Never Miss the Honey

The earliest of the prints included here, made before May's 2025 HKOP Award and residency, Never Miss the Honey introduces what reads as a recurring apian preoccupation in her work, later extended in the 2025 etching Queen. The phrase carries a double sense — both an appetitive injunction not to overlook sweetness and a warning that what is sweet should not be missed in the literal sense of failing to notice — and that doubleness is well served by etching's capacity for layered meaning through layered marks. As an etching from 2023, the print is among May's RMIT-period or immediately post-RMIT works, dating to the transition between her undergraduate training in Melbourne and her return to Hong Kong as a resident artist. Bees, hives, and honey carry gendered connotations — the hive's reproductive economy, the figure of the queen, the worker — that align with May's stated interest in subverting conventions of identity and artistic production. The bitten line is well-suited to insect subjects, where fine, repeated marks can build the texture of a wing or a comb cell.