All posts filed under: Reviews

Samson Young 楊嘉輝

Published by Brady Ng

Pavilion /New Taipei City Art Museum /Taipei /Sep 9, 2025 – Jan 4, 2026 / György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, a piece for 16-part mixed choir, is notoriously difficult for musicians and vocalists to perform. Its rhythmic subdivisions and complexities melt away the performers’ sense of traditional bar lines. Entrances are subtle, so much so that listeners aren’t meant to consciously perceive them, which means members of the choir need to maintain perfect control over pitch at extremely soft levels, gradually finding their way into micropolyphonic composition. Each of the 16 singers has a unique part, so there’s no space for error in intonation, no room for someone else to pick up the slack. The result is a piece of music that feels alien to ears more accustomed to conventional tastes. It’s downright hallucinatory. Most people know Lux Aeterna through Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic treatment of it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the track sculpts an air of mystery around a monolith – a rectangular black slab of non-human origin. That’s precisely what walking into …

Yip Kai Chun 葉啟俊

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

How to draw a line across the sea? /Peng Chau Cinema /Hong Kong /Nov 15 – Dec 21, 2025 / Yip Kai Chun’s solo exhibition occupies the lobby and former ticket office of the old Peng Chau Cinema, which has recently reopened to host art events. The building’s architecture is typical of the 1970s, featuring a concrete floor, broad columns and walls covered with small blue tiles reminiscent of swimming pool mosaics. The space is filled with natural light and has been thoughtfully used by Clarissa Lim, the curator, who has skilfully created a setting that resonates with Yip’s reflections on island life and his long-term experience as a resident of Peng Chau, where he has lived for the past eight years. In this new series of works, Yip invites us to share his insular gaze and to consider the surrounding landscape from his vantage point, one shaped by observing his environment from the ferry he takes every day, a routine that has profoundly influenced and transformed his relationship with geography. Scroll: Kowloon on the …

Ulana Switucha

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Torii /Blue Lotus Gallery /Hong Kong /Nov 15 – Dec 14, 2025 / The new body of work by Hong Kong-based Canadian photographer Ulana Switucha, presented at Blue Lotus Gallery in Sheung Wan, is like a very slow-paced meditation that constantly returns to the same shape, showing how many different forms and angles it can take. The shape in question is the torii, the mystical Japanese gate that marks the entrance to sacred spaces – whether built structures such as temples and shrines or parts of a natural landscape that have been turned into divine spots, because of either something unusual about them or the legends attached to them. They have been a fixture of Japanese religious practice for more than a thousand years and, with their delicate yet imposing presence, they announce that from that point onwards, one enters the realm of the kami, the Japanese Shinto gods – although a level of syncretism means that some Buddhist temples, too, are graced by toriis a short distance from the main entrance. They are a …

Hilarie Hon 韓幸霖

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Shaping Surface into Light /Gallery EXIT /Hong Kong /Aug 30 – Sep 17, 2025 / There is, first of all, an immediate shock. On either side of the space, the pure colours of Hilarie Hon’s paintings vibrate and strike with dazzling intensity. In her new solo exhibition at Gallery Exit, the same motif recurs everywhere: an immense sun slipping into the sea at sunset. The tones are vivid – flamboyant orange, scarlet red and fuchsia pink against bright blues. These colours radiate through the room, producing an initial pleasure that feels raw and almost physical. But what arises from these works is not pure joy. Rather, it is a kind of nostalgia, a feeling inevitably tied to that fleeting instant when day falters and yields to night. Hilarie Hon has been painting sunsets since 2017. It is an obsession for the artist, who, as a child, developed the habit of watching the sunset from Plover Cove Reservoir Dam. When she struggled with sleeplessness and nightmares, her father would take her for night walks to the …

Palace Museum 故宮文化博物館

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Wonders of Imperial Carpets: Masterpieces from the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha /Palace Museum /Hong Kong /Jun 6 – Oct 6, 2025 / A carpet exhibition might sound like something reserved for a niche audience, but the extraordinary Wonders of Imperial Carpets: Masterpieces from the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha at the Palace Museum is so full of surprises and so well curated that it’s one of the most stimulating shows Hong Kong has seen in a while. The stars of the exhibition are, as the title implies, carpets from Safavid Iran, Ottoman Türkiye and Mughal Hindustan, the three Islamic empires of the early modern period. They’re accompanied by ceramics, metalwork, glasswork, maps, illuminated copies of the Quran and jades, spanning eight centuries, mostly from modern-day Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, China, Iran and Türkiye. A number of ceramics from Central Asia are also on show, on loan from Doha, mostly from the Timurid period (1370-1507). The aesthetic and cultural dialogue in this vast region was extensive and fertile. Chinese blue and white porcelain, for example, was …

Trevor Yeung 楊沛鏗

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Courtyard of Attachments /M+ /Jun 14 – Oct 12, 2025 /Caroline Ha Thuc / Courtyard of Attachments, Trevor Yeung’s exhibition at M+, constitutes the Hong Kong iteration of the artist’s presentation for the 2025 Venice Biennale. Distributed across three rooms, one of which is devoted to video documentation, the exhibition has been reconfigured to suit the institutional context of the museum. The original installation featured four site-specific works that incorporated two distinct bodies of water: seawater outdoors and freshwater sourced from the Venice canal indoors. Central to the project is the notion of relationships explored through absence, mostly articulated through the presentation of 74 uninhabited fish tanks. At M+, this absence is intensified: not only are the fish missing but the water itself has also been removed. The exhibition thus distances visitors even further from the living ecosystems that once animated the installation. Consequently, issues such as water quality, ecological interdependence and human-aquatic relationships are displaced. Instead, questions of care and attachment are replaced by an encounter with their impossibility. The exhibition ultimately stages a …

Tsuyoshi Maekawa, Tetsuo Mizù, Julie & Jesse, Kohei Kyomori 前川強、水島哲雄、Julie & Jesse、京森康平

Published by Ilaria Maria Sala

Contours of Expression /Whitestone Gallery /Hong Kong /Aug 9 – Sep 20, 2025 /Ilaria Maria Sala / The Hong Kong branch of the Japanese-owned Whitestone Gallery has inaugurated its new Hong Kong space in Wong Chuk Hang with a group show, Contours of Expression. It features four artists: Tsuyoshi Maekawa, a member of the avant-garde Gutai Art Association group, which was active from 1954 to 1972; abstract painter Tetsuo Mizu, who passed away this January, at 80 years of age; Kohei Kyomori, born in 1985; and the Hong Kong and Jingdezhen-based ceramic artist duo Julie & Jesse – Swiss designer Julie Progin and American artist Jesse Mc Lin. Maekawa’s works date from the early 1960s to 2015 and are all variations of his signature jute/burlap cloth on canvas: using adhesive and paint, he shapes the cloth on the canvas so as to create a three-dimensional element. He adds paint either before shaping the cloth or after, creating abstract works that immediately recall the Gutai approach, with its bright colours and devotion to a process that …

Nai-Jen Yang 楊乃臻

Published by Jessica Wan

xi xi su su /Mother’s Tankstation /London /Mar 14 – Apr 17, 2025 / Nai-Jen Yang’s paintings unfold like whispered secrets, resisting immediate comprehension. In her first solo exhibition in London, at Mother’s Tankstation, surfaces made of gentle, meticulous brushstrokes evoke both lightness and weight, demanding time not as an aesthetic luxury but as a fundamental requirement for their visual effects to register. Looking at works like Bon Iver, Bon Iver and white noise (2024), the eye initially finds little to grasp. Yang’s process involves months of sustained engagement with individual canvases, listening to the same musical pieces while building up surfaces through thousands of repetitive marks. Working with oil paint and rabbit skin glue on fabrics such as calico, muslin and canvas, she creates surfaces that shift between opacity and translucence depending on angle and light. Applied without traditional gesso, the rabbit skin glue creates microscopic crystalline formations that catch and refract light throughout the day. From certain angles, these appear as tiny prisms embedded in the surface. The fabric remains partially transparent, revealing …

Oscar Chan Yik Long 陳翊朗

Published by Gerhard Mack

To Sleep and Wake Unafraid /PF25 cultural projects /Basel, Switzerland /Jun 14–22, 2025 / For his solo exhibition in Basel, Switzerland, Oscar Chan Yik Long created an environment of ink drawings.  Entering the space feels like entering a body, the inner skin of which is covered with images. They are wild and tender, haunting and peaceful, bleeding from memories and experiences, as bodies always carry the traces of our traumas and happy moments. Bleached out in black and white, they are like repercussions of moments lived through: monsters and guardians at the same time. There is no limit, there are no boundaries, only flow, like associations of the mind and bodily fluids, sour and sweet at once.  The space where this happens is a living room in a 16th-century building at the heart of medieval Basel. The walls are structured by painted panels and the ceiling is held up by mighty wooden beams, which together already create the atmosphere of a cosy cave, where time takes a breath and the heartbeat can slow. This most …

Ha Bik Chuen 夏碧泉

Published by Brady Ng

Reframing Strangeness /Para Site /Hong Kong /May 10 – August 10, 2025 / Typhoon season in Hong Kong is brutal. Tree limbs snap and fall. Ships are damaged or even run aground. Roads flood or, worse yet, cave in. But the rain gave Ha Bik Chuen inspiration. Specifically, he saw how the shoes of pedestrians left imprints on newsprint that lay stuck to the ground after it dried, the paper moulded with new bumps and contours, traces left by the people who had walked through as they sought cover from the deluge.  The artist decided to dedicate part of his practice to making paper artworks with pronounced bumps and grooves. Ha needed a way to shape the sheets, so he made more than 100 collagraph plates, which he called “motherboards”, between 1974 and 1995. The process surely drew upon the woodworking skills that he acquired as a teenage apprentice in a construction and decoration workshop in Jiangmen. With these print matrixes, Ha created an estimated 3,000 collagraphs, each with about six layers of paper and …