Phoebe Hui /
The Lurking Void /
Mar 21 – Apr 19, 2026 /
SHOWCASE /
UG/F, Landmark South
39 Yip Kan Street
Wong Chuk Hang
Closed on Mondays except 6 April
Saturday – Wednesday, 12pm – 7pm
Thursday – Friday, 12pm – 8.30pm
The Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC) presents its latest exhibition, The Lurking Void, at its distinctive multi-functional space, the SHOWCASE. Harnessing the full scale of the venue, the exhibition envelops audiences in colossal, site-specific installations, brought to life through unsettling sound and motion. Office equipment – printers, desks, cables, and scanners – transform into creature-like entities and landscapes, portraying a white‑collar world where AI does not replace humans but alters the nature of work, leaving people neither erased nor in control, but instead deeply entangled.
The Lurking Void is a psychological portrait of contemporary office labour shaped by the growing presence of artificial intelligence. Rather than framing AI as a force that simply replaces human workers, the project reflects on how work, identity and value are being reconfigured as humans and machines increasingly operate together. In this environment, the boundary between human and machine grows blurry and fluid, no longer a clean divide but an evolving field of negotiation. Through its installations, the exhibition responds to this complex symbiotic relationship, inviting visitors to consider what it means to be human in the “Post-Human Era”. Created by award-winning Hong Kong artist Phoebe Hui, whose multidisciplinary practice spans robotics, kinetic sculpture, generative art, sound, comics and drawing, the works render this collective condition in immersive form.
At the heart of the exhibition stands Vertebrate, a large-scale kinetic sculpture that demonstrates the full spatial possibilities of the SHOWCASE. Reappropriated from stacked and reassembled office chairs suspended in the air, the work extends horizontally across the space, resembling a mechanical creature with an elongated body. Objects designed to support human productivity are transformed into a structural backbone – as the spine progresses, visible cables, wires, and mechanical elements gradually overtake the recognisable chair components, suggesting a transition from human support to machine logic. At the far end, a cluster of T8 fluorescent light tubes forms a stark, luminous head, pulsing in slow, measured rhythms that evoke maintenance rather than progress. Devoid of agency, the sculpture renders motion as pure function.
As audiences move deeper into the space, Floating Office and Endless Shift form a suspended system of labour caught between motion and stasis. Office desks hover slightly above the ground, detached from their original function, while a modified office chair base rotates endlessly in place. It evokes a condition in which work persists in a continuous cycle, tasks circulate, time stretches, and the boundary between activity and inertia dissolves. In this environment, productivity becomes a self-sustaining loop, quietly drifting within a lurking void.
