Hong Kong’s Cheng-Lan Foundation Opens With a Mandate to Support “Global Majority” Artists
Hong Kong has gained a new independent arts initiative aimed at widening who gets seen, supported, and collected in contemporary art. The Cheng-Lan Foundation opened this week to align with the city’s marquee art week, positioning itself as a platform for exhibitions, residencies, and commissions centered on “global majority” cultural practitioners.
Founded in 2024 by Brian Yue, a Hong Kong native and alumnus of SOAS University of London, the foundation traces its origins to a scholarship program Yue launched at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. That early educational focus has now expanded into a broader structure designed to support artists, curators, and writers from African, Asian, Indigenous, and Latin American backgrounds — communities that have often been sidelined by a Western-centric art ecosystem.
“The term global majority resonated deeply with my own experience of living abroad,” Yue said, describing how the sensation of being perceived as “other” during his formative years helped define the foundation’s mission. Although he spent significant time outside Hong Kong, Yue has framed the city as the place where his “cultural identity and diasporic experience are anchored,” calling the foundation an extension of that condition.
Yue has also linked the project’s urgency to the atmosphere he encountered upon returning to Hong Kong after the city’s prolonged pandemic lockdowns. He described a feeling of “paradise lost,” comparing the anxiety to post-Brexit Britain, while also pointing to what he saw as the city’s resilience and the arrival of new communities speaking the languages of a global metropolis.
The foundation’s inaugural exhibition, “A Country, A Body,” is a solo presentation by the Manila-based artist Cian Dayrit, marking his first show in Hong Kong. Dayrit is known for “counter-cartography” — a practice that uses embroidery and mixed-media collage to probe histories of colonialism, extraction, and resistance. The exhibition is on view at Cheng-Lan Corner, Hong Kong, through March 29.
Beyond its opening program, Cheng-Lan is building a permanent collection through acquisitions and the commissioning of new work. A key part of its stated mission is accessibility: the foundation plans to broaden public reach through international museum loans and collaborations.
It is also launching a pilot residency program designed to bridge Hong Kong with other art centers, partnering with Delfina Foundation in London and Para Site in Hong Kong. Yue has described the residency as a preview of the foundation’s longer-term ambitions: to operate internationally while remaining rooted in Hong Kong, and to provide an additional space for experimentation — both for artists developing new work and for curators testing ideas that may not fit within conventional institutional structures.
As Hong Kong continues to recalibrate its cultural identity in the wake of pandemic-era disruption, the Cheng-Lan Foundation enters the landscape with a clear proposition: to use the city as an anchor point for cross-geographic exchange, and to expand the contemporary art conversation by investing in practitioners too often treated as peripheral.
