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.
As part of Oslo Open ’25, Doris Guo and other artists will be opening their studios from April 26-27 this weekend.
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?
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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.
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.
Our current solo exhibition of Richard Hawkins, The Garden of Loved Ones, opened on March 23, 2025, and was written up in the following publications: The best shows to see in Hong Kong ahead of Art Basel, Payal Uttam, Art Basel Nine Solo Shows to See in Hong Kong, Spring 2025, Anna Dickie, Ocula 7 Shows to See During Hong Kong Art Week 2025, Claire Shiying Li, Frieze Headed to Art Basel Hong Kong? You Need to Make Time for the City’s 13 Can’t-Miss Exhibitions, Giuliana Brida and Katie Kern, Cultured Shows to See in Hong Kong, March 2025, ArtAsiaPacific
The exhibition, along with TRST03 Covey Gong, will be on view through May 24, 2025.
Ophela Lai, on the occasion of Empty Gallery’s 10th anniversary, interviewed Stephen Cheng, our gallery founder, in the Financial Times: “A pitch-black art gallery — now that’s a bright idea: Empty Gallery, a ‘black-cube’ arts space situated in a Hong Kong high-rise, has a reputation for immersive, experimental experiences:
Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery envelops you in darkness. The lift doors open and, for the few seconds before your eyes adjust, there is nothing but a void — no walls, no doors, no floor. Stephen Cheng opened the gallery in 2015 in an industrial high-rise block in Aberdeen harbour. It is a “black cube”: an inversion of the white-walled space that has been the default for showing art since the 20th century. Born in New York, Cheng — the grandson of Hong Kong shipping magnate Yue Kong-Pao — was educated at Eton, and later Harvard where he studied photography and film history (and took classes with Nan Goldin). Darkrooms and cinemas became his favourite haunts. It was in dark spaces where art entered his life “in an irrevocable way”.
March 7, 2025 – ongoing
Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection launches the first dedicated collection galleries at the Museum. Providing unprecedented access to core works in San José’s only publicly held art collection, the Museum invites a deeper sense of community pride in the collection.
The exhibition includes Tishan Hsu’s phone-breath-bed 3, 2023, which the museum acquired in 2024 for their permanent collection.
Initiated in 1973 under the guidance of San José artists, SJMA’s collection has grown to reflect our international point of convergence, where dynamic cultural diversity and high-tech industries mix in California soil. SJMA’s collection galleries position artists as storytellers to imagine the Museum as a space where culture and meaning are actively made and always in process. Organized into thematic groupings, Tending and Dreaming offers poetic starting points for engaging with ideas woven through the works of almost fifty artists from the Bay Area and beyond, including Ruth Asawa, Martha Atienza, Shilpa Gupta, Yolanda López, and Elias Sime, among many others.
There Is No Center at ROH Projects arrives not as a conventional presentation of artworks, but as an event in the truest sense—a disturbance in the usual flow of time. Extending beyond the gallery’s familiar five-week format, the twelve-week-long exhibition challenges the static nature of traditional exhibition-making, embracing a fluid proposition in which artworks enter and exit the exhibition at irregular intervals and for undisclosed periods, and performative actions instigate reconfigurations of how and where works are positioned. These movements establish ever-changing contexts and reconsideration of the works vis a vis in relation to each other, as well as in relation to themselves.
Raha Raissnia will be installing new paintings in the second week of March, and hosting a film-performance on March 9. Read more details at the link below.
Reina Sugihara fantasizes about breathing like a bird—having constant access to fresh air, as she told me, and being able to inhale and exhale deeply as if it were second nature. Inherited from their dinosaur ancestors, the nine to eleven air sacs attached to birds’ lungs allow for oxygen storage enabling effortless and effective breathing. In today’s stress-filled world where we need meditation and breathing classes for their constant reminders to respire deeply and correctly, these small, round, inconspicuous air sacs seem like something that might be as beneficial for humans as they are necessary for birds.
Emerging from the shadows of Empty Gallery’s customarily dark sanctum, Reina Sugihara’s paintings—softly illuminated by spotlights—exuded a quiet primordial force. Her abstract biomorphic forms, rendered in tones ranging from earthy to carnal, resemble blistering encrustations. The thickly painted canvases, some large enough to loom over the viewer, support viscous deposits of pigment and gesso that fissure as they dry. One thinks of scorched terrain, cooling lava, or half-healed wounds and scabs, but the associations are brief—the paintings resist legibility.
Empty Gallery 很高興為大家帶來紐約藝術家徐梯善在畫廊舉行的第二個個展《屏膚》。自1980年代起,徐氏的藝術創作探索訊息科學改變我們具體化經驗中情感、接收及政治輪廓的複雜方式。持續改進創作的實踐以跟上此等湧現的現象,徐氏的作品介乎於繪畫和雕塑,採用方法如UV印刷、鑄造和數碼照片處理創造處於物理與虛擬之間界限的物件。《屏膚》延伸了先是使用於展覽《刪》的創作模式,繼而在第59屆威尼斯雙年展及紐約Miguel Abreu Gallery的展出中更臻完熟,進一步拓寬徐氏的探究範疇以涵蓋生物政治學的擴展場域和數碼監控國家。
由裝置在畫廊19樓空間的六幅新畫作及一個標誌性雕塑組成,展覽《屏膚》中作品的高清表象躍動著一種安靜的威脅感。在作品如〈camera-screen-skin〉和〈double-breath 1〉中定義創作的整體光學性,曾首度在徐氏1980年代的作品中表現為擺動的掃描線(當時它們指向的是一種在屏幕虛幻空間中帶催眠性或暈眩感的吸併) ,但現已逐漸變形為無處不在的點與網孔。這些扭曲的地勢圖表現出一種降服於網絡或被其吞噬的感覺,而這個網絡在其力量與規模上皆接近迷異的幻覺。在這些圖案中疊蓋的是具像影像元素(身體部份的碎片,肉質褶皺和神秘小孔),它們的匿名性似乎指向把獨立主體簡約為可量化和可控數據的抽象單位這簡化過程。以有色矽膠形塑的未分化肉身物質,從這些表面冒出和鑽入,又或從當中滲出。這些元素訴說著物質軀體在一個它開始顯得日益過時的時代中頑固的存在。在這個時代中它只能以黏稠固態現身,被粒子化卻不能完全分解進符號資本的液態流。作為一個整體,這些作品似乎訴說著一種糾纏,一種來自當代主體置身在一個無處不在、又無處可尋、看不見但摸得到的網絡中,其神經生物學性的糾纏。這些作品表達著一種世俗的反烏托邦主義,在當中消費和愉悅(實際上,經驗自身的基礎)與監視、身體監管和更微妙的生物政治控制形式,皆是密不可分。它們在對身體監控和控制的關注這層面上,可回溯徐氏在1980年代末的作品,當中首次明確地表達了科技系統與官僚系統的交結。
展覽的重點作品〈phone-breath-bed 3〉是早前於第 59 屆威尼斯雙年展中展出的一系列雕塑作品的第三件。這件混雜結構作品結合醫院病床、個人計算設備和生命維持系統的元素,可說是徐氏對軀體與設備裝置之間的交接最深沉的探索。一個帶輪的金屬支架上躺著一具透明聚碳酸酯軀體,並用上矽膠鑄件和類似觸控屏幕的印刷面作點綴。在作品核心的概念中,是把醫療產業與功利主義考量連接到現代UI/UX設計中優化界面的深層邏輯。〈phone-breath-bed 3〉作品中的人臉(能聯想到死亡面具)與暴露的體腔召喚來閾限空間,在當中軀體創傷和身體衰退的分雜效應折疊進及強化了屏幕吸併的世界——數據中心與停屍房之間那不自在的交叉點。
在一個歷史性的時刻(1980年代)當徐氏許多藝術同行仍在匆忙追趕舊有影像循環系統影響之時,他對其時剛出現的數碼領域所會帶來的結果獨度的關注(不是對所謂新媒體單純的拜物主義,而是考慮到它對人類經驗不斷變化本質的多方面暗示)早已冠其先見之譽。《屏膚》重整這脈絡的探索,冀與科技樂觀主義的脈衝處於最低潮的時刻產生共鳴。在這樣的一個時刻,數碼民主曾被淹沒的威權主義充分顯現,但當中主體過於糾結,過度消化和量化,以致無法看清外界。有一種幾乎是無意識的擺盪,在網絡屏幕誘人的流暢性與有形軀殻多餘的意識之間,越過其自身淘汰而頑固地繼續存在。徐氏的創作或許比任何其他在世的藝術家都更清楚地表達出物件(或許甚至是物質本身)當從一個壓倒性消極政體虛擬地深陷進一種官僚主義控制論而要面對自身糾結之時所處於的這種不穩定和矛盾的狀態。但也許,甚至比這更重要的是,徐氏的創作代表了一種持續不斷卻永遠不會完成的嘗試,試圖理解和規劃當前經驗的本體。然而,不是從一個假構的全知定位或透過一種分析方法的研究手段來實踐,而是作為一種對內在的掌握,在液態流動和身體,數據,與屏幕之間。