Asia Art Archive, Sheung Wan (2026)

27/10/2026

【AF26 | Oscar Ho Hing Kay】

Generously donated by Oscar Ho Hing Kay to AAA’s 2026 Annual Fundraiser, “Art Paradise” offers a playful reflection on Hong Kong’s cultural life and everyday creativity against the city’s evolving arts and cultural landscape.

Oscar Ho Hing Kay is an artist, curator, art critic, and educator who examines visual culture, public access to art, and Hong Kong’s cultural identities. Ho’s recent publication, “Hong Kong Art: A Curator’s History (1987–2004),” is the first illustrated study of this critical period in Hong Kong’s art history. Focusing on the diverse cultural life of the city, the book builds on AAA’s Research Collections and was launched at AAA’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026.

In “Art Paradise,” Ho depicts a scene of ordinary Hong Kong people enjoying art through dance, song, and chalk painting on the ground. The Chinese text translates: “At night the streets are full of people, no matter whether they’re artists or not, everyone is dancing and singing…turns out Hong Kong people are so artistic,” which Ho observes with a playful nod to the developments of the West Kowloon Cultural District at the time. The work is part of Ho’s “Stories Around Town” series of illustrated journal entries, which combine social and political events, legends, myths, and other stories that captured the public’s attention. Rarely exhibited, the series reflects Ho’s intimate observations of the everyday and his practice of integrating art into life.

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Oscar Ho Hing Kay, “Art Paradise,” 2017, mixed-media on paper, 25 × 18 cm. Generously donated by the artist.

26/10/2026

【AF26 | Studio Visit with Wong Sze Wai】

Wong Sze Wai shares how her work bridges memory and imagination, and how the flaking surfaces and cracks of the Dunhuang murals inspire her textured paintings.

Featured in AAA’s 2026 Annual Fundraiser, “Saturday bedtime story” takes the form of a zhenping, a traditional Chinese screen used to divide a sleeping space and protect against the wind. Wong transforms the folding structure into a gateway for the imagination, where a bird travels between dreams and myth. For the artist, Saturday is a space between wakefulness and dreaming, where one can be free from the demands of the week.

Online bidding for this work is available on aaa2026auction.com until 6 November, 10:30pm HKT.

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Wong Sze Wai, “Saturday bedtime story,” 2026, ink, water-based pigment, clay, and sand on canvas, diptych, 60 × 80 cm. Generously donated by the artist.

23/10/2026

Asia Art Archive’s Executive Director Özge Ersoy introduces five highlights from the organisation’s 2026 Annual Fundraiser auction, sharing the materials, stories, and ideas behind works by Song D**g, Jaffa Lam, Ashmina Ranjit, Huang Rui, and Jennifer Tee.

Together, these works offer reflections on value, identity, migration, and the interplay of light and darkness. Proceeds from the auction help keep AAA’s collections, library, and programmes free and open to everyone.

Visit the preview exhibition at 11/F, H Queen’s, Central, until 25 October. Online bidding is open at aaa2026auction.com until 6 November at 10:30pm HKT.

Tatler is the media partner of AAA’s 2026 Annual Fundraiser.

22/10/2026

【AF26 Highlights | Ways of Seeing】

Our preview and online bidding starts today! Discover four highlighted works by Song D**g, Yuan Yuan, Jaffa Lam, and Zhang Zhaohui that explore how windows and light shape the way we see. From reimagined window frames to geometric abstraction, these works invite reflection on memory, time, and perception.

View these works in person at H Queen’s until 25 October, and join us for tonight’s preview opening reception.

📌 Song D**g, “Usefulness of Uselessness – Varied Windows 59 × 59 cm”

Song D**g is a prominent figure in Chinese contemporary art, known for works that explore memory and impermanence through performance, video, installation, photography, painting, and theatre. This work is part of Song’s renowned “Usefulness of Uselessness” series, which explores the cultural meaning of windows beyond their role as barriers between living spaces and the external world. Drawing on his experience growing up in a Beijing hutong, Song salvages discarded materials from demolished buildings and gives them new life. Through shifting colours and rearranged frames, the work invites viewers to consider new perspectives on self-expression, memory, and time.

📌 Yuan Yuan, “Windows Edge I & II”

Yuan Yuan is critically acclaimed for his meticulously executed paintings of abandoned architectural spaces and interiors. “Windows Edge I & II” depicts two aged window frames fitted with wire screens, each opening onto a distant horizon. These works extend Yuan’s longstanding fascination with the threshold between interior and exterior, using the window as both a physical boundary and a pictorial device. Through the accumulation of minute details and the measured structure of the composition, the works turn an architectural fragment into a meditation on looking, distance, and the passage of time.

📌 Jaffa Lam, “Dark (An Opening)”

Jaffa Lam is known for large-scale, mixed-media sculptures and installations made from recycled and found materials. “Dark (An Opening)” extends Jaffa Lam’s longstanding “Window” series, where fragments of everyday urban life become frames for looking and reflection. For Lam, darkness and light are not opposites but coexist as states of change, uncertainty, and possibility. While capturing the fleeting moments of solace within ordinary experience, this work continues Lam’s exploration of material, memory, and the act of looking.

📌 Zhang Zhaohui, “Shape of Light”

Zhang Zhaohui is known for expanding the possibilities of contemporary Chinese ink painting through abstraction. “Shape of Light” brings the traditions of Chinese ink painting into dialogue with geometric abstraction, using light as both a subject and an organising principle. The work expresses the dynamic presence of light, emerging through the interplay of structure, space, and perception.

21/10/2026

【AF26 Highlights | Gestures of Reflection 】

Five highlighted works from AAA’s 2026 Annual Fundraiser showcase how artists give form to gesture, emotion, and memory. Through deeply personal processes, Il Lee, Chuang Che, Mit Jai Inn, Salima Hashmi, and Soghra Khurasani map their inner worlds onto their works, using physical gestures to turn fragile memories into spaces for reflection.

RSVP for the preview reception on 22 October, 6 to 8pm, at H Queen’s, and experience the works in person: https://www.anpasia.com/public/event/RegistrationForm/4140504A764142594B71

📌 Il Lee, “SBL-052”

Il Lee has developed a body of work built on constant experimentation with material and a boundless process using repetitive gestures of singular lines to create, expand, and reduce form. In “SBL-052,” layers of ballpoint pen lines intersect and gather to create and dissolve form from empty space, inviting the viewer to bring their familiar imagery to the work. For Lee, the ordinary ballpoint pen becomes a tool for exploring the possibilities of abstraction and the emergence of new forms.

📌 Chuang Che, “Untitled”

Chuang Che is a pioneering figure in modern art in Taiwan whose practice builds on classical Chinese painting and calligraphy. In this work, Chuang uses black oil paint to create a powerful rhythm and lyricism that echoes the language of traditional Chinese ink painting. He draws on the Chinese splash ink technique, while his physical and gestural approach resembles that of action painting from abstract expressionism. By using bold lines and thick strokes, Chuang blends traditional and modern expressions to convey the essence of the physical and natural world.

📌 Mit Jai Inn, “Untitled”

Mit Jai Inn is a prominent contemporary artist known for colour-based artworks rooted in physicality. “Untitled” exemplifies Mit Jai Inn’s fascination with the tactile and flexible quality of paint. He applies dense mounds of specially prepared pigments to an unstretched canvas, pressing them into radiating discs using palette knives and his hands. This physically intense yet meditative process gives the paint a sculptural presence, allowing the vibrant colour to feel active, tactile, and open ended.

📌 Salima Hashmi, “32 Church Crescent Series I”

Salima Hashmi is an acclaimed artist, curator, writer, educator, and art historian who has been a pioneering force in Pakistan’s art scene since the 1960s. In this work, Hashmi collages self-portraits from when she was 25 years old in London, using tea wash and natural pigments on handmade paper. Created for AAA’s 25th Anniversary exhibition “At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds, Part II,” Hashmi reflects on the accumulation of memories that are at once precious and fragile.

📌 Soghra Khurasani, “Ehsasat 3”

Soghra Khurasani is an artist and printmaker who explores the relationship between nature and the self, the cycles of life and growth, and the human body. This work is part of a watercolour series named after the Persian word ehsāsāt, which means a range of emotions and feelings. With enveloping layers that resemble those of a seed, “Ehsasat 3” hints at cycles of growth and regeneration. The series extends Khurasani’s reflections on ecology and transformations of the body—in ageing, healing, and beyond.

20/10/2026

【AF26 Highlights | Innovation Through Tradition】

Featuring works by Huang Rui, Gu Wenda, Xu Bing, and Wang Tiande, AAA’s 2026 Annual Fundraiser brings together diverse avant-garde and experimental approaches to contemporary Chinese art. Through abstraction, invented scripts, and unconventional uses of ink and paper, these artists engage with cultural traditions in different ways, drawing on inherited forms and personal memories to explore new artistic possibilities.

RSVP for the preview opening reception and view these pieces in person from 22 to 25 October at H Queen’s: https://www.anpasia.com/public/event/RegistrationForm/4140504A764142594B71

📌 Huang Rui, “Cloud and the moon 7 (Silver Beach series)”

Huang Rui is a pioneering figure in contemporary Chinese art and a founding member of the Stars Art Group, an avant-garde collective formed by self-taught artists in Beijing in the late 1970s. This work reflects on Huang’s lasting memory of Ginshadan, a dry-sand garden at the Ginkaku-ji Zen temple in Kyoto. In this work, abstract strokes in shades of blue evoke the tranquillity of sand, stone, and imagined waters, while cuts across the canvas suggest a bright moon suspended above the garden.

📌 Gu Wenda, “Mythos of Lost Dynasties: Pseudo Seal-Script in Ancient Wrap”

Gu Wenda is a leading figure of the ’85 New Wave movement in China. Set against a gestural ink ground and punctuated by a thin red cross, the monumental pseudo-character evokes the appearance of an ancient inscription while resisting interpretation. By disrupting the relationship between script and meaning, Gu questions the function of language in documenting history and shaping culture. The work belongs to a defining period in the artist’s practice, when his radical transformation of traditional calligraphic forms contributed to the development of experimental approaches to ink painting in China.

📌 Xu Bing, “Page from A Mirror to Analyze the World”

Xu Bing is one of the most internationally recognised artists of his generation, known for his printmaking, calligraphy, and mixed-media installations that challenge conventions of language and meaning-making. This work is part of Xu Bing’s renowned “Book from the Sky” project. Xu invented over 4,000 characters that resemble Chinese script but cannot be read. The work creates tension between the visual authority of written language and the impossibility of understanding it, inviting reflection on how language shapes knowledge, culture, and our understanding of the world.

📌 Wang Tiande, “Digital No.07-SA-02-05” & “Digital No.07-SA-02-05C”

Wang Tiande is known for his innovative approach to Chinese ink painting and calligraphy. His signature avant-garde style overlays traditional landscape painting with burned Xuan paper, often using ci******es and incense sticks as brushes. This pair of works is part of Wang Tiande’s “Digital” series, which exemplifies the artist’s signature burned landscapes and calligraphy. Created during Wang’s art residency in Paris, the series reflects the artist’s deep appreciation for Chinese traditional painting while exploring new ways to expand ink’s expressive and conceptual possibilities.

16/10/2026

【AF26 | RSVP for Preview Opening】

The preview exhibition of our Annual Fundraiser opens next Thursday, 22 October! Check out one of the auction highlights by Qiu Xiaofei, generously donated by the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

Qiu Xiaofei belongs to a generation of artists who have shaped Chinese contemporary art since the 2000s. Qiu’s practice is grounded in family memories and an attachment to his hometown, Harbin, which often serves as a theatrical backdrop in his large-scale paintings. Qiu’s dreamlike compositions blend reality and imagination, reflecting complex psychological landscapes and forces of the human psyche.

“Wang Wei” is a work from Qiu Xiaofei’s recent series, which began after his discovery of previously unknown family photographs following his father’s passing. In this work, elements of the landscapes from the artist’s hometown appear alongside familiar faces and imagined creatures, dissolving distinctions between memory and imagination. Fallen flowers, recurring motifs in this body of work, suggest the continual transformation of the natural world and the fragility of human memory. The compressed space and shifting scale recall Qiu’s longstanding engagement with theatrical imagery, informed by his childhood surrounded by stage sets through his father’s work as a painter and designer. Together, these elements create a layered meditation on memory, loss, and time.

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Qiu Xiaofei, “Wang Wei,” 2025, ink and seal paste on paper, 40.8 × 31.8 cm. Generously donated by the artist and Hauser & Wirth.

15/10/2026

【AF26 | Studio Visit with Dony Cheng】

What does light tell us about a city? In her studio, Dony Cheng shares how she translates fleeting patterns of light into artworks, working with charcoal and soft pastels alongside 3-D modelling and airbrushing.

Inspired by moon-phase charts, “Pearl on Orbit” features a circle of light spheres placed on the ground, translating the passage of time into a physical experience. The work explores changing conceptions of time, from slow and non-uniform rhythms shaped by rituals and natural cycles to fast-paced and rigid tempos that mould contemporary life.

The preview exhibition of our Annual Fundraiser opens next week on 22 October—sign up for the opening reception and see this piece up close: https://www.anpasia.com/public/event/RegistrationForm/4140504A764142594B71

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Dony Cheng, “Pearl on Orbit,” 2026, acrylic, charcoal, and soft pastel on canvas, 25.3 × 35.2 × 4 cm. Generously donated by the artist and Gallery EXIT.

14/10/2026

【AF26 Highlights | Cultural Connections】

Four highlighted works from AAA’s 2026 Annual Fundraiser explore how personal histories and cultural connections shape our lives in a changing world. Anju Dodiya layers fragments of the past and present; Jen Liu reveals the human connections behind automated systems; Christopher K. Ho reflects on the turn towards domestic life in times of upheaval; and Mark Joshua Epstein draws on family history to consider spaces of refuge, solidarity, and possibility.

RSVP for the preview exhibition opening and see these works up close: https://www.anpasia.com/public/event/RegistrationForm/4140504A764142594B71

📌 Anju Dodiya, “Paper Planes”
Anju Dodiya is a leading contemporary painter from India known for her expressive and autobiographical works that depict women’s personal and creative lives. In this work, paper aeroplanes glide over a young girl and a larger image of a grown woman behind her. Dodiya layers fragments of the past and present together into an unsettling balance, exploring how memory, imagination, and identity shape the “emotional theatre of the self.”

📌 Jen Liu, “Trying to Line Up Fun-Loving Johns, They’ve Changed Their Clothing Styles”
Jen Liu is a multimedia artist whose practice examines diasporic Asian identities, labour, technology, and speculative feminism. In this work, Liu explores growing forms of labour in today’s technology-oriented economy, revealing the fundamental human interconnectivity that powers automated systems. By adding eyes and ponytails to computer server farms and underwater data pods, Liu points to the network of human workers concealed within machine facades. The work’s title is derived from “Songs of Gold Mountain,” an anthology of Cantonese rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown in the 1910s––a tribute to the early lives of the Chinese diaspora in the United States.

📌 Christopher K. Ho, “Interlude”
Christopher K. Ho’s interdisciplinary projects address privilege, community, and capital. “Interlude” is part of Ho’s new series of small-scale works inspired by quotidian objects. The series draws parallels between today and the Biedermeier period, during which Central European art turned towards intimate, familial subjects in the face of political upheavals. With surfaces that will eventually patina when touched, the work addresses the inclination to seek refuge in domestic activities during times of social, environmental, and technological change.

📌 Mark Joshua Epstein, “The Way Things Can Be Written Over but Never Erased”
Mark Joshua Epstein works with materials such as fibreglass, resin, and acrylic to create brightly coloured and abstract sculptural paintings and works on paper. In “The Way Things Can be Written Over but Never Erased,” Epstein brings together two parts of his family history: the intricate paper-cut designs made by Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and the curving forms of 1980s laminate furniture sold in his Polish-born grandfather’s Long Island store. The painting reflects on how communities have created spaces of refuge, solidarity, and possibility.

12/10/2026

【AF26 Highlights | Power of Nature】

Seasons come and go, rocks take shape over millennia, and light dissolves into the branches of a tree. Seven highlighted works from AAA’s 2026 Annual Fundraiser capture the quiet and constant transformations of the natural world.

From watercolour and pressed petals to mineral pigments, ink, and mirrored surfaces, Wang Gongyi, Ming Fay, Zheng Chongbin, Jennifer Tee, Guo Hongwei, Poklong Anading, and Mok Yat-san trace the material history of the earth and the cycles of life that connect us to our environment.

RSVP for the preview exhibition opening and experience these works in person: https://www.anpasia.com/public/event/RegistrationForm/4140504A764142594B71

📌 Wang Gongyi, “Eternal Summer”
Wang Gongyi primarily works with printmaking and ink wash painting, and is among the few women artists who achieved recognition from prestigious art institutions in China during the early post-Mao era. “Eternal Summer” reinterprets the traditional practice of painting on silk through a contemporary language of abstraction and calligraphic gestures to evoke a sense of movement and impermanence. The title of this work elicits a desire to hold onto a season and the memories it carries, while acknowledging the inevitability of change.

📌 Ming Fay, “Miraculous Thatcher Shell”
Ming Fay was an influential Asian American artist known for his large-scale fruit gardens and immersive sculptural works. “Miraculous Thatcher Shell” depicts in fine detail the striated organic texture of the Thatcheria mirabilis shell. The artist was fascinated by the geometric sense of order, proportion, and aesthetic of seashells, and often collected them on his travels. As a first-generation Asian American artist, Fay often chose subjects that would resonate differently for Chinese and Western audiences.

📌 Zheng Chongbin, “Salt Land”
Zheng Chongbin has been at the forefront of experimental ink painting since the 1980s. His practice brings Chinese ink traditions into dialogue with Western abstraction, using light, space, and materiality to explore the forces and processes of the natural world. “Salt Land” evokes the formation and erosion of mineral landscapes, creating an image in continuous motion, echoing the flow of matter and energy in natural processes of transformation. Drawing on the Daoist understanding of a world in flux, Zheng allows the materials themselves to suggest the impermanence of natural phenomena, creating a landscape that is at one physical, elusive, and atmospheric.

📌 Jennifer Tee, “Tampan Chelonian Creatures #2 Diptyque”
Jennifer Tee is an interdisciplinary artist who explores migration, belonging, ecology, and spirituality. “Tampan Chelonian Creatures #2 Diptyque” is inspired by Indonesian tampans, which are ceremonial textiles from the Lampung region on the island of Sumatra. Tampans often feature ship motifs to symbolise the journey of humans, animals, and sea creatures to other realms. Through this work, Tee recalls the voyage of tulips from Asia to Northern Europe and the migration of Tee’s family from Indonesia to the Netherlands.

📌 Guo Hongwei, “Fairy in the Rock No.15”
Guo Hongwei is a prominent contemporary Chinese artist known for expanding the possibilities of painting through his experimentation with oil pigment and watercolour. “Fairy in the Rock No.15” transforms mineral pigments into an otherworldly landscape. Ground from stone and mixed with water, the pigments are allowed to settle onto the linen, creating layered surfaces and rugged textures. This process echoes the slow formation of rocks in nature, bringing the material history of the earth into the act of painting.

📌 Poklong Anading, “water table (no. 10)”
Poklong Anading engages with his surroundings through photography, video, painting, sculpture, and installation to explore sociopolitical and environmental issues. “water table (no. 10)” is part of his“water table” series, in which the artist contemplates one’s place in nature, memory, and perception through abstract explorations of reflections. In this work, Anading intentionally conceals the reflective surface and replaces it with rhizomatic tree structures that suggest the interconnectedness of elements in nature.

📌 Mok Yat-san, “Borrowed Stone (13)”
Mok Yat-san is a Hong Kong sculptor known for expanding Chinese landscape and ink traditions through large-scale outdoor sculptures and installations. “Borrowed Stone (13)” reimagines the traditional Chinese scholar’s rock in polished stainless steel. Scholar’s rocks were prized for their unusual shapes and placed in study rooms and gardens. In this work, the mirror-like surface reflects its surroundings, transforming the sculpture into a constantly changing landscape that connects the natural environment with the people and spaces around it.

Asia Art Archive

27/10/2026

26/10/2026

23/10/2026

22/10/2026

21/10/2026

20/10/2026

16/10/2026

15/10/2026

14/10/2026

12/10/2026

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