For Cj Hendry, flowers have always offered fertile ground for reimagining the familiar. Now, after creating viral flower markets and immersive installations around the world, the artist is giving her floral universe a permanent home in Hong Kong.
Located at G/F, 15 Aberdeen Street in Central, near PMQ, Hendry’s new Flower Shop is a three-level flagship devoted to flowers that, quite literally, never wilt. Instead of fresh-cut stems arranged in water, visitors encounter an exuberant world of soft-sculpture blooms: plush, tactile, intensely colorful objects that transform the rituals of buying and giving flowers into something closer to collecting art.
Open daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., the new location is not a temporary exhibition or limited-time pop-up. It is a permanent destination—and Hendry’s first flagship in Asia—marking a new chapter for an artist whose practice has increasingly moved beyond the gallery wall and into large-scale, participatory environments.
A Flower Shop Where the Blooms Last Forever
Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
There is something knowingly cheeky about Hendry’s approach to the flower shop. Visitors can browse individual plush stems, build bouquets, and take home objects that retain the visual language of floristry while rejecting its most defining quality: impermanence.
Each stem is priced at HK$75, with a complimentary tenth flower included with every purchase—a playful nod to the rituals and promotions of conventional retail. The permanent collection is supplemented by daily drops, ensuring that the experience continues to shift and evolve.
Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
The flowers themselves are designed to occupy an unusual space between sculpture, souvenir, gift, and collectible. Their saturated colors and exaggerated softness give them an immediate visual appeal, but the project also extends Hendry’s longstanding interest in transforming ordinary objects into experiences that feel slightly surreal.
“Flowers represent a global language of sentiment, spanning from apologies to festivities,” Hendry said of the project. “But their ephemeral nature is bittersweet.”
That tension between celebration and disappearance is central to the new Flower Shop. Here, a bouquet can become a keepsake. A gift intended for a birthday, anniversary, apology, or ordinary Tuesday can remain on a shelf, sofa, or bedside table for years.
The result is part art installation, part retail environment, and part fantastical botanical landscape.
From Hyperrealist Drawings to Immersive Worlds
Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
Born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1988 and now based in New York, Hendry first became widely known for her extraordinarily detailed hyperrealistic drawings. Working primarily in colored pencil, she developed a distinctive ability to render everyday objects and materials with startling precision, often making a hand-drawn image appear almost photographic at first glance.
Over time, however, her practice expanded dramatically in scale.
Rather than remaining focused solely on works on paper, Hendry began translating her fascination with objects, texture, color, and perception into immersive installations. Her projects have transformed spaces into environments built around singular, often unexpectedly familiar ideas—from flowers to pools and other playful spectacles that invite audiences to physically enter the artist’s world.
Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
Among her best-known projects is a monumental pool installation staged in the Nevada desert, while her flower markets have become some of her most recognizable experiential works. These installations share an interest in creating moments of visual abundance: places that are highly photographable, certainly, but also carefully constructed around touch, movement, surprise, and collective experience.
Hendry’s ability to move between fine art, fashion, retail, and popular culture has also made her a distinctive figure in contemporary art. Her projects have attracted celebrity collectors and substantial international attention, while her exhibitions routinely blur the boundaries between viewing, participating, shopping, and playing.
The new Hong Kong flagship brings those strands together in one permanent space.
Hong Kong Becomes a Permanent Part of Hendry’s World
Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
The Flower Shop does not arrive in Hong Kong without precedent. Hendry has already developed a strong relationship with the city through a series of increasingly ambitious projects, including juju world at Pacific Place and a Flower Market presented at Central Harbourfront during Art Basel.
Her connection to Hong Kong’s creative scene also stretches back to a collaboration with Christian Louboutin, another example of the way Hendry’s practice has crossed between artistic disciplines and commercial worlds.
With the new Central location, however, her relationship with the city takes on a different kind of permanence.
The three-story flagship transforms a neighborhood shopping experience into an extension of Hendry’s artistic universe. Instead of arriving for a brief run and disappearing after a few weeks, as immersive installations so often do, Flower Shop is intended to remain open as an ongoing destination.
That permanence feels especially significant for an artist whose work has often played with the temporary nature of experience. Hendry’s new flowers do not fade, her inventory is continuously refreshed, and the shop itself is designed to outlast the usual cycle of the pop-up.
Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
For visitors in Hong Kong—and for those arriving in Central from elsewhere—it offers an opportunity to step inside one of Hendry’s most colorful ideas and take a small piece of it home.
At a moment when contemporary artists are increasingly exploring new ways of reaching audiences beyond the traditional gallery system, Hendry’s Flower Shop makes a persuasive case for art as something immersive, tactile, accessible, and perhaps even giftable.
After all, these are flowers designed not simply for the moment they are received, but for everything that comes after.
“Flowers represent a global language of sentiment,”
Cj Hendry
Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
Courtesy of Cj Hendry.
