Among the many shows of local and international artists taking place in Hong Kong’s galleries and contemporary art institutions this autumn, there are many that feature photography, image-making and new media. These exhibitions show the many ways the photographic medium is in dialogue with a range of contemporary art practices, including sculpture, installation and digital art. Here we bring you a guide to exhibitions taking place around the city, open throughout the autumn, for you to visit on your next day out.
Cloud Chamber: Group Show
Para Site, 17 August – 24 November
Cloud Chamber is the first institutional exhibition to survey the activities of Art Labor, a Ho Chi Minh City-based collective formed by Thao Nguyen Phan, Truong Cong Tung and Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran. The show features the collective’s long-term historical research, poetic observations and decade-long practice of relationship-building with the Jrai community in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Alongside Art Labor’s newly commissioned and existing works, the exhibition includes artwork from Jrai artists, with whom the collective has created collaborative projects since 2016, archival material from a missionary-turned-anthropologist in the French colonial period, and works by contemporary artists inspired by the region. Jrai wood-carved sculptures and musical instruments are presented alongside moving image, installation, drawings and archival photographs that together weave a counter-narrative to prevalent representations, past and present, of the Central Highlands.
Tao Hui: In the Land Beyond Living
Tai Kwun, 26 September – 2 February
Realism and fiction blur in In the Land Beyond Living, opening up new perspectives from which to contemplate contemporary society in China. With elements of painting, sculpture, video, sound, installation and set design, this solo exhibition by the Chinese video and installation artist Tao Hui takes us from North to South, the inland to the coast, the urban to the rural, the industrial to the natural, featuring the lives of ethnic minorities guarding the Gansu Corridor, migrant workers striving for a better life in drastically developing cities, and the nouveau riche yearning for spiritual sustenance. In seeking new ways to present and comprehend the complex realities of today, the artist interweaves depictions of harsh environments, migration flows, geographical disparities, and the relentless drive for a better life, with surrealistic imagery. In the Land Beyond Living is Tao Hui’s first institutional solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Alongside multiple new commissions of video installations and sculptures, the exhibition will include the Asian premiere of Hardworking (2023) as well as recent works such as From Sichuan to Shenzhen (2017) and Being Wild (2021).
A.A. Murakami: Floating World
M+, 31 August – 2 February
A.A.Murakami is a Tokyo- and London-based artist duo formed by Alexander Groves and Azusa Murakami. Their multidisciplinary practice straddles sculpture, installation, cinema and digital art, creating experiences that augment their science-based inquiries with moments of daring and spectacle. This free exhibition at M+ features two interlinked immersive installations which offer an otherworldly experience — one traces the journeys of physical fog rings into the digital realm and the other reveals an environment of floating bubble clouds. With transient materials and the innovative application of custom-built technology, these two large-scale installations inspire visitors to question philosophical ideas about the nature of reality, artifice, and the digital lives that we increasingly embody within today’s contemporary landscape. The presentation at M+ further develops the duo’s pioneering concept of ‘Ephemeral Tech’, in which innovative technological research is used to reimagine primordial origins and to speculate possible future scenarios.
Jen Liu: I Am Cloud
Blindspot Gallery, 17 September – 2 November
I Am Cloud is American artist Jen Liu’s debut solo exhibition at Blindspot gallery and in Asia. The exhibition presents Liu’s recent and new bodies of work, which encompass videos, paintings, and mixed-media animatronic sculptures. The exhibition moves from the final chapter of Liu’s project Pink Slime Caesar Shift (2016-2023), marked by her film The Land at the Bottom of the Sea (2023), into a new body of work including the titular video I Am Cloud (2024) which premieres at the exhibition. In this presentation, Liu draws upon research and non-fictional materials to create fabulated narratives that examine the virtualization of work – its realities, its speculative futures, and its historical precedents. The title evokes the Cloud, a cyber infrastructure which stores our memories and data, seemingly automated but in fact powered by an invisible soft body network of humans.
Liao Jiaming: Melting Suns on the Screen
DE SARTHE, 31 August – 28 September
DE SARTHE presents Melting Suns on the Screen, a solo exhibition by Hong Kong-based artist Liao Jiaming. Featuring a new body of installation, video and mixed media artworks, the exhibition imagines an abandoned site of worship, in which relics of a fictional religion are preserved and now discovered. During his residency in the same space, the artist’s interactive installation The Arcana Intelligent (2023) posed as a fictitious deity and generated personalized tarot cards using an AI algorithm. The various sculptural and mixed-media artworks in the exhibition follow from this project and reflect on the relationships and ruptures between technology, divinity and human bodies. The final artwork in the exhibition is a video titled Kept Between Us (2024), in which the artist engages in self-reflection as The Arcana Intelligent. Interspersed with footage that Liao recorded from his everyday life, the video breaks the fourth wall and serves as an epilogue to the narrative of the exhibition.
A Brush with Nature: Recent Works by Stephen King
Alisan Fine Arts, 22 August – 19 October
Alisan Fine Arts opens its new space in Aberdeen with A Brush with Nature, the gallery’s third solo exhibition of the acclaimed landscape photographer, Stephen King. Fascinated by patterns in nature, King travels the world in search of images that elucidate the landscape’s capacity for both drama and serenity. King’s work has been described as painterly, a style he cultivates through his use of light, color and composition. Featuring recent photographs taken during recent travels in Scotland, Iceland, the US and Japan, most of which have never been shown before, the exhibition showcases nature’s varied patterns through King’s lens that verges on the abstract and evokes the Chinese ink brush stroke. The gallery has represented King since 2015, coordinating his first show in Hong Kong, a joint exhibition Un/Natural: Photographs by Stephen King and Ming Thein in 2015, organising his first and second solo exhibitions Rhythms in Nature in 2018 and Synchronicity in 2020.
Extend: Group Show
Sin Sin Fine Arts, 13 September – 8 November
Sin Sin Fine Art presents a group show of three Indonesian artists, Dani Huda, Talitha Maranila and Sin Sin Man, each exploring nature as the source of creative expression. Among the artists on view, Dani Huda will show archival pigment photographic prints. Born in Bandung, Indonesia on April 19, 1995, Huda is a multi-disciplinary artist, primarily focusing on film, visual, and sound art and delving into themes of human spirituality, mystics, meditation and its relation with nature. He began his artistic journey as a fashion photographer and expanded his work internationally in 2014, directing and producing fashion films, music videos, and advertisements. His films have won several international honors.
PHOTOFAIRS Hong Kong will take place 26-30 March 2025 (VIP Preview March 26) at the Central Harbourfront.
