Henry Shum

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Henry Shum, *Ghost*, 2022. Oil on canvas, 120 x 180 cm

Installation view, ‘Hex’, Andrew Kreps Gallery, 2022. Photo: Lance Brewer

Installation view, ‘Vortices’, Empty Gallery, 2020

Henry Shum, *Man, Woman and Child*, 2019

Henry Shum (b.1998, Hong Kong) received his BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts London in 2020. Selected group exhibitions include presentations at Andrew Kreps Gallery; New York (2021), Candid Arts Trust Gallery (2020), Fitzrovia Gallery (2019), and Bones and Pearl Gallery (2018), in London. Shum currently lives and works in Hong Kong. His debut solo exhibition with Empty Gallery, Vortices, opened in Fall 2020. He is jointly represented by Empty Gallery and Andrew Kreps Gallery, and his first solo exhibition with Andrew Kreps Gallery, Hex, opened in November 2022.

CURRENT:
The Decameron
ZHI Foundation, Beijing
May 20, 2025 – March 30, 2026

PRESS:
Alex Jen, “Henry Shum’s Atmospheric Oil Paintings Glow With A Mysterious Inner Light“, Art in America
Todd Lippy, “Henry Shum at Andrew Kreps Gallery“, Artforum

Henry Shum_Bio CV
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Henry Shum press archive
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Slugs, AI, Ghosts: Richard Hawkins’s Haunted House, now published in Frieze magazine

Getting Up Close and Personal with Painters Emma McIntyre and Richard Hawkins, published May 6, 2025:

Henry Shum


2025-06-07	Vunkwan Tam in Don't worry, what happens happens mostly without you, madame leniou, Athens
	madame leniou returns—briefly—to Athens, to a domestic space: a 1936 apartment designed by Dimitris Pikionis, everything you ever wanted. Convince yourself that’s what you want. After a brief winter and unnaturally sunny but cruel spring she comes back to a life she used to have. The lifestyle spoiled. The spoils of lifestyle. […] Participating artists include: Steve Bishop, Anna Clegg, Ian Law, Erasmia Kadinopoulou, Will Sheridan Jr., Vunkwan Tam, Constantin Thun opening in Athens: Saturday 07 June, 2025, 3–7pm. Open through June, by appointment. Read more …
2025-05-21	Raha Raissnia in Portrait II, Galerie Khoshbakht, New York
	Galerie Khoshbakht is thrilled to announce the opening of the exhibition Portrait II – presenting works by Beth Collar, Behrang Karimi, Mitchell Kehe, René Kemp, Yoora Park and Raha Raissnia. “With this exhibition we are presenting our programme to New York City. Bringing together a group of artists undoubtably will put things into perspective. Lively conjugations, visual languages, memories, material histories; they fold into each other, dragging one another by the hand. The system will be put in place. However, living these ways of instituting, putting the distant thinking on the side and allowing our own lived experience to take centre, we slowly come to the realization that institutions and programs, no matter how they express themselves, are a beautiful thing; not because we must be critical of them but because we live in them.” Opening: Friday, May 23, 6–8 pm May 24 – June 28, 2025 Read more …
2025-05-20	Henry Shum and Taro Masushio in The Decameron, ZHI Foundation
	ZHI Foundation in Beijing has opened a new exhibition inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, on view from May 20 2025 through March 30 2026. Participating artists include Fei Erqi, Wang Hui, Yu Zhiding, Gai Qi, Mai Trung Thu, K.C. Chww, Cheung Pak Kan, Wing-Tong Lee, Luigi Ghirri, Robert Mapplethorpe, Martin Wong, David Rappeneau. Liu Xiaodong, Liu Ye, Elizabeth Peyton, Kai Althoff, Yuichi Yokoyama, Izumi Kato, Wang Xingwei, Urs Fischer, Anri Sala, Mika Rottenberg, Allison Katz, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Sanya Kantarovsky, Yu Nishimura, Chen Fei, Firenze Lai, Tao Hui, Raphaela Simon, Brook Hsu, Sasaoka Yuriko, Taro Masushio, Hiroka Yamashita and Henry Shum. Read more …
2025-05-15	Tishan Hsu in 360°: Why We Paint? at BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou
	A new wallpaper and three wall-based works by Tishan Hsu are on view at the exhibition “360°: why we paint?” at BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou, curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Sun Man, running from 16 May to 12 October 2025. A collaboration between BY ART MATTERS and Il Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Italy, the exhibition presents over a hundred works by 39 artists internationally. Read more …
2025-05-14	Bradford Nordeen: Slugs, AI, Ghosts: Richard Hawkins’s Haunted House
	Slugs, AI, Ghosts: Richard Hawkins’s Haunted House, now published in Frieze magazine Drawing inspiration from Butoh, the artist’s show at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, features collages of queer bodies “We know we’re in a haunted house: Slug Sex (2025) – a video projection of two encircling slugs – is our first sight in ‘The Garden of Loved Ones’. Its cast light catches in the cobwebs of the gallery’s darker corners. The slug who deigns to top pushes out a goopy blue phallus that runs the length of its body, slugs being a hermaphroditic species. And this, being a Richard Hawkins joint. Around the bend hang the 2012 ‘Ankoku’ collages, exhibited in that year’s Whitney Biennial. These compositions – hastily cut archival materials and notes taped intuitively beside printouts and calligraphy – mimic the notebooks of Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the postwar Japanese dance form Butoh. Their posthumous publication disclosed how Hijikata approached choreography with a collage-like glom, pasting gestures torn from Western art history books alongside handwritten directives. Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario write in The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2019), Butoh – which roughly translates to ‘waltz of darkness’ – is a loosening of signification that champions ‘arbitrary chains of movement [and] diseased or socially dispossessed peoples, or bodies in pain’.” Read more …
2025-05-06	Richard Hawkins and Emma McIntyre in Interview
	Getting Up Close and Personal with Painters Emma McIntyre and Richard Hawkins, published May 6, 2025: Born in New Zealand and now based in Los Angeles, the artist Emma McIntyre is no stranger to frequent travel. But the vibrant art scene of Hong Kong, the site of her second exhibition with David Zwirner, is a bit farther afield than even McIntyre ever imagined herself. Titled Among my swan, a name she’s borrowed from Mazzy Star, the show demonstrates the artist’s taste for chromatic abstractions that transcend the limits of language. “By introducing the swan motif,” McIntyre told Richard Hawkins last month, “I can connect to all the painted swans in art history.” She does so using oil paint alongside unconventional materials like oxidized iron, a gambit, Hawkins says, that suggests McIntyre’s granular attention to her artistic forbearers. “I think the difference is your investment in the history of painting,” he says, “but also how closely you look at other paintings.” Fresh off his own show at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery, The Garden of Loved Ones, he and McIntyre got on a Zoom to discuss their shared obsessions: Baudelaire, art historian Michael Levey, and painting with your body, literally. Read more …
2025-05-02	Cici Wu: Lanterns from the Unreturned at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai
	Cici Wu: Lanterns from the Unreturned marks the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, bringing together key works from the past decade and centering on a new large-scale, site-specific commission of the same name. Central to the exhibition is Lanterns from the Unreturned (2025), a newly commissioned site-specific installation occupying the museum’s East Staircase. Originally built in 1933 for the Royal Asiatic Society, the building was repurposed in the 1970s to store confiscated books during the Cultural Revolution. Wu reanimates this forgotten history through arrangements of lanterns in book form, handcrafted from bamboo and conservation-grade paper traditionally used in rare book restoration. These sculptures line the staircase’s windows and interior, echoing the bundled books that once filled the space. The installation imagines a spectral return, volumes drifting back into the building as flickering presences, alive with the possibility of being read once more. At dusk, the lanterns begin to glow, casting inward and outward light, illuminating the museum’s East Staircase like a vertical scroll. Visible from Huqiu Road even after the museum’s operation hours, these fragile vessels hold space for the unspoken and the unreturned, allowing stories once silenced to shimmer faintly back into view. The exhibition is organized by X Zhu-Nowell, Executive Director and Chief Curator and Karen Wang, Assistant Curator and Researcher at Rockbund Art Museum. On view through September 28, 2025 and a year-long, site-specific installation. Read more …
2025-04-22	Doris Guo: Oslo Open Studios
	As part of Oslo Open ’25, Doris Guo and other artists will be opening their studios from April 26-27 this weekend. Read more …
2025-04-20	7pm in Hong Kong by Geoffrey Mak, Spike Art Magazine
	As the roof caved in on the empire of the US dollar, a son of the diaspora returned to an art market buzzing despite censorship and mass exodus. Enter the Chinese century? 1. Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, lives in an area of my mind with high green hills and banquet halls and concrete residential towers whose balconies jut like vertebrae along spines made of stone. Wild boar roam the hills in the dark. Political prisoners in the Stanley jail bake in humidity and sweat without any air-conditioning. Jet-lagged from New York, I was taking a nap one afternoon in our hotel on the southern coast of Hong Kong Island, and was dreaming that someone I loved was handing me a piece of paper. I began pulling at it with both hands – it was blank, no message – until I felt someone kissing my face. Read more …
2025-04-11	Jaime Chu interviews Stephen Cheng in Spike Art Magazine
	Stephen Cheng on Ten Years of Empty Gallery, Jaime Chu, Spike Art Magazine The founder of Hong Kong art’s black cube on sheltering artists from the system, programming as film-making, and the experimental drug called jet lag. When I first moved back to Hong Kong as an adult in 2023, a new friend tried to recommend me cool things to do: “During a performance at the closing party for Vunkwan Tam’s show at Empty last year, [owner of noise label Mouhoi] Cedric Ng punched a sink until his hands bled.” They knew what to say, but they didn’t have to try so hard. In Hong Kong, historically an entrepot dominated by blue-chip galleries, unwieldy semi-private institutions, and a constellation of independent art spaces surviving precariously under colossal real estate conditions, Stephen Cheng’s Empty Gallery occupies an eclectic yet somehow exacting niche. It’s where minimalist experimental music, Japanese conceptual art and its heirs, and sculptural and filmic practices at the forefront of the Asian diaspora converge in a renovated industrial space notorious for its dark, cavernous interior. Friends who don’t otherwise care for contemporary art bring themselves to the hour-long queue for the gallery’s annual rave, and its artists have found genuine interlocutors within an industry that does not always afford them time. Read more …