Hidden Space is delighted to present “Sunrise. Shift your weight”, a solo exhibition by Sami Yip, the sixth recipient of our annual Hidden Space Award.

Across a series of videos, an unremarkable male body engages, or fails to engage, in a range of tasks in cramped domestic spaces, from a shower cubicle, a kitchen corner to a cell-like barely furnished room. Within them, the protagonist seems caught in either an exhausted stasis or compulsive but ambiguous behaviour. In stark contrast, an upbeat instructional video gives us the same person presenting a very different face to the world: energetic, directly engaging and greenscreen liberated from the banalities of relentless fatigue.

In Yip’s dream-like moving images, he weaves together concerns about personal and societal tipping points, both physical and psychological. His is a melancholy-saturated world that holds both the sensuous and the abject in the same space.

Opening: Saturday 6 April, 4-8pm

Gallery address: Unit 6, 16/F, Block A, Wah Tat Industrial Centre, 8-10 Wah Sing Street, Kwai Hing

Hidden Space is delighted to present “unsung matter(s)” a solo exhibition by Kate Siu.

Using locally dug, unrefined clay and scavenged organic and man-made detritus, Siu generates extraordinary forms from unpromising materials. She allows us to step beyond our normal frames of reference to see the delicate equilibrium that is possible when we pay attention to things other than ourselves.

These composite forms suggest alternative ecosystems. In them, we might glimpse downy feathers and wires, rocks and rusted metal parts, jewel-coloured pools of glass nestling in eggshell-thin craters. The shapes and structures are utterly varied, elongated, squat, tentacled, towering, tufted and more. At times almost aquatic or almost architectural, they are potentially both and yet neither. Here is an emergent co-existent newness. The artworks invite us to value the tenacious, the small, the astounding yet unsung matter of everyday life.

Opening: Sat 30 September, 4-8pm

Gallery address: Unit 6, 16/F, Block A, Wah Tat Industrial Centre, 8-10 Wah Sing Street, Kwai Hing

Hidden Space is delighted to present “It’s not about design / I didn’t ask to win this award / 使用是產品放着是藝術品” by Kaio Wu Hiu Nam, the fifth recipient of our annual Hidden Space Award.

 For her installation, Wu has applied art-world related text to a range of ready-made objects, from clothing to sports equipment, household items and even confectionery. From the starting point of her own aspirations to a particular lifestyle, she has selected objects that she finds genuinely desirable, whether they are original designs or affordable mass-manufactured versions of high-end items. The artwork both critiques the amalgamation of luxury retail with art, whilst admitting to its aspirational pull.  

 In her playfully honest title and the inclusion of ‘rejected’ artworks and ideas, Wu also gives us access to the multiple pressures of choice, the art/exhibition making process, and even how taxing it is to be a fledgling artist attempting to realise ideas.

Venue address: Unit 6, 16/F, Block A, Wah Tat Industrial Centre, 8-10 Wah Sing Street, Kwai Hing

Hidden Space is delighted to present "Your Warmth is the Cut of My Flesh", a duo exhibition by Mindy Lui & Shawn Pakhin Tang. They join forces here to respond to each other’s practice, and whilst there are distinct artworks, together they present a single entwined installation.

Both artists find common ground in taking everyday objects and rendering them into strange, allusive devices, multiplied here to the point of both absurdity and potential threat. The floor is alive with the constant flicker and faint noise of hundreds of compass needles on repurposed clock mechanisms, proliferating in a mass of electrical cables. Instead of the self-contained simple battery-operated clock, these are re-engineered to run off the electricity supply, to take up more rather than less space, to announce their energy use, using every socket and multiple extensions. Brightly coloured soap casts emerge as nodes from this cable network, their moulds taken variously from organic material, manufactured medical instruments and engine parts. Are they endpoints, are they active, or primed to be activated? If so, to what purpose? These are Tang’s, along with heat lamps designed to support vital reptilian body regulation, but clustered and caged here, giving off life-affirming warmth but also signalling danger.

Opening Sat 19 Nov, 4-8pm

Venue address: Unit 6, 16/F, Block A, Wah Tat Industrial Centre, 8-10 Wah Sing Street, Kwai Hing

Hidden Space is delighted to present Linger (A While) by Masahiro Nakamura, the fourth recipient of our annual Hidden Space Award.

In a series of large-scale photographs, a youthful body is seen in a variety of cramped domestic settings. Whether a glimpse of a back in a bathtub behind a butterfly-patterned shower curtain or curled unclothed in sunshine on a bed hemmed in by racks of clothing, the images hover somewhere between staged and candid, between innocent and knowingly alluring. There is a nascent sexuality, both amplified and restrained by its homely setting, by thresholds of isolation and privacy, or lack of.

Around the body, details of the crowded home press in, surrounding, informing, allowing us further tantalising glimpses of an environment that both shapes and constrains. This is the artist’s own body on show - angular, vulnerable, desirous, desirable. In Linger (A While), Nakamura delicately explores the interior tumult of the young adult and the intensity of inarticulate feeling. In the invitation to look, we are both joined in intimacy and the potential breaching of a private boundary. Perhaps both are proposed. Our gaze is not returned.

Fri to Sun 1-6pm
By appointment
Dm or email Hidden Space to confirm your visit

Hidden Space is delighted to present “Domestic Landscape” and “Death is the calling of a seashell witch”, a duo solo exhibition by Katie Ho and Isabella Isabella. Katie’s drawings began in the tensions of intimate home confinement. Whilst in progress, this series sparked an ongoing connection and dialogue with Isabella Isabella, whose performances are evolving responses to Katie’s installation, and will happen across three days during the exhibition.
Opening: Saturday 9 October, 4-8pm
Hours: Friday to Sunday, 1-6pm

Live performances on 10/10, 24/10, 7/11
Limited seats. Registration required for performance: https://tinyurl.com/seashellwitch

Venue address: Unit 6, 16/F, Block A, Wah Tat Industrial Centre, 8-10 Wah Sing Street, Kwai Hing

Hidden Space is delighted to present Polymorphs by Natalie Chiu, the third recipient of our annual Hidden Space Award.

In Polymorphs, Natalie Chiu dives into her inner psyche to create unique life forms, isolated and stripped of narrative content. Her drawings are both fantastical, imaginary and yet also strangely both of this world and our subconscious. Here are creatures or perhaps specimens – it’s hard to define what exactly we are seeing here. Whatever they are, they straddle an ambiguous line between the known and the unknown, between fascination and repulsion.

Venue address: Unit 6, 16/F, Block A, Wah Tat Industrial Centre, 8-10 Wah Sing Street, Kwai Hing

In the Post-Human Narratives project, curator Kobe Ko brings together a selection of women artists from Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan in different locations both real and virtual. Hidden Space is delighted to present one of the physical events, Ice Wong Kei Suet's There’s No Beginning. There’s No End.

25, 26, 27 Sep 2020 (3 days only)
Hours: Fri, 5-8pm; Sat & Sun, 1-7pm

Register for visiting: https://forms.gle/TXKSVwfWsJJA4Kx97

Gallery address: Unit 6, 16/F, Block A, Wah Tat Industrial Centre, 8-10 Wah Sing Street, Kwai Hing