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榮幸呈現靈時小屋。靈時小屋位於畫廊入口門廳左側的獨立房間內。小屋將不定期呈現來自不同時空背景的單件作品,並提供人們深度思考的平台。穿越遙遠距離,在無限微觀的細節中爬梳——每次展覽都將有專人撰文,以動態的視角多層次地討論作品,從而照看我城獨特的歷史與社會情境。
靈時小屋之名戲仿自精神時光屋,在漫畫家鳥山明筆下,這是一個時空膠囊式的異次元自我修煉空間。項目藉此探索一種扎根在非西方哲學思想資源中的認識論思辨,也為懸崖峭壁般的全球化文化提出一個建設性地遊走其中的方法。
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。憑著共襄盛舉的精神,其名稱及概念無限期交付Empty Gallery使用。
靈時小屋的首展將呈現科隆藝術家Matthias Groebel的單件作品。Groebel在1989年至2006年間創作了一系列機器輔助的繪畫,將早期衛星電視的電子訊號轉化到神秘的矩形畫布上。進到電傳視覺這類輪廓未明的領域,他將自己對圖像的選擇讓渡給了直覺和偶然性——他將類比顯屏的截圖結合從字幕機調用的文字片段,創作出帶有如幻覺般表面密度質地的繪畫作品,它們有如具象謎團或是視覺公案。Groebel筆下這些既陌生又熟悉的廣播繪畫描繪出了直到近期才浮現在日常經驗中的社會空間、情感和地理空間方面的劇變。作品展現出了一個鈍化無生氣的景觀——此間的欲望錯位,恐懼蔓延。
Groebel的這件畫作猶如遠程傳輸至香港的訊號,有待進一步解碼與闡釋。《美國麗人#9》(2001)描繪一位不知名的男性人物在鏡頭前瞇著眼睛揮舞雙手,似是在抗議被拍攝,或者感到私隱被冒犯——同時,一行被挪用至此的繁體中文字幕,卻引領著觀眾說:來看吧。
Matthias Groebel, American Beauty #9 (2001). Courtesy of the artist, Ulrik and Empty Gallery. Photo: Michael Yu.