The Cheng-Lan Foundation, an independent initiative supporting global majority artists through exhibitions, residencies and commissions, opened its doors this week in time for Hong Kong’s marquee art week.
Founded in 2024 by Brian Yue, a Hong Kong native and alumnus of SOAS University of London, the foundation grew out of a scholarship programme launched at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, before evolving into a broader platform dedicated to cultural practitioners from historically overlooked communities.
By supporting artists, curators and writers from African, Asian, Indigenous and Latin American backgrounds, the foundation aims to broaden the Western-centric contemporary art world. “The term global majority resonated deeply with my own experience of living abroad,” Yue says. “The sensation of being perceived as ‘other’ during my formative years shaped this mission.”
Despite spending much time abroad, Hong Kong is where Yue’s own “cultural identity and diasporic experience are anchored,” he says. “The foundation is, in many ways, an extension of that condition.”
When Yue returned from London to Hong Kong after the city’s prolonged pandemic lockdowns, he felt a sense of “paradise lost”, an anxiety he likened to the atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain. “It felt like an erosion of the Hong Kong I’d grown up in,” Yue says. “But also, I saw an extraordinary resilience among the people around me, and the continued arrival of new communities speaking languages you would expect to hear in any global city.”
The foundation’s inaugural exhibition, A Country, A Body, is a solo show by the Manila-based artist Cian Dayrit, his first in Hong Kong. Dayrit is known for his “counter-cartography”, embroidery and mixed-media collages interrogating histories of colonialism, extraction and resistance.
The foundation is building a permanent collection through the acquisition and commissioning of new work, focusing on making the art accessible to a wider public through international museum loans and collaborations.
It is also bridging geographical space through a pilot residency programme involving Delfina Foundation in London and Para Site in Hong Kong. “The residency is a preview of what is to come,” Yue says. “We want to think expansively and internationally while remaining firmly rooted in Hong Kong. The city serves as a base to anchor these initiatives and bring back the ideas and relationships we develop across other geographies. Where we hope to be most useful is as an additional space for experimentation—both for artists developing new work and for curators testing ideas that might not fit within conventional institutional structures.”
• Cian Dayrit: A Country, A Body, Cheng-Lan Corner, Hong Kong, until 29 March
