Carol Bove's work beguiles and beautifies in material juxtapositions and unexpected nuances at David Zwirner in Hong Kong.

If female artists have struggled to wrest the spotlight from their male peers, consider the lot of Carol Bove (pronounced "bo-vay"), who makes heavy, intense sculptures forged out of stainless steel in a Brooklyn-based studio, which she then crushes and paints in vibrant colors, resulting in an elegant, fabric-like finish. Such is the challenge of this modern-day Her-phaestus, whose inaugural Asia show Ten Hours (until December 14 at David Zwirner at H Queen's in Hong Kong) is attracting conspicuous buzz.

Bove's trajectory has been steep since emerging in the early 2000s, exhibiting at many of the world's major institutions and prominently featuring in both the 2019 and 2017 Venice Biennales. She's collected by culture vultures such as Adrian Cheng; the New World Development executive vice-chairman has one of Bove's works displayed at his K11 Musea art/retail mall in Tsim Sha Tsui.

The surface tension and ugly/beauty trickery Bove invokes and subverts is much of her appeal. To witness her hulking works in the flesh – or, rather, metal – is a revelation. The nuanced, poetic and feminine qualities of her sculpture stand in stark contrast to the labour-intensive circumstances of their production.

"One thing about these works is that they contain a lot of force," says Bove, who chooses her words with care, as if executing dance steps. "But the resulting power you see can be very tender. I want the touch to appear very light and soft."

One such piece is the powerful, large-scale sculpture Offenbach Barcarolle (2019), the title of which refers to Jacques Offenbach's final opera, The Tales of Hoffmann (1881). It espouses material and visual alchemy; what appears as awkward, bulky contradiction on cursory glance soon softens, succumbs and attains musicality, dance or even romance.

"I think about a viewer's progression through the space," says Bove. "You enact a certain dance as the views unfold in a particular sequence. I try to anticipate these sequences and play with them so that there are reveals and surprises, encouraging the viewer to stand in different parts of the room and feel the space in different ways." Such is the way of Bove, where finding the space, and the art, is a way of opening up the world.