All posts filed under: Reviews

Shigeo Otake 大竹茂夫

Published by Aaina Bhargava

Agoraphilia /White Cube Hong Kong /Jul 10 – Aug 29, 2026 / A bird-man; one-eyed faces sprouting petal-like rays; life-size mushrooms that function as umbrellas – Shigeo Otake’s surreal paintings feature a curious cast of recurring hybrid characters and motifs. One in particular, a girl in a red dress, appears in almost all the works on view for Agoraphilia at White Cube Hong Kong. At times she’s peering from a doorway in a corner, placed at the entrance of a market in a public square, in front of a gate or between two tentacled creatures – always poised at a threshold, traversing the invisible porosity between two entities. With Agoraphilia, Otake creates and explores the possibilities that arise when human and otherworldly realms blur, describing its imagined population as “inhabitants of another world who have somehow slipped into our own, and ordinary people who find themselves in the other world”. To forge this perspective, the artist needed a figure who represented an ordinary person – the viewer – and conceived the girl in red, whose …

Various artists 群展

Published by Brady Ng

Spectrosynthesis /Art Sonje Center /Seoul /Mar 20 – Jun 28, 2026 / Perhaps to understand the essence of Spectrosynthesis Seoul required stepping out of the show. The fourth edition of a series organised by the Sunpride Foundation – following stops in Taipei (2017), Bangkok (2019) and Hong Kong (2022) – it was also the first large-scale institutional exhibition of queer art in Korea. The more time you spent in the show, the weightier that milestone felt. Jongno 3-ga, just a 20-minute walk southeast from the show’s venue Art Sonje Center, has long been a gathering place for older gay men in Seoul, with bars, clubs and meeting spots in the alleys of Ikseon-dong and Nakwon-dong. These were spaces that developed organically, with memories held only in the heads of those who lived them, in a country where that history has rarely been documented. Both neighbourhoods are being rapidly gentrified now, and the spaces that served the queer community for decades are being replaced by independent coffee shops and boutique hotels. Itaewon’s role in shaping queer …

Lap-See Lam 林立施

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Bamboo Palace, Revisited /Blindspot Gallery /Hong Kong /Mar 23 – May 2, 2026 / With Bamboo Palace, Revisited, the gallery space at Blindspot has been transformed into a labyrinth in which visitors can almost lose themselves, or at least lose their usual benchmarks. This arrangement perfectly aligns with Lap-See Lam’s work and allows us to journey with her through the meanders of memory and the collective history of Hong Kong. Born in Stockholm as a second-generation immigrant, the artist has spent nearly a decade exploring the culture of the Hong Kong diaspora, focusing in particular on the transformations and glitches that occur through spatiotemporal displacement. Her research delves into her own family history, which she weaves together with the history of the territory through myths, craftsmanship and techniques. This is how she came to work with shadow play, an art form that travelled from Europe to China in the 17th century. More recently, since her participation in the Nordic Pavilion in Venice in 2024, she has been tracing the fate of a Chinese ship built …

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 …

Oscar Chan Yik Long 陳翊朗

Published by Artomity Magazine

They always look from an imagined aboveRadvila Palace Museum of ArtVilnius, LithuaniaNov 27, 2025 – Mar 15, 2026Tautvydas Petrauskas Where are all the colours? The question is of course a bit silly, but it follows the visitor around Oscar Chan’s exhibition They always look from an imagined above, just like the synaesthesia of images and the smell of Chinese ink that settles over the exhibition rooms. Maybe the colours were there before and then evaporated, little by little, and maybe they’re now releasing that smell? Perhaps all those thorny, threatening, self-contained beings flying around absorbed all the colours, or they were devoured by the King of Ghosts from the work of the same name in the fourth room? I visited the exhibition at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art in January, one of the least colourful months in Lithuania. It could be described as naked or even skinless, like many of Chan’s drawn or painted beings – because why would these dream images of skeletons and personifications of quasi-mythological characters need clothes? Clothes and costumes …

Sara Tse 謝淑婷

Published by John Batten

Seed to Textile 2025 – Woven Campus /Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT) Hong Kong /Jan 10 – 13, 2026 / Over the past five years, Hong Kong artist Sara Tse has assiduously documented the school that she and her sisters attended when they were young. Opened in 1952, Kwai Chung Public School was a primary school for children living in nearby rural villages, some still inhabited today. It was reached by a narrow pathway, sited atop a small hill, surrounded by trees, on Castle Peak Road in Kwai Hing. Hong Kong’s rural schools from this period were all similarly designed by government public works architects: large, rendered brick, single-storey, pitched-roofed classrooms arranged around a U-shaped open space doubling as both playground and outdoor assembly area. Tse’s school also had a covered, open-air, concrete podium at one end of the playground, used by teachers at school assemblies. These schools were the pride of a local community and were supported financially and materially by parents and local donors. Like many schools, Kwai Chung Public School …

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 …