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榮幸呈獻《靈時小屋》。小屋位於畫廊入口大廳左側的獨立房間內， 不定期展示來自不同時空和背景的創作，讓觀者對單件作品進行深度思考。該計畫有別於我們的恆常展覽，旨在從常規項目的邏輯、思維及壓力中開闢新的空間。展覽穿越遙遠距離，在無限微觀細節中爬梳，並每次委託文字工作者撰寫論文，以動態的視角從多層面討論作品，從而照看我城獨特的歷史與社會環境。
《靈時小屋》的名稱靈感來自精神時光屋：在漫畫家鳥山明筆下，精神時光屋是一個時空膠囊式的異次元自我修煉空間。項目藉此探索一種植根於非西方哲學的思辨性認識論，用於在懸崖峭壁般的全球化文化中漫步。
《靈時小屋》原為2018年至2021年間於皇后博物館開展的合作項目。博物館憑著共襄盛舉的精神，將其名稱及概念無限期交付Empty Gallery使用。
在第二個展覽中，小屋將聯手三藩市灣區最具影響力的藝術家和電影製作人之一Jordan Belson，展示他的一系列繪畫作品。Belson作為Harry Smith、Oskar Fischinger和John Cage的同代人，致力探索宇宙結構，並視擴展人類意識為終生任務，而他的創作亦源於這些抱負。Belson受到神秘主義和科學的深刻影響，發展出一套獨特的視覺語言，包括振動模式、幾何圖案和放射狀線條，表達他對超越主義運動的願景。
Belson的《孔雀之書》（Peacock Book）繪畫創作於1950年代初期，當時他正處於創作醞釀期，開始逐漸形成他後來最為知名的抽象電影風格。他運用墨水和粉彩，在中國紙上以書法般的筆觸完成作品，充滿活力和幻像般的動感——紙上彷彿上演著整部Belson電影，畫面似乎來自天外並轉瞬即逝，通通被濃縮進某個時刻的視覺密度之中。
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Jordan Belson（1926-2011）是二十世紀前衛電影的重要人物。他年輕時學習繪畫，1946年獲得加州大學伯克利分校的藝術學位。他最初以畫家身分取得成功，在1940年代末於三藩市現代藝術博物館和紐約古根海姆博物館（當時稱為非具象繪畫博物館）展出作品。然而，1950年之後，他定居在三藩市的北灘區，主要專注於電影製作。儘管他在餘生仍繼續創作繪畫和素描，但他再也沒有公開展出過這部分作品。
