With Hong Kong Art Week set to take off Monday, art world jet-setters are officially en-route and eyes are squarely on the coastal metropolis.
It’s been a busy, challenging year for Hong Kong, as 2023 marked the first Art Basel Hong Kong since the lifting of “Zero Covid” restrictions that had all but eliminated international tourism to the metropolis. It couldn’t have come sooner, as the launch of Tokyo Gendai and Art SG last year and Frieze Seoul in 2022 marked those other cities’ entrance in the competition for Asia’s leading art hub. However, any hopes that local politics could be forgotten were dispelled earlier this week when Hong Kong’s legislature passed a new sweeping national security law that curators and artists are already worrying could dampen artistic production.
Next week should tell us a lot about how the competition for regional dominance is shaking out. But early signs point to Hong Kong’s continued centrality to the Asian art market, as Sotheby’s and Christie’s both prepare to open massive new headquarters in the city this year, and M+ Museum (opened in 2021) and Tai Kwun Contemporary (opened in 2018) anchor the institutional scene. In January, Hauser & Wirth inaugurated a 10,000-square-foot street-level space, a rarity in the notoriously pricy city where most galleries reside on the upper floors.
The Covid years, as Empty Gallery director Alexander Lau told ARTnews in an email, were initially “shattering,” but isolation infused energy into the city, as it “gave every Hong Konger a reality check on how to move forward with life, both philosophically and emotionally.”
The result, numerous art dealers told ARTnews, is a renewed focus on strengthening the city’s cultural ecosystem through new institutions, galleries, and nonprofit art spaces, as well the confidence to invest in and elevate local artists.
“We’ve noticed more of a willingness to take meaningful risks with programming, beyond the typical more commercial route of transplanting blue-chip art trends to Hong Kong,” Lau said of the city’s galleries.
ARTnews caught up a handful of Hong Kong’s rising dealers, along with several veterans, to see how they are evolving along with the rest of the city’s cultural scene.
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PHD Group
Image Credit: Photo by Felix SC Wong. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group. One of the city’s newer—and buzzier—galleries is the cheekily named Property Holdings Development Group, which has operated since 2021 by appointment only from a 1970s rooftop clubhouse in Wan Chai. The gallery’s full name nonsensically references the city’s real estate industry and calls to mind any number of blandly named holding companies; when shortened to PHD Group, it pokes at art world elitism and academia.
Fittingly, PHD Group primarily shows East Asian experimental artists and keeps their roster small (currently, it lists 11 artists). The local emphasis, cofounder Ysabelle Cheung told ARTnews, is about “trying to build a narrative around the relationships between places, artists, and ecosystems.” PHD’s program is all solo shows, aside from its inaugural show, “Rendering,” and its two-year-anniversary exhibition, “Tendering,” which just closed.
“We are very committed to this as we feel it allows artists to make a strong statement with impact. This is critical to any artist’s career,” cofounder Willem Molesworth told ARTnews.
The small roster allows PHD to invest heavily in its artists. Last year, during Art Basel Hong Kong, the gallery mounted a debut solo show for Michelle Chu, whose work—primarily installations and “relational rituals”—tends non-commercial. The gallery stayed open 24 hours a day for the entire week. It earned raves in the New York Times, Art Review, and elsewhere.
This year, the gallery will stage Wong Kit Yi’s debut solo show, “+852 GHOST-JPG,” featuring a new video work completed during a residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, as well as surrealist furniture, screen paintings, and bagpipe objects. The gallery will stay open from 11:11 a.m. to 11:11 p.m. each day and host daily performances as well as a “collective karaoke lecture performance choir” that all can join in.
It’s sure to be a trip.
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Rossi Rossi
Image Credit: Courtesy Rossi Rossi Founded in 1985 in London and open in Hong Kong since 2013, Rossi Rossi has distinguished itself in the city by operating both a classical and contemporary art program across its Wong Chuk Hang and Hollywood Road locations
Originally specializing in classic Himalayan, Indian, and Southeast Asian art, Rossi Rossi has since expanded its scope to contemporary artists from those regions. The gallery, it said in an email, prides itself on “well-researched scholarship,” accompanying nearly every exhibition with a scholarly catalogue.
This year, during Hong Kong Art Week, the gallery will open a solo exhibition by British Pakistani artist Nazia Khan, who exhibited in the Pakistan Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The new exhibition, “UNRULY Edges,” continues Khan’s research and interest into ecology and colonialism with “new oil paintings, drawings, and brass reliefs that focus on the changes imposed on bodies of water throughout colonial history.”
The gallery will also show at Art Basel Hong Kong with a booth dedicated to Nepali multimedia artist Tsherin Sherpa, who exhibited in Nepal’s inaugural pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Sherpa’s work reconceptualizes traditional Tibetan arts such as thangka painting and carpet weaving to challenge fetishizations of Nepalese culture.
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Empty Gallery
Image Credit: Photo: Michael Yu; Courtesy of Empty Gallery Head out to Aberdeen Harbor, on the southern edge of Hong Kong Island and you will be rewarded with the city’s most distinctive gallery experience. Empty Gallery, founded by Stephen Cheng in 2015, is a 4,500 square-foot black cube that uses its dark walls to dramatic effect. As the gallery explained in an email, “Ultimately, the design of the gallery is meant to absorb, quieting one’s mind and also making one more aware of their body in relation to the artworks surrounding them.”
The gallery’s program is experimental and challenging, with a self-conscious goal of challenging an art market dynamic where East Asia is seen primarily as “place of circulation … whilst artistic or discursive value is something created in the West.”
In 2022, artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork transformed the gallery space into a stone garden with large-scale wool acoustic sculptures activated by visitors’ footsteps. In 2018, it presented the solo exhibition “delete” by Tishan Hsu exploring his family history. The exhibition presaged a late career surge for the septuagenarian artist who has since received a heralded survey that traveled from the SculptureCenter in New York to the Hammer in Los Angeles in 2020 and then featured at the 2022 Venice Biennale in. The gallery has also collaborated often with sculptor Jes Fan, whose work has appeared in numerous biennales.
“Overall, we are grateful to both nurture emerging talents as well as collaborate with more experienced artists who we feel deserve to create bodies of work displayed in the most ambitious and considered ways possible,” Cheng told ARTnews in an email.
Next week, the gallery is celebrating its 30th exhibition with “Le Contre-Ciel,” a group exhibition organized by Drawing Center curator Olivia Shao. It will also offer works at Art Basel Hong Kong that deal with the self as an “affective archive” by Hsu, Fan, Kiyomi Gork, and others.
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Blindspot Gallery
Image Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Blindspot Gallery. Blindspot, one of Hong Kong’s most closely watched galleries, continues to wow over a decade since it was founded by Mimi Chun in 2010. Though the gallery originally focused on photography, it has since expanded its roster to include artists who work in different mediums, privileging emerging and established artists from Asia.
Occupying a 7,000-square-foot warehouse in Wong Chuk Hang, Blindspot has championed artists like Sin Tai Kin—shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2022 and currently with a solo exhibition at Buffalo AKG Art Museum through August 19—as well as Isaac Chong Wei and the pseudonymous Chinese artist Xiyadie, both of whom will figure in the main exhibition of the 2024 Venice Biennale next month. Trevor Yeung, also on the roster, will present a solo collateral event in Venice, co-presented by M+ and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.
The gallery’s program reflects concerns with “social phenomena” and “societal issues,” according to Chun, not the easiest remit in the wake of the chilling 2020 National Security Law and the new one passed earlier this week. Still, the gallery remains bold, as evidenced by a bracing show last March by Chinese artist Wang Tuo, which included The Second Interrogation, depicting an extended conversation between an artist and a government censor.
Still, the gallery works to show difficult art like Trevor Yeung’s Stabled Cuddle Party (2024), in which sea snails (Serpulorbis rossaei) encased within an oriental vitrine are adorned and preserved like a treasured piece, or Xiyadie’s Gate (2013), a traditional Chinese papercut depicting two men pleasuring each other, both of which will feature at the gallery’s Art Basel booth. The gallery will also present Xiyadie’s debut solo exhibition during Art Week, with over 30 works spanning the 1980s to the present.
“We are optimistic that the forthcoming Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 will help the local art market gain momentum,” Chun told ARTnews in an email.
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Gallery Exit
Image Credit: Courtesy of Gallery Exit Anthony Tao is not the first art collector to later open a gallery, but Gallery Exit may be one of the more memorable. Opened in 2008, Gallery Exit weathered the global financial crisis and built its reputation by developing long relationships with artists.
“We have known many of [our artists] since when they were in art school,” Tao told Art Basel in 2020, when the gallery had a presentation in the fair’s Hong Kong Spotlight. “I try to find people that are more persistent, who really want to be artists, to do something inspiring for other people.”
The gallery’s location in Tin Wan, along Hong Kong Island’s southern coast, allows it to show bigger, more ambitious work by its roster of artists, which has an emphasis on local talent. That has been a benefit for the gallery given the city’s increased interest on Hong Konger artists since the start of Covid.
On March 23, the gallery will open a solo exhibition, “The Star Ferry Tale,” by Stephen Wong Chun Hei, showcasing his latest paintings of the Hong Kong landscape.
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Contemporary by Angela Li
Image Credit: Courtesy of Contemporary by Angela Li Art dealer Angela Li has long been a fixture of the Hong Kong arts scene, having first ditched a banking career for art in 2000. After years as an art consultant, Li founded her eponymous gallery in 2008 with a focus on emerging and mid-career artists hailing from Hong Kong. Later she served as president of the Hong Kong Gallery Association (founded in 2012), where she is still a board member.
That local focus has served the gallery well. As Li told ARTnews in an email, the city’s art scene since 2020 has been marked by “increasing openness and support collectors towards local artists.” Among the artists on Li’s roster are Jacky Tsai, Wong Sze Tai, and Cheung Tsz Hin.
“This shift in perspective has created opportunities for local artists to gain exposure and recognition within their own community,” Li said.
The gallery is currently showing a solo exhibition of Cheung’s paintings, “moments in layered motion” which, according to the artist, “focuses the energy on diverse emotions from the inner states of mind.” Li will also have a booth at Art Central, Art Basel’s long-running satellite fair, featuring works by many artists on Li’s roster, as well as a second booth dedicated solely to painter Chan King Long Ken.
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WOAW Gallery
Image Credit: Coutesy of WOAW Gallery In recent years, the worlds of art, fashion, and music have become intertwined with endless collaborations and crossovers. Kevin Poon has been at the center of that convergence. Over the last two decades, he cofounded the streetwear brand CLOT, started the Hong Kong music festival Blohk Party, and has been behind numerous restaurants and cafes in the city. He is also a collector, having long been a fan of street artists like Futura 2000 and KAWS and eventually collecting contemporary artists like Daniel Arsham, Jonas Wood, and others.
After hosting a pop-up during Art Basel Hong Kong for years, Poon took the plunge in 2019 and opened WOAW gallery, or World of Amazing Wonders. The timing, just before the start of the Covid pandemic, was surprisingly fortuitous, despite the global lockdown.
“There was so much stimulus during COVID that it was an unexpected boom. Everything was flying when we started,” Poon told ARTnews.
The gallery’s first exhibition, with Japanese artist Koichi Sato, was well-received, and in the years since, the gallery has successfully shown a range of both rising Western and Asian artists, including Cristina Banban, Anna Weyant, Jade Kim, and Kang Haoxian. While the gallery only represents five artists officially, it has shown dozens more at its five locations (three in Hong Kong plus Beijing and Singapore), often through smartly curated group exhibitions that juxtapose Asian and Western artists.
“There are a lot of fears, challenges and misconceptions around Western artists showing in Asia and Chinese artists showing abroad. We try to give them the confidence and a platform to connect and show their works globally,” Poon said.
During Art Week, WOAW will open three shows in Hong Kong: a solo exhibition by American painter Clinton King, another solo exhibition by Japanese painter Keita Shirayama, and “Object Reality,” a group exhibition bringing together 10 international artists to explore the relationship between art and reality.
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Tomorrow Maybe
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Eaton HK. One of Hong Kong’s newer galleries, Tomorrow Maybe, opened in 2018 with the aim to both provide an experimental laboratory for emerging artists and rising curators, and to foster cultural exchange between local artists and those from abroad.
During Art Week, the gallery will open a new group exhibition, “After Human: Marks of the Beasts,” which includes works by British artists Revital Cohen, Zoë Marden, and Tuur Van Balen, Korean artist Sungsil Ryu, Chinese American artist Joy Li, Hong Kong artists Mui Hoi Ying and Hou Ching, and Chinese American performance duo Future Host (Tingying Ma and Kang Kang). The exhibition, according to the gallery, uses “storytelling as a tool to contain [the artists‘] fluid imaginations and figurations of animals.”
The gallery’s location is a destination in itself; it sits inside Eaton Hong Kong, a luxury hotel and cultural hub in Kowloon that is inspired by the films of Wong Kar Wai.
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Kiang Malingue
Image Credit: Image courtesy of Kwan Sheung Chi and Kiang Malingue; Photo: Samson Wong Pak Hang While Kiang Malingue has been in operation since 2010, it relaunched in 2022 with a name that better reflected the partnership at the heart of the enterprise: that of Edouard Malingue, the scion of Paris’s Galerie Malingue, and Lorraine Kiang, the former head of Christie’s department focusing on Chinese ceramics and art.
The gallery, located in Wan Chai, represents 35 artists and has long put together a well-respected program that has included exhibitions by Vietnamese American multimedia artist Tiffany Chung, Hong Kong video artist Ellen Pau, and most recently, Kwan Sheung Chi, whose “Not retrospective” was filled with the sly, politically aburdist works for which he has become known.
Next week, in addition to a group presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong, the gallery will open a trio of exhibitions: “lucid / liquid / limpid,” its first exhibition with Japanese American artist (and 2019 Guggenheim fellow) Carrie Yamaoka; “anus whisper,” a presentation of new work by provocative animator and installation artist Wong Ping; and “Flowers of Hong Kong,” the first exhibition for Chinese painter Liu Xiaohui in Hong Kong.
“We continue to make ambitious exhibitions … and trust that the collectors will make choices that speak to them, and consider collecting as a serious and consistent approach to the sustainability of the art market in Asia,” Kiang and Malingue wrote in an email of the current atmosphere in Hong Kong.