How to Be Happy Together, Para Site, 22/F, Wing Wah Industrial Building, 677 King’s Rd, Quarry Bay, until 6 April
The iconography of Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai looms over both sides of Victoria Harbour this year. Along with Ho Tzu Nyen’s reenvisioning of his oeuvre on the M+ façade, on Hong Kong Island, Wong has inspired the Para Site group exhibition How to Be Happy Together (until 6 April), which combines 20 artists and collectives from Hong Kong, China and Latin America, using the lens of Wong’s 1997 classic Happy Together, about a gay Hongkonger couple in Argentina. The show’s curator Zairong Xiang describes the film as “very porous, sensuous, wet and sexy”, and Wong as “the master of only hinting at things exuberantly without ever making them concrete. In the age of division and antagonism—each camp holding not only grudges but self-assurance—this ephemerous touch might not only be aesthetically pleasing but politically constructive.”
The show’s 20 artists and collectives come from Hong Kong, China and Latin America Felix SC Wong
Xiang, a teacher at Duke Kunshan University, explores transregional connections: of the Hong Kong artists, Luis Chan was born in Panama, and Nadim Abbas’s work portrays the Argentine waterfall Iguazu, a motif in Happy Together. The Chinese-Brazilian artist Chu Ming Silveira and the Costa Rican-Taiwanese artist Mimian Hsu “by virtue of being of Chinese descent, do engage with our region profoundly. The trafficking of ideas from Latin America to China is not a new thing; we could trace it back to the 1930s with Miguel Covarrubias and then David Alfaro Siqueiros’s visit to China in the 1950s.”
Louise Bourgeois, Soft Landscape. Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, G/F,
8 Queen’s Road Central, Central until 21 June
Louise Bourgeois’s Spider, 2000, a symbol of motherhood, is on show at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong in Soft Landscape. Christopher Burke
The 1950s marked a time of depression, crisis and transformation in the life and work of Louise Bourgeois. Unable to make art, she turned to intensive psychoanalysis, excavating her suffering and dreams through writing. Her seclusion yielded a new sculptural vocabulary that she would hone for the next five decades: organic, soft forms, indebted to the body; expressions of an inner emotional landscape.
Soft Landscape is the title of Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong’s second show dedicated to Bourgeois in collaboration with The Easton Foundation, including rarely-seen sculptures, works on paper and a three-metre-long fountain installation in which water spills from a frieze of breasts. The exhibition “sets up a series of five dialogues among works characterised by an iconography of holes, cavities, mounds, breasts, spirals, snakes and water”, alluding to themes of fecundity, growth and motherhood, says the foundation’s curator, Philip Larratt-Smith.
Among the earliest pieces on show here are two rounded bronzes from 1962 called Lair, a term Bourgeois applied to various sculptural forms signifying retreat, protection and interiority—just as she was emerging from her own period of creative soul-searching. Going on view for the first time in Asia are Mamelles (fountain) from 1991 and a steel Spider (2000) crouched over a white marble egg, Bourgeois’s famed symbol of the complexities of motherhood.
Beauty Will Save the World, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, 10 Chancery Lane, Central, until 16 May
The video installation Glitter’s Paradise (2015) by Dinh Q. Lê Courtesy the artist and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery
Far from superfluous, beauty can also be a survival strategy in trying times, posits Beauty Will Save the World at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery. “Contemporary art from Southeast Asia, initially developed in socially and politically stressed post-colonial conditions, deploys visual seduction among other strategies as it grapples with bleak social realities,” says the Singapore-based curator Iola Lenzi. Works that “contend with wars, migration, communal violence and state violence manage to engage viewers. And through conceptually underpinned aesthetics and sensory appeal, they pierce the darkness to transcend trauma.”
In the show, Lenzi, author of the 2024 book Power, Politics and the Street: Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia After 1970, combines eight artists who are renowned regionally as well as in their home countries. Of them, Vietnam’s Dinh Q. Lê and Bùi Công Khánh and Myanmar’s Htein Lin and Moe Satt have shown previously at the gallery and are in the collection of M+. Artists less familiar in East Asia include Indonesia’s FX Harsono, Cambodia’s Chan Dany and Josephine Turalba from the Philippines. Resonating locally, Vietnam’s Vũ Dân Tân is represented both at ABHK’s Kabinett sector and the gallery, with his series Money, which was inspired by Hong Kong’s 1997 handover from the UK back to China.
