Palace in Brussels.In some of the paintings the children are in the process of disappearing: phantom bodies not quite removed from their gruesome acts.

He has since written extensively on modern and contemporary art and culture, and is a contributor to Burlington and frieze magazines.They are untethered, directionless, forever waiting in a non-place, forever forced to repeat pointless actions that seem to have no beginning or no end. I heard other interpretations while there, and so did the artist: that the paintings examine the loss of innocence, that they are a caricature of original sin, that they meditate on hypocrisy, that they demonstrate human capacity to be at once good and evil.

To finish on a lighter note, David Zwirner’s first outpost in Asia will located in H Queen’s, the new tower in Hong Kong’s Central district. This is a set or a stage, devoid of context, withholding of answers, but suggestive of a director or someone watching. But even if the paintings deceptively represent a vacuum (lack of context, setting, explanation), they are not made in one. A major museum survey, Michaël Borremans: As sweet as it gets, which included one hundred works from the past two decades, was on view at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 2014.It is difficult to concentrate on the weight of the artist’s brushstrokes when such a scene is staring you in the face. That the painting had had an unintended and instinctive meaning signalled that “I had made a good work”, Borremans said. As Michael Bracewell argues in new scholarship on the artist, published in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, viewers are “caught in a strange time loop, in which the nobility of execution ascribed to Old Masters―the re-creation in painting of human presence, caught both stilled, in a particular instant of its being, and for eternity―is placed in the service of vertiginous modernist vision. Michaël Borremans combine horror and innocence in this young children, becoming allegories of the human condition. On the occasion of his inaugural exhibition Michaël Borremans: Fire from the Sun at the new David Zwirner space in Hong Kong (27 January–9 March 2018), I spoke with Borremans about his practice and his participation in the Biennale of Sydney (BoS) (16 March–11 June 2018).