6 Hong Kong Exhibitions Exploring Nature, Abstraction, and Evolving Practices

As preview days begin and Art Basel approaches, Hong Kong moves into full momentum. Whitewall highlights these Hong Kong exhibitions as essential stops during Art Week—whether to ease into the city before the fairs or to step away from the crowds for a more intimate encounter with the work. These exhibitions unfold at a different pace, inviting a closer look at practices that range from emerging voices to established names.

This season, Collect Hong Kong Art Fair 2026 continues to build as a platform for local artists, while Zheng Zhou’s latest exhibition reveals a transition shift toward abstraction. The duo Zheng Mahler brings Lantau Island’s ecosystem indoors through a living terrarium, offering an immersive encounter with nature. At WestK, FunFest returns with over 120 programs, including The Cats that Slept for a Thousand Years, a large-scale installation that invites interaction. Meanwhile, at PODIUM Gallery, “Amour Aquatique” stands out as a Hong Kong exhibition that considers water as both material and metaphor across five distinct practices.

Group Show: “Amour Aquatique”

PODIUM Gallery

Wong Chuk Hang

PODIUM Gallery’s group exhibition “Amour Aquatique,” is a Hong Kong exhibition that draws on feng shui and Asian cosmology, where a symbolic shift from earth to fire calls for water as a necessary counterbalance—an agent of care, adaptability, and renewal. Presented during Hong Kong Art Month, the exhibition brings together Fran Chang, Omyo Cho, Soyoung Chung, Minouk Lim, and Luis Xertu, each of whom approaches water as both material and metaphor.

Across the works, water becomes a shifting framework through which ideas of love, grief, and memory unfold. Fran Chang channels imagined landscapes through silk, creating atmospheric scenes suspended between clarity and dissolution. Omyo Cho translates memory into sculptural forms, merging glass and metal into speculative, almost otherworldly objects. Soyoung Chung explores transformation through site-responsive installations, while Minouk Lim brings together text, sound, and image to reflect on contemporary social dynamics. Luis Xertu turns to dried flora and foliage, grounding the exhibition in nature’s cyclical passage.

What we love: A fluid dialogue across practices, where water becomes both subject and structure—linking the personal and the collective with quiet precision.

“Amour Aquatique” at PODIUM Gallery
March 21–May 30 2026

Zheng Zhou: “Seeking Traces”

Kiang Malingue

Wan Chai

Zheng Zhou’s fifth exhibition with Kiang Malingue, a Hong Kong exhibition that marks a clear shift in his practice, moving decisively toward abstraction while maintaining continuity with earlier work. Following his 2024 exhibition Spanish Grilled Fish, where simplified figures and layered color shaped uncanny scenes, this presentation reduces figuration in favor of structure and surface.

Across the works, irregular rectangular color blocks appear as a recurring motif, dispersed in sweeping, unrestrained compositions. A palette of titanium white, scarlet, violet, and cobalt blue unfolds in layered fields, creating depth without a fixed narrative. Color operates independently, freed from symbolic meaning or personal preference. The compositions feel intuitive yet controlled, guided by movement rather than system.

At moments, traces of Zheng’s landscape sensibility remain, particularly in works like Secret Passage to Hidden Depths (2025), suggesting a transition rather than a rupture. 

What we love: Spring in the South (2025), a diptych where shifting clusters of color form a loose, labyrinthine composition—balancing gesture, light, and spatial tension.

Zheng Zhou at Kiang Malingue
March 24–May 23, 2026

WestK FunFest

WestK Performing Arts

West Kowloon

WestK FunFest returns for its third edition, transforming the West Kowloon Cultural District into a family-focused arts destination from March 19 through April 12, spanning the Easter holidays with more than 120 programs. Bringing together performers and creative groups from Hong Kong and abroad, the festival extends across the district with a mix of performances, workshops, and interactive installations.

A key highlight is The Cats that Slept for a Thousand Years by UK-based studio Air Giants, presented free to the public at the Harbourside East Lawn of the Art Park until April 7th. Making its Asian debut, the large-scale inflatable installation features a family of cats—two adults and a kitten—expanding on its original single form. Visitors are invited to engage directly with the work, as sound, light, and movement respond to touch, with gentle purring and rhythmic heartbeats creating a calming, immersive environment.

What we love: An interactive work that encourages touch, play, and pause—bringing a sense of calm and wonder into the everyday rhythm of the city. 

FunFest at WestK Performing Arts
March 19–April 12, 2026

Zheng Mahler: “Mushroom Clouds”

PHD Group

Goose Neck Bridge

One of the most ambitious presentations of the week comes from artist duo Royce Ng and anthropologist Daisy Bisenieks, who work together as Zheng Mahler. Over the past year, the duo has focused on Lantau Island, researching thirty-eight species of mushrooms—photographing, cataloguing, and building a dataset that was then fed into a custom AI model to generate speculative new forms. The project moves between art, science, and technology, challenging Western anxieties around fungi while expanding how knowledge can be constructed.

Their Hong Kong exhibition, “Mushroom Clouds,” transforms this research into an immersive environment. At its center is a large-scale living terrarium that simulates Lantau’s biodiverse ecosystem, where plants and fungi coexist within a shifting, responsive landscape. Fog gathers and disperses with changes in heat and moisture, while AI-generated mushroom forms emerge in a ghostly, evolving display.

What we love: An immersive intersection of disciplines, where data, ecology, and imagination converge to reframe the natural world within the city.

Zheng Mahler at PHD Group
March 21–May

Lee Bul: “From 1998 to Now”

M+

West Kowloon 

One of the most prominent and pioneering South Asian artists, Lee Bul is the subject of a comprehensive survey at M+, in this major Hong Kong exhibition at the city’s museum of contemporary visual culture. On view over several months, the exhibition traces four decades of her practice, from her emergence in the late 1980s amid Korea’s shifting sociopolitical landscape to her expansive, multidisciplinary career spanning sculpture, installation, and two-dimensional works.

Lee’s oeuvre consistently interrogates the relationship between the body, society, and systems of power, translating complex, often abstract ideas into visually striking forms. The exhibition unfolds across three sections, offering both a broad overview and focused insight into her evolving language. Landscape of Utopian Dreams presents large-scale installations reflecting on modernity and failed utopias, while The Body and Technology revisits her seminal cyborg works. Inside the Artist’s Mind reveals her process through drawings and maquettes.

What we love: A rare, in-depth look at a practice that moves seamlessly between imagination and critique, past and future.

Lee Bul at M+
March 14–August 9, 2026

Collect Hong Kong Art Fair 2026

Hong Kong Arts Centre

Wan Chai

Collect Hong Kong Art Fair 2026 builds on the momentum of its inaugural edition last year, continuing to position itself as a platform for local artistic talent. Bringing together 530 artists across a range of media, the fair creates space for emerging and established voices to connect with galleries, collectors, and a wider audience. The emphasis remains on visibility and exchange, fostering dialogue within Hong Kong’s evolving art ecosystem.

The fair reflects the city’s distinct “East meets West” identity, offering a cross-section of practices that span disciplines and perspectives. More than a marketplace, it operates as a point of convergence—where collaboration, discovery, and long-term support for artists take shape. As it establishes itself as a recurring event, it signals a growing commitment to sustaining local creative communities within Hong Kong’s broader cultural landscape.

What we love: A focused spotlight on local talent; capturing the energy of a scene that continues to grow in confidence, scale, and ambition. 

“Collect Hong Kong” at Hong Kong Arts Centre
March 21–29, 2026