All posts tagged: Empty Gallery

Reina Sugihara 杉原玲那

Published by Brady Ng

Respirare /Empty Gallery /Hong Kong /Dec 8, 2024 – Mar 1, 2025 / Everyone experienced the Covid pandemic on different terms. There were forced lockdowns for some and productive isolation for others, social pods and cautious public encounters, with a constant reminder of strained medical systems and an immense loss of life. For Tokyo-based painter Reina Sugihara, that era provided an opportunity to slow down and start a new hobby. Like many millennials around the world, she picked up bird watching. That was one of the kernels for Respirare, an exhibition of paintings by Sugihara at Empty Gallery. After a bout of sickness that affected her breathing, the artist came across an article about a bar-tailed godwit that set a world record by flying nonstop for 11 days, covering 13,559 kilometres between Alaska and Tasmania. Sugihara began to consider how birds breathe. Unlike human lungs, which move air in and out through the same pathway, avian respiration enables a one-way air flow, making it an efficient system that enhances oxygen uptake. This is crucial for …

Noteworthy Shows in Hong Kong Autumn / Winter ’23 Edition

Published by Aaina Bhargava

“Hong Kong is back!” seems to be the city’s official PR motto since quarantine for incoming travellers to the city was essentially abolished in October, and restrictions were dropped. If the succession of gala fundraisers and exhibition openings and the general year-end frenzy is anything to go by, the slogan applies to the city’s art scene, which seems to be overcompensating for its dearth of activity over the past two years. There were numerous shows and events last autumn, from Asia Art Archive and Para Site auction fundraisers to blockbuster exhibitions like Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now at M+ to smaller exhibitions such as John Batten’s showcase at Ping Pong to online initiatives such as the launch of David Clarke’s digital archive. Here are eight noteworthy exhibitions. Behind Your Eyelid, Pipilotti Rist at Tai Kwun ContemporaryTai Kwun Contemporary’s blockbuster exhibition surpassed expectations, providing an experience that cultural institutions should aspire to. Serving as a mini survey of Rist’s practice, the show featured a number of highlights from the artist’s career, including I’m not the Girl who …

Closing soon: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork ‘Olistostrome’ at Empty Gallery

Published by Artomity Magazine

Jacqueline Kiyomi GorkOlistostromeSep 11 – Nov 20, 2021 Empty Gallery 18 & 19/F Grand Marine Center3 Yue Fung Street, Tin WanHong Kong+852 2563 3396Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 7pm http://www.emptygallery.com Empty Gallery’s second solo exhibition with Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Olistostrome, is closing soon on next Saturday, November 20.  Often aiming to reconfigure received hierarchies between audience, performer, and exhibition architecture, Gork’s hybrid practice exists in the slippery disciplinary interstice between sculpture and sound installation. Acutely sensitive to the ways in which the sonic world regulates and molds our sense of subjective interiority, Gork both draws on and subverts the legacy of cybernetics—creating systems of embodied feedback which seek to mobilize the emancipatory potential latent within everyday materials and infrastructures, as well as the simple act of listening. The visual and sonic (Solutions to Common Noise Problems) landscape is punctuated by a series of sculptures known as Attenuators. At once resembling sacred rocks, greco-roman statuary, and topological formations, these enigmatic structures– dispersed like islands within a reservoir of dry pebbles– function simultaneously as sculptures in the classical sense, and as sonic modifiers …

ektor garcia

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Christie Lee / It must be a strange moment for ektor garcia. The artist, used to a nomadic lifestyle, is, like everyone, on lockdown, in his case in Mexico, his birthplace. Under normal circumstances, he would have flown to Hong Kong for his show Oax.D.F.L.A.N.O.H.K., yet the pandemic left him no option but to direct Empty Gallery where to place each piece through video conferencing, arranging them to mimic his own living space. On entering the black box exhibition space, visitors encounter ventanal (2020), which means ‘a large window’ in Spanish. Consisting of spider leg-like forms that twist and knot into each other, the work was created with the ancient lost-wax casting process, where molten metal is poured into a wax cast mold. One feels a perverse thrill looking at these slightly menacing forms. From there, the eye is directed towards Portales (2020), a series of hanging curtains fashioned from metals or animal skins. These are intricately latticed, the shadows they cast on the wall behind adding to the frenzy. While the ones crafted from animal …

Rei Hayama, Takashi Makino

Published by Artomity Magazine

Katherine Volk / The Pearl of Tailorbird / Memento Stella / Empty Gallery / Hong Kong / Dec 15 – Jan 26 / Katherine Volk / Two solo exhibitions, The Pearl of the Tailorbird by Rei Hayama and Memento Stella by Takashi Makino, took over the entire two-floor space of Empty Gallery. While both employ film, they provoke vastly different feelings and reactions. Spread across two floors, The Pearl of the Tailorbird took viewers on a journey. Winding through the top floor of the gallery’s iconic dark void were walls spiralling inwards like a maze; as visitors navigated the barriers, it felt as if they needed Ariadne’s silver thread to guide them out of the miniature labyrinth. This searching and disconnection are symbolic of Hayama’s exploration of the human condition alienated from nature. The layout itself was a structure within a structure, where perceptions were altered, and the spiral also alluded to other manmade or mythical cultural constructions of disorder, such as the Tower of Babel, from a biblical tale in which God punishes people’s attempts to build …

Toshio Matsumoto

Published by Artomity Magazine

Everything Visible is Empty Empty Gallery Hong Kong Sep 9 – Nov 18, 2017 Katherine Volk Visitors to the new Toshio Matsumoto (1932-2017) show at Empty Gallery were immersed in the artist’s experimental visuals as soon as the elevator doors to the gallery opened. Pulsating, coloured waves radiated from a central void and filled the opposite wall, while the entrance space was filled with cosmic sounds. White Hole (1979) simultaneously startled and mesmerised, taking the viewer on a journey into the void. This captivating start to the exhibition was only a taster of what was behind the next door. The gallery consulted with the late artist’s archive to present a retrospective of his newly restored work. The dark space, enclosed between black walls, ceilings and floors, was the perfect setting to display the dynamic aesthetic of the post-war image maker. Empty Gallery brought together a selection of the artist’s documentaries and short experimental films from 1960 to 1979, each featuring drastically different subjects, but connected through their enquiries into the complicated conditions of a changing Japanese society. Phantom (1975) and The Song of Stone (1963) …