All posts filed under: Features

Slavs and Tatars 斯拉夫與韃靼

Published by Brady Ng

Most writing about Slavs and Tatars is hagiographic. Catalogue essays describe their research cycles in reverential terms, and magazine profiles home in on their geographical ruminations and visual puns. The collective and their collaborators make all of this easy precisely because they are articulate, having published more than a dozen books and much more ephemera. That has a cost. When a practice is primarily described through its own terms, some questions go unasked. What does it mean to aestheticise syncretism for a predominantly western audience? Does the collective’s strategic unlocatability – not here, not there – resolve anything, or does it simply make irresolution appear to be philosophy? And who exactly is the region “east of the former Berlin Wall, west of the Great Wall of China” being made legible for? There was a hint of an answer in a conversation hosted at the M+ Lounge featuring Payam Sharifi, one of the founders of the collective, in March. He described books as talismans, adding that the reason why Slavs and Tatars have pursued publishing as …

Reclaiming the Hong Kong Sea 重佔香港海域

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

What has become of the sea in Hong Kong? With a coastline of 1,189 km, it ought to be everywhere, yet it seems to be hiding. At the Maritime Museum, it serves as the backdrop to the entire history of the territory. In historical paintings, we see it carrying warships, pirates, then merchant vessels. Usually, it appears as a means, a resource; rarely as a subject in its own right. Modern artists scarcely represented it – or, when they did, it was mere scenery. In Ap Lei Chau (1961) by Lui Shou-kwan, for instance, the island and the boats moored in the bay are rendered in ink, while the sea itself is utterly transparent, homogeneous and white – a void into which the boats might fall; a negative space. We find it again, subdued, in Wu Guanzhong’s Victoria Harbour (2002), barely sketched with a few fine lines and bluish strokes. In contrast, over the past decade, artists have been increasingly representing the sea, exploring its ambivalent and complex features. How do these artworks participate in …

Shahana Rajani

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

The conflict between India and Pakistan following the horrific April 2025 terror attack in Pahalgam in India-administered Jammu and Kashmir might have ended quickly, but there have still been long-term consequences. For example, India decided to suspend the bilateral Indus Waters Treaty that has been in place since 1960, resulting in even greater uncertainty regarding the future of water availability in Pakistan – a country that has witnessed some of the most far-reaching consequences of climate change. Created in the months before and after this backdrop of conflict, of weaponisation of treaties and bureaucratic accords, and of the climate crisis, artist Shahana Rajani’s work on the city of her birth, Karachi, and the Indus Delta becomes all the more urgent and poignant. Her show at Para Site, In Drawing, In Remembrance, the first time her interdisciplinary works have been shown in Hong Kong, mixes a deep, poetic sensibility with the catastrophic, painful consequences faced by communities displaced by water scarcity. This has been brought about by the construction of dams, by the bureaucratic redrawing of …

Thresholds 閥限

Published by Aaina Bhargava

Galuh Anindita, Arahmaiani, Christine Ay Tjoe, Nadiah Bamadhaj, Kei Imazu, Ines Katamso, I Gusti Ayu Kadek, Murniasih, Citra Sasmita, Jennifer Tee / White Cube / Hong Kong / Oct 31, 2025 – Jan 24, 2026 Chequered poleng cloths are ubiquitous in Bali. Often found wrapped around shrines, trees, statues or objects with spiritual and mystical connotations, these black and white textiles have a protective function and symbolise the coexistence of paradoxes: good and evil, order and chaos, light and dark – it’s literally woven into their materiality. For Galuh Sukardi, this coexistence of these polarised forces sparked the conceptual basis for Thresholds, an exhibition rooted in ideas of spiritual, political, physical and mythological means of transformation, largely informed by ancestral knowledge. “Opposites don’t always have to be resolved; sometimes they are simply lived,” says Sukardi, emphasising that to allow for this co-existence, a kind of equilibrium is required. “They’re all held in a delicate balance and, within that balance, I sense a maternal energy, a presence that nurtures and guides.” The exploration of this balance …

Charmaine Poh 傅秀璇

Published by Jessica Wan

PalaisPopulaire, Berlin /Deutsche Bank Artist of the Year 2025 / The first thing you encounter upon entering Charmaine Poh’s exhibition Make a travel deep of your inside, and don’t forget me to take is a glowing hand-written phrase on the floor, ending with “how we breathe”. Projected in soft blue light, the words hover just above eye level, pulsing gently, as if taking air. This quiet invocation sets the tone for what follows: a deeply atmospheric and emotionally textured experience that unfolds as much through sensation as sight. The exhibition’s title stems from a tender mistranslation spoken by a Turkish friend practising English – a moment of care and connection that invites viewers into a shared space of inbetweenness. From here, a spiral staircase leads upwards into the exhibition space. Poh’s exhibition moves in spatial and conceptual spirals, refusing linear progression in favour of an environment shaped by rhythm, return and echo. Visitors are then welcomed with a reading corner arranged on a wall-mounted shelves. Books in Chinese, English and German sit side by side. …

GayBird 梁基爵

Published by Brady Ng

For most people who were at GayBird’s Fragile! Human Inside performance at Tai Kwun in April 2025, it was impossible to anticipate the many twists and turns that would take place. The 70-minute performance started at the Laundry Steps, with an animation projected next to an installation that resembled a human head, constructed using cardboard boxes as building blocks and screens for eyes, with a gap left for its mouth – altogether roughly five metres in height. An anthropomorphic avian creature rambled on in the animation, steeping the audience in its conspiratorial bent:  “So these organisations aren’t aiming to take away any memory of importance, but just these minor details that are so inconspicuous,” it said. “Nobody even suspects them when something happens.” What followed was a relocation of the entire audience into JC Cube, the heritage and arts complex’s auditorium, where GayBird awaited on a podium above the seats. He views this migration as the audience’s journey into a virtual space, where he orchestrated a performance of light and sound while wearing an Apple …

Salvatore Emblema 薩爾瓦托雷・恩布勒馬

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Born in Terzigno, near Naples, Salvatore Emblema (1929-2006) initially pursued a rather traditional artistic education, going to art school, training as a cameo jewellery carver (a practice that has a distinct Neapolitan declension, in the Torre del Greco school, which specialised in corals) and then enrolling in a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Naples. He didn’t finish university but instead dedicated time to travelling – going to France, the UK, and the Netherlands, and to New York for a year – after which he returned to Italy and started his career as an artist. In the 1950s, he worked for the Cinecittà movie studios in Rome, the largest in Europe, where he collaborated with Federico Fellini on films like La Strada (The Road, 1953-54), making the sets. His artistic practice bears little resemblance to old-school academic training involving even meticulous jewellery-making skills: the modernity of his approach to painting and sculpture is striking even more than half a century later. In his hands, the unprimed jute and sackcloth canvases he uses have …

Samson Young 楊嘉輝

Published by Artomity Magazine

By DeWitt Cheng / In The Invention of Morel, a 1940 novella by Adolfo Bioy Casares, a Venezuelan writer sentenced to exile on a deserted island in the South Pacific hides from a group of tourists who arrive suddenly. Observing them daily, he becomes fascinated and begins a journal recording their doings – and starts falling in love with a young woman named Faustine, who strangely ignores him when he approaches her. Even stranger, all the intruders repeat their actions again and again, as if caught in a Groundhog Day time loop. Later, the narrator discovers that the group’s host, Morel, is a scientist, and that the visitors are projected recordings of his guests, all of them granted technological immortality. After the guests have departed, the writer, having learned to operate Morel’s machine, interpolates his image into the projection, pretending to interact with Faustine. Eighty-odd years later, such plot lines may be commonplace in movies – like Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, with its movie characters stepping off-screen and into the real world …

Chen Wei 陳維

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Entering Chen Wei’s new solo exhibition at Blindspot Gallery is akin to stepping into an alternate space-time continuum. Where visitors enter, the title is displayed on a semi-transparent silver partition, illuminated by undulating waves of light that oscillate like a musical frequency. This partition functions as a threshold, inviting visitors to traverse into the world of the Chinese artist, renowned for his meticulously staged photographs and his enigmatic universe, situated between dream and reality. Chen has conceptualised and curated the gallery space, integrating its peeling walls and concrete flooring to construct an environment reminiscent of a theatrical stage. Through the subtle interplay of light, shadow lines that echo the linear compositions of his artworks and a carefully orchestrated dialogue between colours and textures, the exhibition creates a cohesive visual and spatial experience. The artist demonstrates here that image-making is not his sole end but that he rather operates as an architect or a stage designer whose apparatus aims to question our collective sense of reality and our ability to seize it.  The artist has long …

Danh Võ In Situ: Akari by Noguchi 傅丹創意現場：野口勇的「光」

Published by Aaina Bhargava

There is a common cultural trope that in order to be a great artist one must struggle, undergo hardships and/or suffer from heartbreak. For artist Danh Võ, this is “fucking romanticised bourgeois bullshit. It’s coming from a privileged perspective.” Võ is here to shift established perspectives and ask what it means to make great art – a question that he and his classmates found themselves constantly asking while at art school in Denmark. “I was lumped into a fixed idea of what art could be,” says the Vietnamese-born Danish artist, who is now based in Berlin. “Denmark is so privileged: you get money when you study; you have all the resources. The art academy was great, as were the people you met there. But we were all trying to think differently and figure out: how do we make good art?” After making what he describes as “horrible paintings” as a student, Võ took a break and, in unconsciously trying to erase everything learned about what art could be, he found “a liberty, to work in …