Goldfish on a Rolls-Royce and a lobby of unglazed ceramic blooms: The Peninsula Hong Kong has turned its public spaces into a temporary exhibition site for Hong Kong Art Week.
The luxury hotel’s annual Art in Resonance program has unveiled three site-specific commissions by Hong Kong artist Angel Hui, Indonesian artist Albert Yonathan Setyawan, and Hong Kong architect, artist, and collector William Lim. Installed from the start of Hong Kong Art Week through early May, the works thread contemporary art through the hotel’s façade, grand lobby, and The Verandah Café, emphasizing craft-driven production and collaborations with artisans.
Outside, visitors are met by “Swimming in Light,” Hui’s commission, which places goldfish imagery on an unexpected emblem of luxury: a Rolls-Royce. The project draws on a familiar Hong Kong street scene — goldfish sold in clear plastic bags, especially around the Goldfish Market in Mong Kok. For the commission, Hui worked with artisans to embroider goldfish motifs onto plastic bags, transforming a disposable material into a labor-intensive surface. The installation extends beyond the car, spreading across sections of the hotel’s glass frontage and its historic awning, where saturated color plays against the building’s famously restrained exterior.
Hui’s presence in the program arrives amid heightened international attention: she is one of two artists selected to represent Hong Kong at this year’s Venice Biennale.
Inside the hotel’s grand lobby, Setyawan’s “Metamorphic Modulation” occupies a semi-enclosed circular structure, inviting viewers into a dense field of repeated forms. The installation comprises 700 small ceramic elements — leaves and flowers — each individually slip-cast and left unglazed. Arranged in rhythmic patterns, the work rewards close looking, with subtle variations in shape and surface emerging across the repetition.
The installation was curated by Louis Copplestone of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), who has described the intended effect as an opportunity for visitors to “get lost in the pattern.” Setyawan, who makes the ceramic components in his compact Tokyo studio, frames repetition as both method and meaning. “Repetition and balance creates a sense of order in our life,” he says. “In a way they are the building blocks of our reality.”
Setyawan also positions the work as a meditation on scale: “This whole idea of monumentality is achieved not through scale, but through tiny objects,” he adds, describing the structure as an attempt to “create a space within the space.” The commission continues an ongoing collaboration between The Peninsula Hong Kong and the V&A, and the work is expected to travel to London later this year, where it will be reconfigured in response to a new architectural setting.
A third commission, Lim’s “Walking on a Bright Future,” responds directly to the hotel’s interiors and the social choreography of dining. Installed in a section of The Verandah Café, the work is a textile and spatial intervention developed with artisans from Tai Ping Carpets. The team translated one of Lim’s paintings into a large, hand-tufted wall tapestry, then extended the installation onto the floor through checkerboard distortions in the carpet — a visual shift that subtly unsettles the room’s familiar geometry.
Taken together, the three projects demonstrate how Art in Resonance uses the hotel as both a platform and a constraint: a place where art must negotiate luxury codes, circulation patterns, and architectural heritage. The result is not a white-cube takeover, but a series of interruptions — moments of color, pattern, and material intensity that reframe what visitors think they are there to see.
