Empty Gallery was recently featured in the April 2026 issue of The Art Journal in a feature on art initiatives in the Southern district of Hong Kong island, written by Rachel Yang.
The Kestner Gesellschaft is pleased to present Potentialities, a major survey of works by Richard Hawkins. Since the early 1990s, the Los Angeles–based artist has developed a singular practice centered nerdy research, the dynamics of fandom and desire, and on the intense pleasure of looking. Comprising more than 100 works across eight bodies of work, the exhibition offers the first major institutional overview of Hawkins’s oeuvre in more than a decade. Potentialities focuses on works produced over the past twenty years, spanning painting, sculpture, ceramic reliefs, and AI-generated videos that draw on online subcultures and shared memes.
Empty Gallery has been featured in the Australian publication “Broadsheet” exploring Hong Kong’s spaces for art.
On view from April 16–August 17, 2026, 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.
In an excerpt from her book Calamities (2016), which hangs on the wall of Empty Gallery in Hong Kong, the poet Renee Gladman attempts to configure a diagram of poetry for her students—a grid hovering over a “subterranean container where meaning might lie”—before realizing that her schematics are off, that “poetry comes from nothing.” Her subsequent advice may well function as the primary directive of this exhibition, organized by San Francisco–based curator Jordan Stein: “Read the nothing.”
From the outset, La Moustache presents itself as an aporia, given its stated desire to transcend the known tempered by the manifold means of arriving there. If, in our present moment, we are buckling under the weight of too much meaning, the competing impulses of spiritualist withdrawal and nihilist accelerationism both promise non-sense as a way out. Stein shows little interest in the endless scrolls and AI-powered image infinities that purport transcendence through distraction, submission to the Algorithm-as-God. In its stead, he has assembled a group of meditative works anchored around the Bay Area Conceptualists of the 1970s like Paul Kos and Stephen Kaltenbach, alongside Doris Guo, Mary Helena Clark, and other younger artists continuing their legacy of object-as-experience, resisting an analytical approach in favor of something more phenomenological. By resurrecting a uniquely Californian perspective on Minimalism, with its cadre of art-world dropouts and back-to-the-land enthusiasts, Stein is resisting not only a tradition of criticality but also the social apparatuses that sustain it.
GHOSTLY, GODLY/人間》opens in Hong Kong on March 21, supported by the Octone Foundation.
Contemporary art’s engagements with Modernity and Hauntology continue to provoke essential reflections on history and reality. This curatorial experiment explores their untapped possibilities within specific East Asian contexts. Set in Hong Kong—where Buddhism and Daoism thrive alongside deeply lived folk beliefs that shape not only spiritual life but also social, cultural, and political realities—the exhibition highlights the intangible yet constant presence of the ghostly and the divine in everyday human–world relations. The English title GHOSTLY, GODLY captures this spectral dimension, while the Chinese title 人間 (Human Realm, Ningenkai) evokes the unresolved, bittersweet present of Buddhist cosmology, where joy and suffering coexist and call for ongoing practice.
Curated by Chris Wan, the show presents newly commissioned works, existing pieces, archives, and documents by artists Simon Liu, Cici Wu, Tang Kwok-hin, Ha Bik Chuen, and On Kino. Fully supported by the Octone Foundation, this project fosters experimental curating and artistic creation outside conventional institutional frameworks.
New Humans: Memories of the Future will inaugurate the New Museum’s expanded building with an exploration of artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changes. New Humans will trace a diagonal history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of more than 150 international artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, highlighting key moments when dramatic technological and social changes spurred new conceptions of humanity and new visions for its possible futures.
March 5 – April 18, 2026: Jessica Silverman is pleased to present “Beauty is the Best Defense,” a group exhibition that reframes decorative excess as a form of wit, resistance, and genderful expression. The exhibition runs from March 5–April 18, 2026. Spanning generations and geographies, the eight artists in this show explore ornament as armor and beauty as a survival tactic, mounting a spirited challenge to the long-held assumption that Minimalism represents the epitome of tasteful restraint and aesthetic discipline. That assumption, the exhibition suggests, has always conformed to an Anglo-Saxon, masculine norm—one that these artists collectively unsettle, complicate, and transcend.
The participating artists are: Lari Pittman, Grayson Perry, Ilana Savdie, Rose B. Simpson, Ramekon O’Arwisters, Tishan Hsu, Lehuauakea, and Karim Boumjimar.
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.
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。
