More Not-To-Miss Exhibitions in Hong Kong

Between visiting Art Basel and Art Central in Hong Kong this week, you’ll want to save time in your schedule for visiting these exhibitions at art spaces around the city.

Kiang Malingue 
Tiffany Chung: “entangled traces, disremembered landscapes”
March 20—May 6
A three-channel video installation and suite of cartographic artworks make up Tiffany Chung’s first solo show in Hong Kong, “entangled traces, disremembered landscapes”. On view at Kiang Malingue through May 6, visitors will find Chung’s ongoing exploration of history, geopolitics, and memory informing this look at the interconnectedness of topics like nature, war, colonialism, culture, and state-making. Through Chung’s gaze, cartography becomes art and geographies suggest all of the histories they’ve witnessed. Chung invites her viewers to consider these hidden narratives while experiencing works that are the product of studies and research. In particular, the featured works examine subjects and locations like the U.S. military global footprint, histories of the terra rouge plateau in Bình Long-Phuóc Long, and pirate attacks from the 1980s in the Gulf of Thailand. 

Kiang Malingue Tin Wan
Zheng Bo: “Beech, Pine, Fern, Acacia”
March 18—May 6
Zheng Bo’s “Beech, Pine, Fern, Acacia” presents four of the artist’s “biophilia” films together in the same space for the first time ever. At Kiang Malingue’s Tin Wan gallery, visitors can find the films displayed on monumental screens within the dark concrete space, where each of the four works paints a distinctive vision of different ecological scenarios, conceived with underscoring narratives like contact between queer humans and queer plants, sensual encounters with flora, ideas of symbiosis and community, and more. Featured are the works Pteridophilia, featuring an environment of ferns; beech trees of the UNESCO World Heritage site in Brandenburg, Germany, filmed for The Political Life of Plants; Samur, filmed under an acacia tree in Dubai; and Le Sacre du printemps, which features a cast of Nordic dancers in courtship with pine trees, referencing the 1913 experimental work by the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and composer Igor Stravinsky. 

Asia Art Archive
“The Collective School”
March 1—April 1
Installed within the library of Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive is a show examining artistic and collective learning models, entitled “The Collective School”. The exhibition was born from questions like “What makes collectivity necessary for survival today?” and “How do artists learn from their peers in a collective?”, visitors to the library will find eight collectives from throughout Asia sharing the results of their group discussions and conversations on the topic. 

Osage Gallery
Maurice Benayoun: Value of Values
March 17—April 29
Maurice Benayoun’s project Value of Values (VoV) is an ever-evolving neuro-design-based project existing on the blockchain, which utilizes audience participation to assign shape and form to human values like money, love, and freedom. At Osage Gallery, the latest developments of this project—which has been made through a combination of neuroscience, fintech, design, and even AI technology—sees viewers’ thoughts lent to the process of creating physical artworks (some 2D and some 3D) and minted NFTs from the data collected in a creative collaboration between human and machine. 

LGDR & Wei
Francesco Clemente: Winter Flowers
March 20—April 29
LGDR & Wei is sharing a show of works by Francesco Clemente that were all produced in 2023, titled “Winter Flowers”. Building on the artist’s series of the same name, which originated in 2010 after his wife began the practice of picking blooms that survived the chill of a New York winter, Clemente’s botanical compositions represent beauty, resilience, presence, and pleasure. Painted on a series of large square canvases, the works feature a noteworthy color palette that has been carefully chosen from plant and vegetable pigments, which paint Clemente’s canvases with hues both vibrant and dull—like the largest canvas in the show, Winter Flowers XLIV (measuring 92 x 92 inches), which has been imagined in the grayscale, or an unrealistic but captivating selection of teal, orange, brown, and greenish yellows making up Winter Flowers XL. 

Ben Brown Fine Arts
José Parlá: Phosphene
March 18—April 29
The works on view in José Parlá’s “Phosphene” originate from the artist’s time spent in his hometown of Miami, where his sunlit natural surroundings offered a change in scenery from his usual setting of an industrial Brooklyn studio. Noting the hallucinatory images that come from closing one’s eyes while in direct contact with the sun’s rays, Parlá’s latest works are born from this experience. Featured in the show, Ben Brown Fine Arts is presenting ten compositions of a more intimate scale that are the product  of this plein-air painting experience, along with two large-scale canvases, which bear witness to the artist’s process and gestures with their layers of looping, swirling white markings.

White Cube
Tuni Adeniyi-Jones: Deep Dive
March 22—May 20
In “Deep Dive,” White Cube presents new paintings and lithographs by the British Nigerian artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones. Existing in fields of color, Adeniyi-Jones’s stylized subjects (often representative of figures from mythology, religion, and ceremonies) float in spaces devoid of any specific horizon or orientation, surrounded by swirls of energy or environments of leafy flora. Appearing as though they might be dancing or poised ready for movement, the artist’s recognizable rounded, muscular bodies and their surroundings address the artist’s own Yoruba heritage, the Black-American culture of his home in Brooklyn, and the work of past artists including the tile designs of William de Morgan, Aaron Douglas’s use of silhouette, and the fluid imagery of Ben Enwonwu.

Blindspot Gallery
Wang Tuo: “The Second Interrogation”
March 21—May 6
Wang Tuo’s exhibition “The Second Interrogation” looks at cultural censorship in China through material like a two-part video installation and a display of paintings, drawings, and visual research material. A sequel to the 2017 The Interrogation, (which captures the psychology behind interview methods), the titular film work follows a dramatic encounter between an artist and a censor, where the two end up changing roles, in turn posing questions about the importance of the arts and their purpose in an authoritarian state. Also featured, viewers will find the “Weapons” series painting portraits of anonymous figures from China’s underground art and culture scene, a selection of drawings that are a result of the featured video, and archival campaign imagery that illustrates the topic at hand. 

Videotage
“Foundation – a Web3 Media Art Festival”
March 17—September 16
Noting the new era of digital culture and the internet that we have entered with the emergence of Web3, Videotage’s “Foundation – a Web3 Media Art Festival” aims to prepare a new generation of artists for the evolving digital space. Through three commissions and 12 works from international artists, the gallery invites viewers of this virtual exhibition (co-curated by Kyle Chung, Angel Leung, and Lisa Park SoYoung) to join in an exploration of the creative possibilities of Web3 from the perspectives of decentralization, humanized AI, and extended realities (XR). Of the fifteen featured artists, the exhibition includes a commission by Chloë Cheuk (with digital development by Liu Chang), surrounding the correlation between exam-oriented education and school bullying, a digital-sculptural hybrid encompassing a holographic character by Elena Knox titled The Masters, Balon Bacon Ijo’s look at the climate crisis, and more.