A week-long arts festival featuring expanded exhibition hours, cultural events, live art from emerging artists. The festival also marks the return of Artists’ Night presented by Tai Kwun and supported by Art Basel Hong Kong.
Tai Kwun is proud to present its first-ever Art Week (24 to 30 March 2025) – a dynamic seven-day celebration brimming with cutting-edge performances from emerging artists, absorbing cultural events, extended exhibition hours, and eclectic commercial gallery offerings.
As the highlight of the week, Artists’ Night, presented by Tai Kwun and supported by Art Basel Hong Kong, marks the second consecutive year of collaboration between the two organisations, continuing a relationship that delivers spirited arts happenings to the city. It embodies Tai Kwun’s mission to foster an arts and culture hub in Hong Kong’s central district. Through contemporary arts events, it inspires the community while nurturing emerging artistic talent.
Continuing from the previous year’s brunch, Tai Kwun Contemporary will co-host an international brunch with Museum MACAN this year on 27 March. The event will invite artists, curators, critics, researchers, and practitioners in contemporary art to share diverse artistic insights from a global perspective.
Extended Opening Hours for Breakthrough Exhibitions
Throughout Art Week, Tai Kwun Contemporary will offer extended hours for its ongoing exhibitions, providing greater access for arts professionals, VIP guests, and the public.
Part of Tai Kwun Contemporary’s Breakthrough series, the three solo exhibitions currently on view showcasing a trio of female artists exploring materials and storytelling through diverse approaches: Alicja Kwade: Pretopia reflects on our perception of time and proposes new perspectives for understanding reality; Hu Xiaoyuan: Veering examines the complex relationship between human destiny and natural evolution, addressing questions of survival and the meaning of life. Lastly, Maeve Brennan: Records explores the legacy of human impact on the environment and unearths hidden narratives within society’s dominant narratives.
Artists’ Night
Presented by Tai Kwun and supported by Art Basel Hong Kong, Tai Kwun’s annual Artists’ Night returns on Friday, 28 March 2025, curated by Jill Angel Chun and Shuman Wang, crowning Art Week. From 7-11 pm, venues across Prison Yard will be transformed with a cross-disciplinary lineup of performances, music, and entrancing experiences. Featuring experimental music producers and DJs from Asia, alongside European visual artists and collectives who work with virtual reality as their primary medium, the performances fuse visual art, soundscapes, improvisational performances, and musical experimentation.
Themed around a “Traveling Temporal Odyssey,” the evening probes the revolutionary power of artificial intelligence (AI), the body, and ritual, making use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality to take audiences on a journey through time, from the near future to ancient prehistory – so they can peer through the cracks to witness the interwoven evolution and divergence of humans and nature, and, ultimately, envision a fluid and boundless future.
A focal point of the public programmes will be a live performance and film screening by London- based Malaysian Chinese artist Lawrence Lek at Tai Kwun’s open-air venue, the Laundry Steps. His performance NOX immerses audiences in his ongoing SimBeijing (New Beijing) trilogy. Blending Sino-futurism, wasteland aesthetics, and expressive electronic soundscapes, Lek examines the body, identity, agency, and emotions in the age of artificial intelligence.
Also open to the public is Bleeding into the Metaverse. Lighting up F Hall Studio, this dynamic digital dance party space invites attendees to dance alongside their own digital avatars. Created by affect lab, a women-led creative studio and research practice based in Amsterdam, the digital gathering originated as a response to an internet feud between feminist politics and online culture in 2022, and calls for greater acceptance and inclusivity of body diversity in the real world.
During the VIP, invite-only opening, experimental electronic artist 33EMYBW from Shanghai will present a brand-new audiovisual performance, Holes of Sinian, at F Hall Studio. Live set incorporates vocal samples and field recordings, blending music from China’s borderlands, Tanzania, Bulgaria, and Thailand. The live visuals are created by London-based interdisciplinary artist Joey Holder, leveraging AI to weave together ancient dreams, cultural memories, and mysterious mythical beings. The cosmos, science, technology, and interactions between humans, machines, and animals converge.
For the invite-only grand finale in F Hall Studio, Hong Kong-based DJs and producers JayMe and Woonjii will perform together as the duo yisekai for the first time presenting Yiniverse Party, a signature musical style that draws inspiration from new-wave electronic music. The set submerges audiences in the atmosphere of the “Yiniverse”, using synthesisers and an uninhibited approach to production to unleash infinite energy and emotions across multiple universes.
On the same evening of Artists’ Night, Hong Kong–based artist Sissi Kaplan will present a live performance, 77 Days: I am still here, drawn from her artist book, 77 Days: An Experience Report (2024), at the Artists’ Book Library on the second floor of Tai Kwun Contemporary. The hour-long music and spoken word performance evokes a sense of displacement in space and time, using pre- recorded sounds and readings to establish a tension between the present and the recent past, conjuring memories of isolation, loss, and estrangement stemming from the Covid-19 pandemic. It is part of the project, nowhere left but here, here i am again, curated by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu for the Artists’ Book Library.
Commercial Galleries
Throughout Art Week, Tai Kwun’s commercial galleries will host a range of intriguing exhibitions. Key highlights include: “The Voice in the Mirror” at Kwai Fung Hin Gallery, a solo exhibition of paintings, sculptures, ceramics and tapestries from Venezuelan modernist Oswaldo Vigas; “Beneath the Golden Canopy” at MASSIMODECARLO marks Chinese-Canadian artist Dominique Fung’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, presenting a new series of works that explore history, power, and cultural memory through a lens of longing and diasporic connection; “The Last Word Always Belongs to the Mountains” at Ora-Ora, a series of paintings from US-based artist Stephen Thorpe exploring our fractured relationship with culturally significant landscapes; “Seven” Contemporary Lacquer Art Exhibition at The Gallery by SOIL, a groundbreaking display of seven contemporary lacquer artists from Japan and China and “Sending You a Bouquet from Space” at Touch Gallery features a cosmic-themed collection of paintings by Aries, where struck golf balls serve as signals to the universe, delivering messages of love and hope.
Tai Kwun’s Art Week is committed to inspiring the community through arts, culture and heritage explorations, while incubating budding artistic talent across Hong Kong and the globe – opening a portal to an alternate reality that blurs boundaries between technology, culture, and the psyche.
