All posts tagged: Para Site

Shahana Rajani

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 …

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 …

Wing Po So 蘇詠寶

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Take Turns Para SiteHong KongMar 15 – May 25, 2025 Wing Po So’s new installation presents itself as a constellation of three sculptural compositions – or “islands”, as the artist refers to them – constructed from old drawers once used in traditional Chinese medicine shops. These drawers, stacked and assembled in varying configurations, give rise to angular structures that appear simultaneously orderly and illogical. Some are positioned vertically, others inverted, open or shut, interlocked with precarious balance, ultimately producing a sense of organised chaos. Within the cold, stark environment of the gallery, the installation emerges as a living enclave – warm wood tones, the subtle scent of earth or dried herbs and a nearly recognisable soundscape evoking rhythmic breaths or pulses, all contributing to a multisensory experience. So seeks to recreate the dynamic choreography characteristic of traditional Chinese pharmacies. Having grown up in her parents’ shop, she experienced the daily rituals first-hand: opening and closing drawers, climbing stools to reach higher levels, bending towards lower compartments, crushing dried plants, grinding powders and blending ingredients. In this …

Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien

Published by Caroline Ha Thuc

Offerings for Escalante / Para Site / Hong Kong / Oct 21, 2023 – Feb 8, 2024 / Negros is a large island located in the Visayas, in the central part of the Philippines, with a population of about 4.7 million. Since the mid 19th century, it has relied on the production of sugarcane, a crop that quickly became one of the Philippines’ most important export goods. During the first Marcos government (1965-86), sugar was very lucrative, yet its profits were mainly kept by political cronies and landlords, and did not benefit local workers. From the early 1980s, a drop in raw sugar prices resulted in dramatic famines, child malnutrition, unemployment and a significant rise in poverty on the island. On 20 September 1985, not only sugarcane farmers but also fishermen, students and all types of unaffiliated workers joined a nationwide protest asking for wage increases, better living conditions, human rights and a demilitarisation of the territory. The local militia replied with guns and violence. Twenty people were killed. Known as the “Escalante massacre”, this event …

signals… at Para Site

Published by Christie Lee

In 1996, on the eve of Hong Kong handover to China, a bunch of Hong Kong artists founded one of the city’s longest-running independent art spaces in Kennedy Town. Some 27 years later, it has moved to North Point, with the city it is in also facing uncertain times, not least because it has just emerged after three years of pandemic restrictions. Executive director Billy Tang is looking back to Para Site’s artist-run beginnings, where it was, above all, a platform for artists and ideas to come together. The idea is to have longer exhibitions, where ideas are allowed to gestate over a period of time. This shift in curatorial thinking takes solid form in Para Site’s latest exhibition, signals…, which features three chapters and is curated by Tang and Para Site curator Celia Ho. While the first chapter, signals…storms and patterns, was about hums beneath the calm, signals…folds and splits, which opened on June 9, explores liminal spaces. The third exhibition, signals…here and there, centres on the idea of dispersal. Installation view of ‘signals…folds …

Garden of Six Seasons 一園六季

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Brady Ng / Around the world, many public gardens, especially those normally maintained to symmetrical and groomed perfection, have been left untended during citywide lockdowns or movement control orders. In Paris, a friend walked by the Jardin de la Nouvelle-France, peered inside, and called it a “little jungle”. This wildness without wilderness is the consequence of eight weeks of precautionary restrictions. When people cannot visit parks and gardens, their upkeep is similarly affected. While human activity in public ground to a near halt in many major cities, nature reclaimed its place in our constructed environs. Wild boar roamed down paved roads in Berlin. Dolphins frolicked in sections of the Bosphorus normally busy with tankers and cargo ships. Monkeys climbed up to my sister’s fourth-floor apartment in Singapore and tried to break in. Taking its title from the name of a neoclassical garden in Kathmandu built in 1920, Garden of Six Seasons was a wide-reaching exhibition that also functioned as a precursor to the Kathmandu Triennale scheduled to open in early December and run for more than a …

Video, Sofa, Bauhinia – Retrospective and Reconstruction of Ellen Pau

Published by Artomity Magazine

By Leung Po Shan / “They said There’s nothing special about an onion It deserves all criticisms Despite an earthy costume Its name doesn’t inspire trust Its nature is not agreeable. Peel off layer after layer, there is nothing inside that can be called sophistication! How formalistic!” (Yasi: Extract from “Onion”) What About Home Affairs?, the title of Para Site’s retrospective of Ellen Pau, pioneering Hong Kong artist and co-founder in 1986 of the city’s first video and media art collective, Videotage, can been construed as a bilingual pun, taking in both Hong Kong politics and the shackles imposed on women in the home and society. “Home Affairs” brings to mind the Home Affairs Department, which is responsible for Hong Kong’s internal affairs. The ambiguity of the words creates a discrepancy between the title in Chinese and English. In her essay in the exhibition catalogue, video artist Lo Yin-shan, who emerged a generation later than Pau, references academic David Wang Der Wei’s post-loyalist theory to point out that Pau’s Emergence (A work in progress) (2016) was …

Various artists

Published by Artomity Magazine

Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs Para Site Hong Kong Mar 18 – Jun 11, 2017 Caroline Ha Thuc The scope of this ambitious exhibition is very wide, in geography, in time and in the multiple issues that are addressed. Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs refers to the land as a physical territory but also as a receptacle for human memory, mythologies and history. Recent accelerated development in Asian countries has triggered deep and sometimes violent changes among people and also landscapes, leading to massive flows of migration, uprooting of longstanding traditions and land grabs, not to mention the depletion of natural resources. New ideologies and discourses are emerging from the urgent need to adapt to this new context, from nationalism to historical revisionism and critical alternatives to dominant Western ways of thinking. In their curatorial statement for Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs, Cosmin Costinas and Into Guerrero highlight the global feeling of anxiety that also dominates Asian societies today, and underline the general loss of certainty and the violence generated by this shifting geopolitical order. Soil is the fabric of a nation, and dealing with soil inevitably leads to boundaries …

Amna Asghar, Doreen Chan, Viola Chen, Dachal Choi, Come Inside, Eternal Dragonz, Jes Fan, Christopher K Ho, Eisa Jocson, Linda CH Lai, Fiona Lee, Ma Qiusha, Huong Ngo, Ngoc Nau, Vivian Vivian Xiaoshi Qin, Renee So, Salote Tawale, Hiram To, Ka Man Tse, Wong Kit Yi, Kristina Wong, Xiyadie, Bobby Yu Shuk Pui

Published by Artomity Magazine

Jun 30 – Sep 10 Group show. Para Site 22/F, Wing Wah Industrial Building 677 King’s Road, Quarry Bay (852) 2517 4620 Email Web We-Su 12pm to 7pm Para Site Art is a non-profit art organisation that was established in 1996. We produce, exhibit and communicate local and international contemporary art. Our main activities include presenting an ambitious year programme comprising 10 exhibitions, publications of catalogues and PS magazine, a bilingual visual-arts publication. The gallery also organises seminars, talks and workshops.