Art Exhibitions To See This October In Hong Kong
- The Hong Kong Arts Collective
- Oct 6
- 12 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
We've handpicked some art exhibitions and events to check out this October. Read on to discover more.
Square Street Gallery: My gaze is as clear as your breath
Square Street Gallery is pleased to present my gaze is as clear as your breath, a solo exhibition by Melody Qingmei Li, curated by Tong Hu. Through repeated sessions of observation and meditation, Qingmei distils her methodology of drawing skin into works within the exhibition.
At its core, my gaze is as clear as your breath invites viewers to reflect on the boundaries of the self and our connection to the world. Qingmei’s methodology of drawing skin begins with a simple act of gazing at a patch of skin. Through sustained observation, the familiar is transformed. Patterns, textures, and imperfections emerge, dissolving preconceived notions tied to race, gender, health, or class. Over time, these fragments of skin grow and connect, extending outward to embrace other beings, objects, and the larger organic and inorganic world. The boundary of skin begins to dissolve through the gaze.
Drawing on postmodern feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledge,” Qingmei resists the myth of objective, universal truth. Haraway points out that all knowledge is grounded in embodied experience, social structures, and technological systems. It is only by generating subjective, restricted apprehension repeatedly that we may apprehend a wider reality. Qingmei generates situated knowledge through her temporary, partial gazes she exercises through her practice of drawing skin, which forms the basis for the artworks in the exhibition.
The exhibition features a range of media. In collaged paper works, mineral pigments and incense ashes swirl together in fluid, merging marks echoing the abstract dissolution that occurs when gazing at skin, at times resembling skin gashes. Handmade silk forms a wispy, extended layer of ‘skin.’ They are mounted on custom stands with embedded mirrors that allow only partial glimpses of their reverse sides, embodying the situated, partial knowledge central to the practice. Two vibrant acrylic paintings are ruptured by tentacle-like forms that break free from the two-dimensional frame with violent vitality. Further in, it appears to have broken free completely, becoming independent sculptures on the wall, echoing the dissolving and crossing of boundaries with the gaze.
Qingmei shares her methodology in the artist’s book Body Map: The Manual, which provides step-by-step guidance to practice ‘drawing skin’. A two-channel video installation documents workshops at HART Haus led by Qingmei, where participants explored the four steps of her practice: “I–we/us–between–symbiosis.” These sessions culminated in a collective “symbiosis body map,” combining fragments of participants’ skin, gazes, thoughts, and elements from nearby surroundings such as tiles, moss, and raindrops. The footage from the workshop is juxtaposed with skin imagery gathered by Qingmei of skin from the artist herself, other participants, various textures taken from the organic and inorganic, and machine-generated visions of symbiosis. These realistic depictions of humans and plants, organisms and objects merging into one another evoke a sense of the uncanny, echoing the alien-like forms inhabiting the gallery walls. Small mirrors, first introduced in the paper collages, reappear in this installation, drawing viewers into the work by incorporating their reflections and physical bodies.
Besides visiting the exhibition and reading or collecting her artist book Body Map: The Manual, visitors can join this experiment in symbiosis by participating in the Body Map workshop held alongside the exhibition.
When: 27 Sep - 11 Oct 2025
Square Street Gallery, 21 Square Street, Central
PHD Group: The Eggs
Born to a family of shamans, Kim Sangdon is a spiritual practitioner and multidisciplinary artist whose practice investigates Korea’s past—in particular the violent division of the South and North—and its ruthless pursuit of modernization.
In his earlier works, the artist studied processions of people and non-human entities in traditional mourning rituals, political protest and communal gatherings of healing. Through installations and performances, he observed a collective malaise that the novelist Choi In-hun described as “refugee mentality,” referencing the rootlessness of people constantly escaping borders, whether geographical, historical, or socio-political. Yet in the ancient practice of shamanism, great emphasis is placed on ideas of boundary expansion and shape shifting. This idea—that spirituality can dissolve the violence of borders—forms the crux of Kim’s practice, giving birth to new, resilient, ways of being.
For his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, “The Eggs,” Kim Sangdon looks to the humble egg as a metaphor for spiritual growth. Small but endlessly generative, the egg appears throughout Korea’s sociopolitical history, from myths of kings being hatched to present-day protests, where egging politicians has become a common ritual.
The folkloric painting series, “Egg That Has Spent the Night” (2024–25), first shown at the 16th Sharjah Biennial in 2025, references Kim’s interpretation of “night” as celestial realms of the subconscious, dreams, and maternal gestation. Rising out of obsidian darkness are forms reminiscent of alien spawn, energy auras, or the hyper-connected signals glowing on our screens, painted in the traditional style of dancheong typically used to decorate temples and sacred buildings in Korea. Underneath, the rubbly textures of the black base layer reveal the artist’s relationship to grounding rituals. Working long nights in his studio, Kim would often break for a walk outdoors with his dog. The memory of looking at the night sky while traversing the quiet, empty streets gave him the impulse to layer his canvases with asphalt paint, binding the infinite stars to the glittered compositions of the road below.
These pluralistic connections—the divine and the earthly, the exquisite and the ordinary—reveals Kim’s belief that spiritual communion can be found in all places. Central to this idea is the ubiquitous symbol of the antenna, present in the router devices that sit in our homes, the tiny sensory organs of insects, or the ways in which our own bodies receive, or emit, signals. In the paintings, these antenna signals present themselves as overlapping, concentric circles, a mysterious fullness to the ovum shapes. In his sculptures, however, Kim counterbalances the celestial qualities of his paintings with more earthly revelations. On the heads and bottoms of surrealist, elongated eggs are dancheong-painted circles, suggesting that spiritual messages, and resilience, can be found even in the most ordinary of places, such as a supermarket aisle, or even the shelves inside of our fridges.
When: 4 Oct - 22 Oct 2025
PHD Group, Gooseneck Bridge
Ora-Ora: Concrete Colour
Ora-Ora presents Concrete Colour, the third solo exhibition by Hong Kong-based artist Sophie Cheung. Exploring memory and feelings of loss, Cheung harnesses the gradual erosion of familiar sights in a quest to find the permanent landmarks of belonging.
Concrete Colour introduces the new CMYK Series and further develops her Erasing News Series. In the former, Cheung reinterprets the industrial printing process through an Asian lens, manipulating printer ink on plastic-coated paper to produce vibrant, tension-filled compositions that echo Hong Kong’s hybrid cultural spirit. In Neon Light Embodied on the Glass Curtain Wall, Mongkok, the oscillation between alienation and intimacy in the city is unflinchingly depicted. The series glows with the fading presence of neon—a metaphor for urban change and visual memory.
In the Erasing News Series, the artist subtracts newsprint through the act of erasing, creating textured contemplations. Anchored in specific Hong Kong locations, they address universal themes of time, resilience, and rebirth.
Concrete Colour includes Cheung’s first sculpture, A Closed Energy Loop (2025), which brings the already tactile and contoured surfaces into an assertive, three dimensional presence.
Highlighting transformation and rebirth amid change, Cheung offers a deeply personal yet widely resonating meditation on place and loss.
When: 17 Sep - 18 Oct 2025
Ora-Ora, 105–107, 1/F, Barrack Block, Tai Kwun, Central
WURE AREA: I Remember I Fear I May Not Remember
We are delighted to invite you to visit the upcoming showcase “I Remember I Fear I May Not Remember ”《我記得我怕我將不記得》 by MA Yujiang 馬玉江 at WURE AREA, venue partner.
Artist MA Yujiang brings together his recent artistic creations at WURE AREA, sharing significant memories from his years living in this city with the audience. I Remember I Fear I May Not (I Remember) is an art project that showcases both new and past works by MA Yujiang. The collection includes pivotal pieces from his earlier career as well as the latest iterations of ongoing series. Each work represents a unique “growth,” displayed together in
WURE AREA’s art space, revealing the core of MA Yujiang’s artistic practice—capturing the past through action, preserving memories through art, and allowing those memories to evolve without fading.
When: 4 Oct - 24 Oct 2025
WURE AREA - Block B, Po Lung Centre, Unit 707, 7/F, 11 Wang Chiu Rd, Kowloon Bay
THE SHOPHOUSE: Dark Waters
THE SHOPHOUSE is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of London-based artist Sam Creasey in Hong Kong, Dark Waters, featuring a new body of work on canvas and mixed media works. Creasey's paintings occupy an uneasy territory between familiarity and estrangement, showcasing his profound concern for place and identity. It interrogate how the physical structures we inhabit—streets, offices, public utilities, and governmental buildings—both reveal and conceal the system of power that shape everyday life. The exhibition extends to consider not only the psychic weight of built environments but also reflecting on underlaying issues rooted in late-stage capitalism, rapid technological change, public services, or urban expansion, while highlighting how privatisation and profit routinely overshadow the public good.
Creasey’s visual language—jagged, steel-edged, and imbued with an uncanny representational quality—echoes the raw surfaces of the metropolis. Architecture, symbols of authority, and institutional rituals seep into the work, drawn from his experience within government buildings. These glimpses into backroom offices provide direct encounters with the regalia of power, which he reconfigures into painted and ceramic forms. While also being informed by psychogeographic wanderings, motifs of motion, journey, and transition thread recurring through the work, mapping the idiosyncrasies of places within an increasingly homogenised landscape. His canvases, hybrid frames, and ceramic vessels act as microcosms of contemporary life—both relics and stage sets, ancient and modern—depicting the relationship between place and meaning. The fragility of clay becomes a metaphor for human and institutional vulnerability; geometric planning collides with the unruly uncertainties of material, much like the precarious balance between civic ideals and consumerist imperatives.
The exhibition title Dark Waters resonates on multiple registers. It alludes to the insular geography of islands but also gestures towards a broader turbulence. The exhibition explores a modern identity crisis on both personal and national level, torn between attachments to the past and the uncertainties of the future. This is often most apparent in the crises afflicting public infrastructure: privatised utilities, for instance, have been widely criticised for prioritising profit over service, making the very substance of life a site of financial extraction. Water, in this sense, becomes both literal and metaphorical—an element that surrounds, sustains, and endangers, while also symbolising opacity, hidden systems, and the difficulty of seeing clearly through a fog of uncertainty. This is represented in the ceramic elements of the paintings, which feature pipe-like shapes evocative of drainage and sewage systems. For example, the painting titled Dark Waters (2025) depicts a peripteral structure at the top of the painting similar in design to an ancient Greek vernacular of columns and a pitched roof. The distinctive turbine at its center is inspired by a sewage pumping station in The Isle of Dogs, East London, designed by the post modern architect John Outram.
The themes that animate Dark Waters are global in scope. By presenting this work in Hong Kong—a city where architecture, infrastructure, and ideology are intensely intertwined—Creasey invites viewers to consider their own relationship to the environments they inhabit. THE SHOPHOUSE, itself a heritage site marked by adaptation and layered histories, becomes an ideal stage for these questions.
Ultimately, Dark Waters does not resolve the contradictions it surfaces. Instead, it submerges the viewer in them, insisting on the need to look beneath the surface of our constructed worlds. Creasey’s imagery offers not answers but atmospheres—fragments of cities, systems, and identities in flux, through which viewers may gain a clearer perception of the undercurrents that govern our shared future.
When: 6 Sep - 26 Oct 2025
THE SHOPHOUSE, 4 Second Lane, Tai Hang
Double Q: Ewa Partum: Conceptual Feminism
A pioneer of conceptual art, Ewa Partum’s work is inseparable from feminism challenging the social inequalities, the patriarchal system, and women’s representation in art. Since the early 1970s, she has challenged the societal systems that dictate how women should behave, appear, and occupy public space. In her practice, the personal is political—not as a slogan, but as a lived, enduring artistic investigation.
This first solo exhibition in Asia brings together Partum’s works across photography, film, mixed media, and works on paper, offering viewers an opportunity to see the breadth and depth of her contribution to the intersection of conceptualism and feminist discourse
When: 18 Sep - 1 Nov 2025
Double Q Gallery, 68 Lok Ku Road, Sheung Wan
Alisan Atelier: The Remains of Our Days
Alisan Atelier is pleased to present The Remains of Our Days, bringing together artists Amy Tang, Jeremy Ip, and Rivian Cheung. This exhibition marks our first collaboration with curator Joyce Hei-ting Wong, and it’s also the first time we are showcasing these three talented artists at the gallery.
The artists share a unique interest in the overlooked aspects of our daily lives, drawing inspiration from everything from floor stains to peeling walls and wild weeds. They explore the messages embedded in what we often discard or forget. Through their creative use of gesture, colour, and materials, they craft contemporary visual stories that touch on themes of consumption, waste, resistance, decay, and regeneration..
When: 27 Aug - 1 Nov 2025
1904 Hing Wai Centre, 7 Tin Wan Praya Road, Aberdeen
HART HAUS: Time in Perspective
With HART HAUS as venue and program partner, “Time in Perspective” presents a Duo exhibition of two contemporary artists, Boon Lee and Wenda Yiu, who delve into these vanishing narratives, transforming the textures of time into art. As In Western District of Hong Kong Island, where the rhythms of old and new Hong Kong intersect, traditional shops endure as quiet acts of resistance—guardians of memory, labor, and community. Through the engagements with local shopkeepers, the exhibition becomes a conversation between preservation and impermanence, where fleeting moments are given lasting form.
When: 8 Oct - 1 Nov 2025
HART HAUS, 3/F, Cheung Hing Industrial Building, 12P Smithfield Road, Kennedy Town
WKM Gallery: In the Meantime
WKM Gallery is pleased to announce In the meantime, Japanese painter Yukari Nishi’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Renowned for her surreal and psychologically charged compositions, Nishi’s work invites viewers into a world where the boundaries between reality and fantasy dissolve. Featuring a series of all new paintings, this exhibition continues Nishi’s exploration of the surreal as a place that serves as both an escape from, and mirror of, reality. Describing her process as a form of “collage therapy”, Nishi’s somewhat psychological approach to painting — which begins with a playful indulgence of the subconscious, but ends with a very deliberate process of reflection — reveals to us the relationships and emotions of the artist’s day-to-day, particularly through the lens of her role as a mother. These strange scenes may seem slightly uncanny at first, but they are tied together by affectionate acts of giving and sharing. Nishi’s works open our eyes to the complicated nature of caretaking; its heavy burden as a never-ending task, but one that leads to the joys of love, connection, and family.
When: 6 Sep - 8 Nov 2025
WKM Gallery 20/F Coda Designer Centre 62 Wong Chuk Hang Road
Tang Contemporary Art: Narration: Action Poem
Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the solo exhibition “Narration: Action Poem” by artist Zhang Hui, opening on October 4, 2025, at Tang Contemporary Art Hong Kong, Central space. This exhibition marks Zhang Hui’s first solo project with Tang Contemporary Art, presenting nine new paintings. Curated by Tang Contemporary Art curator Fiona Lu, the exhibition will remain on view until November 12.
Several years ago, while teaching, Zhang Hui painted from a model. At first, it was merely an exercise in studying form, proportion, structure, and musculature. The model was simply an object. Yet over time, Zhang realized the models were more than that: they had a social identity, they were a living human being. Still, in practice, when drawing a model, the subject is not portrayed as a person but used as a medium for training. Thus, the model’s identity becomes strange—both “a person” and, at the same time, like a plaster cast, a kind of “for-example person.” From this realization, Zhang began broader reflections on shifts in subjects and perspectives throughout art history: from depictions of gods and popes in religious painting, to monarchs, to the emergence of democracy and freedom after the French Revolution of 1789; from looking up at divinity, to gazing upon kings, to the leveled gaze of the Impressionists. Over time, humans shifted from being accessories to gods into objects that could be regarded directly. This historical trajectory inspired Zhang’s understanding of the “for-example person”—at once an object, and a node within a larger sequence.
When: 4 Oct - 12 Nov 2025
Tang Contemporary Art, 10/F, H Queen's, 80 Queen's Road. Central
PODIUM: World of Interiors
PODIUM is proud to present ‘World of Interiors’, Urumqi-born, Berlin-based artist Min-Jia’s first solo exhibition in their career and with the gallery. Built upon their apprenticeship in Shaanxi Huaxianshadow puppetry under master Wang Tianwen in Xi’an, China, this body of work samples and remixes traditional techniques, materials, and ornamental forms across cultures, creating an enigmatic site from which to investigate the interior life of the migrant. Drawing from the analysis of how economic and migratory cycles construct subjectivities in Chinese-Australian writer Aurelia Guo’s eponymous book, as well as the artist’s experience in the transnational Asian diaspora, the exhibition fractures and recycles narratives of transformation to destabilise myths of origin and identity. The exhibition opens on 20 September (Saturday) from 2 to 7 PM and is on view until 15 November (Saturday).
When: 20 Sep - 15 Nov 2025
Unit 9D, E Tat Factory Building, 4 Heung Yip Road, Wong Chuk Hang
For more exhibitions please visit our active list of Hong Kong art exhibitions: https://www.hongkongartscollective.com/hong-kong-art-exhibitions
If you would like your exhibition featured, please email your press release to partnerships@hongkongartscollective.com
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