Aaina Bhargava reviews La Moustache in Frieze Magazine: “A mound of sand sits on the top floor of Empty Gallery in Hong Kong, glistening in the gallery’s signature pitch-black darkness. Nearby, a staircase leads to the level below. As if hovering like a mirage or suspended in mid-air, a stream of sand trickles to the ground. In Paul Kos’s Sand Piece (1971), grains filter through a small aperture in the ceiling above, creating a captivating illusory effect of extreme slow motion.”
At Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s “Gama,” Empty Gallery’s pitch-black, two-floor void functioned less as backdrop than as active medium. For her third solo exhibition with the black-box space, Gork continued to nurture darkness as a collaborator, allowing the works to unfold as a single, cavernous installation.
Cold air and darkness seized the senses upon entry. A short corridor and unguarded reception area led to Gork’s conceptual, deconstructed “cave,” where the titular sculptures, Gama 1, 2, and 3 (all 2025), emerged as sequences of chunky terracotta tiles suspended on steel frames. Named after the Okinawan word gama, meaning “cave,” the series uses the island’s red clay to trace the interior impressions of Shimuku Gama, where Gork first conceived these works. Conceived as “permeable membranes,” the blocks of terracotta hover ominously in liminal darkness, solid and weighty yet cracked and vulnerable.
Chan Hau Chun’s Map of Traces will be on view at Cushion Works in San Francisco from February 21 through April 4. Map of Traces (2025) is a 29-minute film by Hong Kong artist Chan Hau Chun. It was recorded on MiniDV, Google Street View, police surveillance cameras, and various phones. Its primary subject is human relationships in the wake of the 2019 demonstrations. Its many opposites include redaction and revelation, exile and homecoming, the fugitive and the fixed. Its cardinal tension lies in the gap between authorized narrative and lived experience.
Mask, umbrella, camera, uniform, glasses, backpack, barricades. The grain of memory, a low-hanging fog. How best to distinguish between what’s happened, what’s here, and what’s around the bend? Throughout, the tink tink tink of the crosswalk signal. When to stop, when to go, when to run.
Hannah Sage Kay writes in The Guardian:
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork has created a sound installation emulating second world war spaces: a Japanese internment camp in California and caves used as bunkers in Okinawa
In 1945, during the Battle of Okinawa, the great-uncle of the Japanese-American, Los Angeles-based artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork was stationed on the island as a US solider, having volunteered for service probably in the hopes that his family might be spared from the Japanese internment camps back home. They weren’t, and so while his siblings and parents were incarcerated at Tule Lake in northern California, he was on the frontlines in what has been deemed one of the bloodiest conflicts in the Pacific during the second world war.
From ARTnews: Opening on April 16, this edition of Greater New York will mark PS1’s 50th anniversary, and rather than bringing on any outside curators, the museum has this time leaned on its staff to organize the show. The exhibition’s curatorial team includes director Connie Butler, chief curator and director of curatorial affairs Ruba Katrib, associate curators Jody Graf and Elena Ketelsen, assistant curator Kari Rittenbach, curatorial assistant Sheldon Gooch, and curatorial coordinator Andrea Sánchez.
Taro Masushio and Cici Wu are amongst the participating artists of this year’s exhibition. Please see the link below for further information.
On February 6 and 7, Vunkwan Tam will be exhibiting new works as part of an exhibition, 野有死蘭, in Room 303 at the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, Hong Kong. Venue support from Crash.
Jaime Chu reviews La Moustache in issue #86 of Spike Magazine, Salad Days: “What is the fine line between undiagnosed paranoia and collective psychosis? Emmanuel Carrère’s 2005 film La Moustache, adapted from his own 1986 novel of the same name, portrays Marc, a Parisian architect who decides to shave off his mustache before a party one night. To spiraling consequences, it turns out: for neither his friends, nor his coworkers, nor his wife acknowledge the difference, even denying that he ever had a mustache to begin with. When his wife threatens to send him to a psychiatric institution, Marc, in a moment of panic, makes an escape, boarding the next plane out of Paris to Hong Kong.
A reality without consensus, and the destabilizing effect an experience of it might prompt, is the subject of a formally attentive and hermeneutically provocative exhibition curated by Jordan Stein, a longtime fixture of Bay Area arts, at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery. His riff on Carrère begins in a kind of foyer, where a trio of found-object works set the table for a negotiation between the dissemination and containment of uncomfortable knowledge.”
Cici Wu is participating in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, which is on view from January 24 until April 19, 2026.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings is the first retrospective in twenty-five years dedicated to the groundbreaking work of the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (b. 1951, Busan, South Korea; d. 1982, New York City). Cha produced an expansive range of works across text-based media, video, and performance, including her posthumously published book, Dictée (1982). The artist’s interdisciplinary practice gave shape to the experimental art scenes in San Francisco, New York City, and beyond.
After emigrating from South Korea to the United States, Cha enrolled in 1969 at UC Berkeley, where she studied art practice, comparative literature, and film. Keenly attuned to the active role that audiences play in the creation of meaning, she prioritized nonlinear narratives to allow for more open-ended forms of interpretation—what she termed a method of “Multiple Telling with Multiple Offering.” The retrospective adopts this framework to allow for a range of entry points into Cha’s work, guiding visitors through the themes—memory, displacement, and the mutability of language, among others—that recur in her oeuvre.
Since 1992, owing to a generous gift from the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation, BAMPFA has served as the steward of Cha’s art and archives. Gathering over one hundred artworks and archival materials from across her short but prolific career, as well as select loans of works by Cha and other artists, Multiple Offerings highlights the inventive, playful, and meditative methods of Cha’s practice while also situating her work within a constellation of artistic forebearers, peers, and contemporary artists for whom she has long been a lodestar.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue—the first museum monograph dedicated to the artist in over twenty years.
Not With Symbols is now on view at Bodenrader, Chicago through February 28, 2026.
“Metaphor cannot supplant the legible image and assume the role of descriptor. Ours is a distorted reality, in which images are compressed, flattened beneath glass and gloss, and lit from behind. Here, images and their meanings or representations are slippery, as are the ocular and cognitive processes we rely on to perceive and comprehend them. Despite this, logic is not abandoned altogether in favor of a nonsensical miasma of free association. Rather image itself is probed and worked to such a degree that it both dissolves and reifies within (or in spite of) its own physical, technological, political and social structures.
Ideas of legibility and readability are often at odds with the level of access granted by each of these artists. Some achieve this internally by preventing a clear understanding of their content through omission, redaction, and dilution. Others pack in detail, clarity, and specificity to such a degree that viewers are subconsciously compelled to decode the image through pure visual recognition. No matter the approach, these artists each exploit the innate structures of image and representation to expose our social and biological compulsions for resolution.”
Participating artists include Eberhard Havekost, Taro Masushio, Alan Michael, Josephine Pryde and Raha Raissnia.
A new exhibition at Layr, Vienna, titled “…each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself…” and curated by Boris Ondreička, is now on view through February 28, 2026.
“The exhibition “…each thing is itself in not being itself, and is not itself in being itself…”[1] departs from the foundations of the religious/spiritual and ontological philosophy of Keiji Nishitani (1900–1990). The Japanese thinker explained that things exist only in relation to other things and understanding them therefore also requires exploring what they are not. His thinking was significantly shaped by his studies with Martin Heidegger in Freiburg, Germany, and ultimately made him a key figure in intellectual exchange and mediation between the hemispheres who could critically compare and synthetise various schools of thought of the West and the East.”
Participating artists include Anchan/Anna Daučiková, Anna Andreeva, Jędrzej Bieńko, Igor and Ivan Buharov, Stano Filko, Denisa Lehocká, Yutaka Matsuzawa, Luboš Plný, Kazuna Taguchi, Philipp Timischl, Petr Válek, Cici Wu, Guan Xiao and Leah Ke Yi Zheng.
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