Hong Kong’s Spring Exhibitions Trace China’s Post-2008 Shifts, Ecological Unease, and the Glow of Myth
In Central, Hong Kong’s spring calendar is less a single “season” than a set of overlapping arguments: about how recent history hardens into memory, how labor is made invisible, and how old stories keep finding new materials.
At Tai Kwun’s JC Contemporary, “Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe” (10 Hollywood Rd, Central, through May 31, 2026) brings the second chapter of the institution’s two-part exhibition “Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008” into the realm of the physical. Where the first installment, “Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud” (September 26, 2025–January 4, 2026), examined the unruly promise and volatility of China’s early internet, the current presentation turns to the human labor and material systems that underwrite the country’s manufacturing power.
The decision to divide the project, co-curated by Pi Li, reflects its ambition. “We want to make this the most comprehensive historical survey of Chinese art in the first quarter of the 21st century,” Li said, describing the show’s scope as too expansive for a single installment.
A short walk away, Pearl Lam Projects is presenting “Bearing the Unseen” by Chinese artist Qiu Anxiong (G-3/F, W Place, 52 Wyndham Street, Central, through May 30). The exhibition gathers stop-motion animations, sculptures, and paintings, with an emphasis on works made over the past two years. These new projects extend Qiu’s recurring visions of humans and other animals moving through future landscapes that feel at once utopian and ruined.
The show also includes earlier videos and animations that have helped define his practice, including “New Book of Mountains and Seas” (2006–17), “Flying South” (2006), and “Jiangnan Poem” (2005). Ecology and Daoist philosophy sit close to the surface of the work, but the mood is less didactic than quietly disquieting — a world where animism becomes a way to think through environmental fracture.
“My subject has, over time, continued to be the relationship between humans and nature — the world of animism,” Qiu said. “I believe the most important task of art is to restore that original harmony.”
Qiu’s biography also threads music and art-world history into the exhibition’s present tense. Educated in Germany, he has been a fixture of Shanghai’s art scene since 2004, yet his wider renown traces back to Sichuan. In late 1996, he co-founded Chengdu’s underground music venue Little Bar, which became a gathering point for artists including Zhou Chunya, He Duoling, and Zhang Xiaogang. The venue later came under the ownership of Zhang’s ex-wife Tang Lei, who continues to run it — one of the few surviving spaces from the early era of Chinese rock. “At the time, it was just about being young and having fun,” Qiu said. “I met my wife there, so that was its biggest impact on me.”
Myth, meanwhile, is being retooled in neon at Gagosian. “Mary Weatherford: Persephone” (7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, through May 2) marks the American painter Mary Weatherford’s debut exhibition in Asia. Weatherford draws on the story of Persephone — goddess of spring and queen of the underworld — whose abduction by Hades and cyclical return has long served as a metaphor for seasonal change.
In Weatherford’s hands, disappearance and reemergence are staged through large washes of vinyl emulsion and her signature incorporation of found elements. Canvases are fitted with neon light tubing and adorned with seashells and coral, bringing the myth into contact with the material language of the contemporary city.
The references extend beyond antiquity. New works in the exhibition nod to Dante’s “Inferno” (around 1321), the art of Robert Smithson, and even Fleetwood Mac’s 1975 ballad “Landslide.” Yet the show’s most consistent throughline may be neon itself — a technology with its own cultural mythology, equally legible in New York and Las Vegas as it is in Hong Kong.
David Zwirner Hong Kong is also hosting a first: “Walter Price: Pearl Lines” (5–6/F, H Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road, Central, through May 9) is the Brooklyn-based painter Walter Price’s first solo exhibition in Asia. The presentation arrives amid what the gallery describes as a decade of steady ascent for Price, who first drew broad attention in 2016 with solo shows at Karma in New York and The Modern Institute.
Taken together, these exhibitions map a city where the contemporary is rarely just “new.” It is a negotiation between networks and bodies, between ecological anxiety and spiritual inheritance, between the ancient and the electrically current — and, in each case, a reminder that the recent past can already feel like another country.
