Empty Gallery is pleased to present Respirare, Tokyo-based painter Reina Sugihara's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Sugi-hara's enigmatic canvases emerge from a gradual and ritualistic process of tracing, layering, and effacement often enacted over a period of months or years. Her paintings first coalesce around the intuitive selection of a found object, whose essential mystery and perceptual ambiguity become a site of sustained phenomenological investigation. Mediated first through the sieve of embodied consciousness and then through the hand of the artist, these objects are transmuted into luminous deposits of gesso and oil, pigment and binder-emergent and quivering contours whose contingent organicism suggests a self-sustaining reality. Striking in their anachronistic approach to a medium often fraught with its own history, Sugihara's paintings share affinities with the automatism of the Surrealists, the corporeal tendencies of post-war Japanese and European painting, and the contemplative traditions of religious art, but are, quietly, all their own.

Opening reception: 6-8pm

Following the opening reception there will be performances by Shizuo Uchida, Ritsuko Sakata (DJ), and the band RQRQ.

Gallery address: 19/F, Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung St, Aberdeen

Born in Japan, Taro Masushio is an artist based in New York City. He received his BA from UC Berkeley and MFA from New York University and has taught at both institutions. His works have been exhibited internationally including at 47 Canal, Capsule Shang-hai, Immanence, Pacific Film Archive, and other venues. He was the 2022/23 City Artist in Residence at Internationales Atelier-stipendium Mönchengladbach. He opened a solo exhibition, Liar Liar, at Ulrik; New York in 2023, and Rumor Has It at Empty Gallery; Hong Kong (2020). In Fall 2024, he will join Cooper Union; New York as the Henry Wolf Chair in Photography.

Opening reception Saturday, September 21, 6-8PM.

Gallery address: 19/F, Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung St, Aberdeen

Empty Gallery is pleased to present Apologies and Other Regrets, James T. Hong's second solo exhibition with the gallery. Since the late 1990s, Hong has produced searing moving image works that deploy elements of experimental, documentary, and essayistic filmmaking to critically address issues of class, race, and historical trauma in America and East Asia. His research-based practice often operates along the fraught intersection of epistemological and socio-political questions, interrogating the manner in which knowledge is produced, disseminated, and manipulated in the service of power.

On our 19th floor, Hong presents the newest iteration of his film Apologies(2012–ongoing) in a monumental three-channel version. Shown most recently at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, Apologies is a taxonomic investigation into that most contemporary phenomenon: the political apology. Hong's film functions simultaneously as documentation of the technics of mediatized diplomacy, and a sort of historical index of past atrocities via their—often facile—national acknowledgments. On our lower floor, Hong will also present a series of new sculptures entitled Stabbed In The Back.

Opening reception: 8 June, Saturday, 6-8pm

Gallery address: 18th & 19th Floor Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung Street, Tin Wan

A nocturnal sail through aural experiments and rhythm-driven electronics. Please join us on the dance floor for an all-night celebration at the gallery.

Full line-up to be announced soon. For more details, please visit emptygallery.com or follow @emptygallery.hk on Instagram. 

Date: Friday, March 29, 9 pm to 5 am

Address: 18/F Grand Marine Centre, 3 Yue Fung Street, Tin Wan

Empty Gallery is pleased to announce our 30th exhibition: Le Contre-Ciel

Spanning both floors of the gallery, the exhibition will feature works by Yuji Agematsu, Francis Alÿs, Paul Chan, Mel Chin, Magalie Comeau, Bruce Conner, Liz Deschenes, Trisha Donnelly, Agustín Fernández, Guo Fengyi, Richard Hawkins, Kong Chun Hei, Leung Kui Ting, Mathieu Malouf, Kazuo Ohno, R.H. Quaytman, Julia Scher, Michael E. Smith, Tang Kwok-hin, Tom Thayer, Stewart Uoo, Antek Walczak, Wucius Wong and Yu Ji.

Organized by Olivia Shao
Opening reception: Sunday, March 24, 4 - 8PM

Gallery address: 19/F, Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung St, Aberdeen

Empty Gallery is pleased to present Back, Oslo-based artist Doris Guo’s first solo exhibition in Asia. Existing in the interstices between embodied duration and affective labor, Guo’s practice often coalesces around the cultural and material gestures which structure our attempts to form a communal life. 

Back centers around a collaborative project of material care which Guo and her mother, Weili Wang, have undertaken to organize and conserve the latter’s artwork. Formerly lodged undisturbed around her Seattle home, Wang’s oil paintings and sketches––mostly executed between 1970 and 1990 around the Yangtze River Delta––bear witness to an artistic life partially abridged by circumstance. Presented as diptychs together with Guo’s pinhole photographs depicting the suburban interior of Wang’s study––replete with cardboard boxes, filing folders, and other marginalia––they constitute a highly personal form of evidence, speaking to the paradoxical manner in which physical or geographical proximity can amplify distance, and separation can foster feelings of closeness. The familiar, but rarely remarked upon intertwining between intimacy and anomie. This body of work is accompanied by a suite of new projector sculptures in which found objects are enlarged and transmuted, the quietly domestic assuming the charged contours and haunting proportions of memory.

Opening Reception: Friday, December 8, 6-8PM

Gallery address: 18th & 19th Floor Grand Marine Center, Tin Wan

Cici Wu (b.1989) lives and works in New York. She received her BA from The City University of Hong Kong, School of Creative Media. In 2013, she moved to the United States, where she earned an MFA in Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Wu has had solo exhibitions at 47 Canal, New York (2018), Bonnevalle, Noisy-le-Sec, France (2018), and has participated in group exhibitions at Interstate Projects, Brooklyn (2019), Para Site, Hong Kong (2018), and Triangle Art Association, Brooklyn (2017), among others. She also co-founded PRACTICE: a studio, residency, and exhibition space based in New York which has been operating since 2015.

Please join us on Saturday, September 2nd, 6-8 pm, for the opening reception of Belonging and Difference, Cici Wu's second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Gallery address: 9/F, Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung St, Aberdeen

Empty Gallery is proud to announce the return of our annual rave. We are excited to welcome back friends—old and new, from near and far—at the gallery.

The event will begin on March 24th Friday, running all night long with Pessimist, Tara Clerkin Trio, Conna Haraway, Special Guest DJ and Exael.

Time: March 24, 9 pm – 5 am
Address: 18/F Grand Marine Centre, 3 Yue Fung Street, Aberdeen, Hong Kong

RSVP essential, please register here.

Empty Gallery is pleased to present screen-skins, New York-based artist Tishan Hsu's second solo exhibition with the gallery. Since the 1980s, Hsu's practice has investigated the complex manner in which information technology has altered the perceptual, affective, and political contours of our embodied experience. Continually refining his practice to keep pace with these emergent phenomena, Hu works between painting and sculpture, employing methods such as UV printing, casting, and digital photo manipulation to create objects which are poised at the limit between the physical and the virtual. Screen-skins extends a mode of practice first articulated in delete and subsequently refined in presentations at the 59th Venice Biennale and Miguel Abreu Gallery, broadening Hsu's scope of inquiry to encompass the expanded sphere of biopolitics and the digital police state.

Gallery address: 19/F, Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung St, Aberdeen

Empty Gallery is pleased to present Sites of Wounding: Chapter 1, New York and Hong Kong-based artist Jes Fan's second solo exhibition with the gallery. Originally trained in glassmaking, Fan's practice in expanded sculpture merges a regard for form with a radically transdisciplinary approach to research and material experimentation- often incorporating unstable organic compounds such as sex hormones, skin pigments, and other biological agents. Although Fan's earlier investigations focused largely on a granular deconstruction of gender essentialism, his recent work has turned away from anthropocentric concerns to engage with ecosystems and organisms beyond the human. For Sites of Wounding, Fan returns to Hong Kong to research native species that generate precious materials through processes of contamina-tion, penetration, and incorporation. In a series of new works, he explores the affective resonance of these woundings as they relate to both the generative potential and the psychosomatic trauma of colonial subjectivity.

Gallery address: 19/F, Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung St, Aberdeen

Long-time collaborators Raha Raissnia and Charles Curtis will premiere a new performance at the gallery on February 18 and 19, closing Raissnia’s current exhibition, نور (Nour).

Raha Raissnia will debut an expanded cinema piece incorporating both 16mm film and 35mm slides, in collaboration with Charles Curtis, whom Artforum has described as “one of the great cellists”, celebrated in the realms of both experimental music and classical performance.

The duo has previously performed at Miguel Abreu Gallery (2006), Xippas Gallery (2006), Arika’s Kill Your Timid Notion Festival (2008), and The Drawing Center (2018).

Gallery address: 19/F, Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung St, Aberdeen

Empty Gallery is pleased to present the Tehran-born, New York-based artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

نور (Nour) Meaning ‘light’ in the Persian language, presents new works by Raissnia that assemble an idiosyncratic syntax of architectural, natural and technological forms to construct multilayered 'somewheres' that traverse past and present, memory and imagination, transient moments and the accretion of time.

In many ways the thematic lodestar of Raissnia’s practice, light is deployed by the artist as a technical and philosophical medium for its ability to uncover realms and entities which evade our grasp.

Gallery address: 19/F Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung St, Aberdeen

Empty Gallery is pleased to present F, Hong Kong-based artist Vunkwan Tam's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Tam's practice operates akin to a sort of found poetry or cento, assembling groupings of readymade objects and linguistic fragments—often encountered online—into reduced spatial narratives. Site-sensitive and semi-improvised, these fugitive arrangements repurpose the deracinated stuff of semiocapitalism in order to perform an archaeology of communal affect—a type of emotional excavation of the present.

Appropriating its title from a popular form of chatroom response in which the titular letter is used as shorthand to express condolences for an accident, failure, or tragedy, Fengages with the city's contemporary moment as a form of cipher—traversing a spectrum of lived ambivalence and illuminating the potential artistic use-value of such minor affects as exhaustion, resignation and disillusionment.

Gallery address: 18th & 19th Floor, Grand Marine Center, Aberdeen

Hot on the heels of Tailwhip, Empty Gallery is pleased to present BAD TIMING, Xper.Xr’s second exhibition with the gallery, and his first presentation of new work in nearly three decades. Occupying a seminal, if oft-overlooked, position within Hong Kong art history, Xper stands nearly alone as a regional representative of the radically individualistic and anti-authoritarian potentials embodied by the shared legacy of industrial, no wave, and noise music. Bad Timing sees this interminable provocateur re-animating his long deceased painting practice–– last sighted at the Quart Society in 1991–– with a perverse and unexpected turn towards society portraiture.

Gallery address: 19/F Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung St, Aberdeen

Empty Gallery is pleased to present Yutaka Matsuzawa: Vanishing in the Wilderness. Co-curated by Alan Longino and Reiko Tom, and realized with the generous assistance of the Matsuzawa family, this exhibition represents the first overview of this pivotal artist's practice in Sinophone East Asia. Widely considered the leading pioneer of Japanese conceptual art, Matsuzawa's practice synthesized a diverse array of Eastern and Western knowledge- including parapsychology, Pure Land Buddhism, quantum physics-- in the pursuit of artistic strategies for expressing the immaterial sphere. Split like an atom between the gallery's two levels -generative both separately and together-the 19th floor features canonical works from Matsuzawa's post-revelation period, while the 18th floor presents earlier paintings and collages spanning the mid 1950s through the early 1960s-- works which have rarely been shown outside of Japan.

This exhibition begins with a call for proposals from 1964. Calling for artists to exhibit their work with Matsuzawa in the highlands of central Japan, three aphoristic directions instructed would-be participants:

Don't Believe Matter

Don't Believe Mind

Don't Believe Senses

As instructions, they are formally conscious of the dominant Conceptual art being practiced globally at the time. However, as poetry, they conjure a speculative world that helps the individual temporarily return to a world of dissolution and disappearance.

Gallery address: 19/F Grand Marine Center, 3 Yue Fung St, Aberdeen

Empty Gallery is pleased to present Olistostrome, our 2nd solo exhibition with Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork (formerly known as Gordon). Often aiming to reconfigure received hierarchies between audience, performer, and exhibition architecture, Gork's hybrid practice exists in the slippery disciplinary interstice between sculpture and sound installation. Simultaneously drawing on and subverting the legacy of cybernetics – arguably a dominant logic of our contemporary moment – Gork's systems of embodied feedback seek to mobilize the emancipatory potential latent within both everyday materials and infrastructures, as well as the simple act of listening.

Taking its name from a geological term for a rock mass created through the chaotic sliding and accumulation of semi-fluid sediments, Olistostrome consists of a series of new acoustic sculptures set within a complex sound installation developed for the gallery. At once resembling sacred rocks, greco-roman statuary, and topological formations, these enigmatic structures– dispersed like islands within a reservoir of dry pebbles– function simultaneously as sculptures in the classical sense, and as sonic modifiers for Gork's psychoacoustic environment.

Gallery address: 18th and 19th Floor Grand Marine Center, No. 3 Yue Fung Street, Tin Wan

Empty Gallery is pleased to present Tailwhip, a historical overview of the activities of Cantonese artist, noise musician, organiser, and raconteur, Xper.Xr.

Comprising performance documentation, archival photographs, scores, props, and other ephemera, Tailwhip attempts to pull back the curtain on this obscure yet vital presence within the counter-cultural history of Hong Kong. Coming of age in the 1980s – and finding his way to experimental music only after extended dalliances with BMX biking, drag racing, and general juvenile delinquency – Xper.Xr released his first cassette in 1989, quickly establishing himself as one of Hong Kong's first industrial noise musicians and joining a burgeoning international network of like-minded protagonists including the likes of Merzbow, Emil Beaulieau, and Masaya Nakahara. However, noise would ultimately prove too narrow a category to contain a practice which so thoroughly courted misappropriation, failure, self-satire, and entropy as strategies for artistic resistance. Embodying a congenital disregard for authority in all of its forms – from police and copyright law to notions of avant-garde 'good taste' – Xper's performances would often leave audiences both at home and abroad mystified – as ersatz covers of popular tunes shared space with aggressive vocal exorcisms, comic interludes, and blasts of distortion.

Gallery address: 18th and 19th Floor Grand Marine Center, No. 3 Yue Fung Street, Tin Wan

Empty Gallery is pleased to present “Rumor Has It” New York-based artist Taro Masushio’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Masushio’s conceptual practice positions photography as an ontological proposition or speculative machine within a nexus which also includes prose, video, drawing, and sculpture. He investigates the capacity of images, not to document an underlying reality, but to manipulate and endlessly extend our own perception– mobilizing the domains of time, space, and affect as plastic qualities to be sculpted in the pursuit of other possible worlds.

Gallery address: 18-19/F, Grand Marine Center, Tin Wan

Empty Gallery is pleased to present VORTICES, our first solo exhibition with Hong Kong-based painter HENRY SHUM. Drawing its title from an anachronistic term for ‘vortex’ once employed by William Blake and Descartes to describe the spiral-like structure of the cosmos, Vortices assembles a thematically interconnected group of recent oil paintings along with a single wall mural. Shum locates his source materials within the tides of mediated imagery which daily engulf our consciousness, transmuting these eclectic images into paintings which seem to pulse with an oneiric energy. Rendered in undulating lines and diaphanous washes, these haunting compositions (whose fugitive motifs are mirrored and inverted across the show) depict otherworldly scenes which are at once distant and familiar – tenebrous spaces of late-capitalist dream.

Gallery address: 18-19/F, Grand Marine Center, Tin Wan