Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe, JC Contemporary, 10 Hollywood Rd, Central, Hong Kong, until 31 May 2026
The past can be a foreign country, as the saying goes, and for China even recent history can seem stunningly distant. With its two-part exhibition Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008, Tai Kwun explores how China’s artists were shaped by the monumental changes to their society from 2008, both online and offline. The first instalment, Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud (26 September 2025-4 January 2026), looked at the foreshadowing wildness of China’s early internet. The second part, Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe (until 31 May), switches focus to the physical world, particularly the human labour behind China’s manufacturing juggernaut.
The show was split in two due to its scope, says Pi Li, Tai Kwun’s departing head of art and the show’s co-curator: “We want to make this the most comprehensive historical survey of Chinese art in the first quarter of the 21st century.”
Qiu Anxiong’s Peach Blossom Spring Wonderland – Encounter with a Snake (2025) is showing at Pearl Lam Projects
Bearing the Unseen, Pearl Lam Projects, G-3/F, W Place, 52 Wyndham Street, Central, until 30 May
Ecology and Daoist philosophy underlie the haunting stop-motion animations, sculptures and paintings of the artist Qiu Anxiong. He primarily brings works made in the past two years for his show Bearing the Unseen (until 30 May) at Pearl Lam Projects, as well as videos and animations like New Book of Mountains and Seas (2006-17), Flying South (2006) and Jiangnan Poem (2005). The new projects continue Qiu’s visions of humans and other animals navigating future wasteland utopias.
“My subject has, over time, continued to be the relationship between humans and nature—the world of animism,” Qiu says. “I believe the most important task of art is to restore that original harmony.”
Educated in Germany, Qiu has been a fixture of Shanghai’s art scene since 2004, but his renown traces back to his native Sichuan, where he and a friend founded Chengdu’s famed underground music venue Little Bar in late 1996. Situated in a studio cluster, it became a haunt for artists like Zhou Chunya, He Duoling and Zhang Xiaogang. Zhang’s ex-wife Tang Lei eventually bought it and runs it to this day—one of the only surviving spaces from Chinese rock’s nascent era. “At the time, it was just about being young and having fun,” Qiu says. “I met my wife there, so that was its biggest impact on me.”
Mary Weatherford’s Sunshower (2025)
Mary Weatherford: Persephone, Gagosian, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, until 2 May
They might be thousands of years old, and they might have been told and retold millions of times, but there is apparently still plenty of creative juice to be wrung out of Ancient Greek myths.
For her debut exhibition in Asia, the American painter Mary Weatherford has taken inspiration from the story of Persephone, the goddess of spring and the queen of the underworld. Persephone’s abduction by her uncle Hades—who would eventually take her as his wife—and her cyclical return to the surface of the world symbolises the passing of the seasons. Weatherford, with her signature blend of found objects and hard-edged abstraction, tells that ancient tale of disappearance and rebirth through big washes of vinyl emulsion on canvases adorned with neon light tubing, seashells and coral.
But her inspirations are not limited to the ancient world. New works in the show reference Dante’s Inferno (around 1321), the paintings of Robert Smithson and even Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 ballad Landslide. But perhaps the biggest inspiration here, appropriately enough, is the history of neon light itself—a glowing symbol of technology and urbanity, as relevant to New York and Las Vegas as it is to Hong Kong.
Walter Price’s Granny Shot (2025)
Walter Price: Pearl Lines, David Zwirner, 5–6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road, Central, until 9 May
Walter Price’s first solo exhibition in Asia at David Zwirner Hong Kong marks a decade of steady ascension for the Brooklyn-based painter, who broke onto the scene in 2016 with solo shows at Karma in New York and The Modern Institute in Glasgow, following four years in the US Navy. In the past ten years, Price’s vividly coloured and symbolically obscure paintings have received solo exhibitions at MoMa PS1 in New York, the Camden Art Centre in London and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, as well as the praise of leading critics—the late Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New Yorker: “I can think of no precedent for Price’s style-defying style.” Deliberately ambivalent and resistant to its own interpretation, Price’s work is often read as a commentary on the implicit narratives around race and the legacy—or burden—of creating art as a Black American. Since 2016, Price has ambiguously titled each of his solo shows Pearl Lines and the Hong Kong show is no exception. This is his second solo at David Zwirner, who he signed with in 2024, and exhibited the same year in its Los Angeles space.
Nicole Eisenman’s Hope Street with Freddy and George (2016-23)
Nicole Eisenman: Fallen Angels, Hauser & Wirth, G/F, 8 Queen’s Road Central, Central, until 30 May
Forget the monumentality, the history painting-style vastness of scale, Nicole Eisenman’s latest works are something far more intimate. Every painting in her Hauser & Wirth exhibition is an easel-sized vision of a single subject, sitter or topic; it’s a far cry from the enormous, hyper-populated tableaux the French-American artist made her name with.
Though the scale is smaller, the ambitions are no less grand. Eisenman’s series focuses on three primary locations of “middle-class living”: home, work, beach. A man sketches a vase of flowers, a woman sits forlornly on the sand, a father stares at his phone as two kids crawl around him. These heavily overworked and reworked pieces are filled with trash and detritus, shadows and darkness. The effect is uncomfortably claustrophobic. These are paintings filled with ennui and tedium, a discomfiting sense of powerlessness and boredom, as time ebbs away and the world falls apart. Eisenman’s cryptic approach has always made her something of a painter’s painter, but these smaller, contemplative, critical images are her at her most intimate, and most inviting.
Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now, M+, 38 Museum Dr, West Kowloon, until 9 August
Lee Bul was born in 1964 to parents whose opposition to South Korea’s military dictatorship brought a life of precarity. She was part of the generation that came of age during Korea’s 1987 transition to democracy, but when political freedom did not prove a societal panacea, Lee channelled her early experiences into her art. She created compellingly absurdist challenges to the persistent economic and gender hierarchies she perceived in her country. Her street performances, which were most defined by the fabric sculpture suit she wore in Sorry for suffering—You think I’m a puppy on a picnic? (1990), set the stage for installations like the bags of rotting fish in her work Majestic Splendor (1991-97). Lee’s spectacular later works explore utopian shortfalls invoking sci-fi futurism to convey humanity’s failures. Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now, which opened at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art last autumn and has now travelled to Hong Kong’s M+, traces her remarkable career.
Untitled (The Hill of Poisonous Tree series) (2008)
© The Estate of Dinh Q. Lê
Remembrance: A Tribute to the Work of Dinh Q. Lê, 10 Chancery Lane, G/F, 10 Chancery Lane, SoHo, Central, until 16 May
The too short career of Dinh Q. Lê is explored this spring at 10 Chancery Lane through 14 of his works created between 1989 and 2024—the year of his sudden passing at 56. Lê was born in Vietnam, raised and educated in the US and returned to Vietnam in the 1990s. His woven photographs based on his aunt’s grass mats examined displacement, memory, postcolonial distortions and the legacies of violence. In addition to this exhibition, which has been curated by David Elliott, Lê’s Damaged Gene (1998), an installation using children’s dummies and clothing to explore the enduring scars of war, is on display in the Kabinett section at Art Basel Hong Kong.
“Dinh Q. Lê couldn’t show his works in Vietnam [due to] their controversial content,” though he was collected and shown worldwide, says Katie de Tilly, the founder of 10 Chancery Lane. Nevertheless, he was a foundational figure in the country’s contemporary art development, creating the non-profit platform Sàn Art in 2007. De Tilly, who worked with Lê from the early 2000s, recalls visiting elderly Hanoi artists with him in 2015. They shared works “made during what they call the American War”, De Tilly says. “The paper was fragile, but their pride was unmistakable. They were deeply moved that Dinh had sought them out, rediscovering their art and reintroducing it to today’s world. I left in awe, aware that we had been entrusted not just with paintings, but with lives and memories.”
Liu Xuan’s Lilayati (2025)
Courtesy of Liu Xuan
Threading Inwards, Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile, Hong Kong, until 28 June
Upon entering Threading Inwards at the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Chat), visitors pass through an ethereal fabric gate. The Korean artist Sang A. Han created the soft artwork, Threshold 1 (2024), using white cotton stained with meok (Korean ink). Beyond this piece is a series of shrine-like soft sculptures resembling pagodas. Each form is filled with cotton stuffing collected from donated dolls.
In Asia, textiles have long served as sacred vessels that link the material and spiritual worlds. Taking this as a departure point, the exhibition brings together 14 artists from the region working in media spanning painting, video, photography and textile.
The exhibition was co-curated by Wang Weiwei, the curator of exhibitions and collections at Chat. She collaborated with three rising curators—Seoul-based Eugene Hannah Park, Tokyo-based Kurosawa Seiha and Beijing-based Wang Huan—to select artists that encompass a diversity of perspectives. Works range from monumental site-specific tapestries by the Malaysian-born artist Marcos Kueh to anthropological photographs by the Kyoto-based Korean diaspora artist Kim Sajik.
