Opening this Saturday, January 11, is “Sarah & Samuel,” a show featuring artist-couple Sarah Lai and Samuel Swope. Revealing for the first time the differences and parallels in their individual practices, the exhibition is, markedly, not a duo show, but a show about being a duo. Two new collaborative pieces will be presented alongside older works, representing the unseen partnership sprung from a 19-year relationship and shared studio space.

“I Am a 70-Year-Old British Sculptor”, Christopher K. Ho’s first solo exhibition at PHD Group, opens September 14. It features thirty sculptural works and ten new drawings.

Christopher K. Ho (b. 1974, based in Hong Kong) is an multidisciplinary artist, educator, and writer. In his practice, he examines colonial histories and identity as articulations of power and politics. In his role as arts educator and organizer, he has led workshops on otherness and decolonization. He is currently executive director of Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong and co-edited “Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts,” a Paper Monument publication.

As part of her solo exhibition “Dreamskin,” Chan Ting will unveil a new performance titled “To Kill or to Heal?” on Aug 16 and 17 at PHD Group.

Featuring performance artists Florence Lam and Hengsyun, the performance will delve into the duality of things, exploring how something produced for violence and war can be transformed into an instrument of healing and care.
Fri, 16 Aug
Sat, 17 Aug
Time: 8:30pm

Request to attend the performance by emailing info@phdgroup.art or Whatsapping +852 5943 7541

Chan Ting (b. 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Hong Kong. Her practice begins as conservation: discarded or rejected objects from public sites or domestic residences are salvaged and brought back to her studio for restoration. Drawing on her background as a hypnotherapist and energy healer, she then communes with these objects in a process of addition and subtraction that involves layers of plaster and pigment that are sanded and drilled away with heavy industrial tools.

Formally, her expanded paintings and sculptural objects engage directly with the artist’s environs. In hand-blending plasters, industrial pigments, and waxy oil pastels, she also folds in the air, smell, and temperature of Hong Kong and its movements of people. This results in an image that is both a palimpsest and landscape portrait, at once a reference to the contemporary conditions of place and a psychological study of society, memory, migration, and change.

Supper /ˈsʌpə/ noun: an evening meal, typically a light or informal one
Club /klʌb/ noun: an association dedicated to a particular interest or activity

“Supper Club” references social gatherings through its late opening hours of 4pm - 1 am. Our goal is to exist outside the parameters of the conventional art fair or exhibition experience, and we aim to create an intimate alternative, social space for like-minded individuals to linger and convene. Breaking down the paradigms of formality and severity typically associated with art events, Supper Club is also an informal gathering space, and this casual undertone will be reflected in our curation and programming.

We are pleased to announce all 22 galleries joining us at Supper Club! Please join us in welcoming:
47 Canal
ANOMALY
Balice Hertling
Canton Gallery
Cylinder
GALLERY COMMON
Gallery2
island
Keyi Gallery
Madein Gallery
Make Room
Misako & Rosen
Mou Projects
Nova Contemporary
P21
PHD Group
Tabula Rasa Gallery
TARQ
THE SHOPHOUSE
Vanguard Gallery
YveYANG Gallery
ZIAN Gallery

Time: 4pm - 1am

Location: Fringe Club, 2 Lower Albert Road, Central

Announcing Wong Kit Yi’s first solo show with PHD Group, opening March 23

Expect bagpipes, hidden frequencies, karaoke and more.

The gallery will be open 11:11am to 11:11pm for the week of Art Basel Hong Kong. Live performances featuring the artists and her special guests will also take place daily during that week.

Wong Kit Yi (b.1983) works at the intersection of speculative imagination and research. Merging video with performance and the everyday, she crafts participatory experiences that engender questions of identity, the parameters of time, and context. In her relational karaoke-lecture-performances, she moves fluidly between the voices of academia, memoir, philosophy, and pop song, aggregating content from her research.

She has performed and shown work at Tate Modern (London); Queens Museum (New York); Para Site (Hong Kong); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong); and the San Francisco Art Institute (San Francisco). She has participated in FRONT Triennial, Cleveland (2022) and The Arctic Circle expeditionary residency (2015) and was a 2021-22 artist-in-residence at the Chinati Foundation. Her work has been collected by the M+ Museum (Hong Kong) and the Kadist Art Foundation (Paris/San Francisco).

We are happy to announce “Forging the Swords,” a solo exhibition for Beijing-based artist Xi Jiu that is rooted in a story by literary figure Lu Xun. The show opens Saturday, February 3.

The eponymous story begins with a young village boy on the cusp of his sixteenth birthday. In the light of dawn, his mother tells him the story of his father’s murder and of two swords forged of invisible iron, setting him on an irreversible path of revenge.

Written in 1926 in the aftermath of a bloody anti-warlord demonstration in Beijing, “Forging the Swords” is a memorable and dark inclusion in Lu Xun’s folio of tales retold from ancient China. Xi Jiu’s richly rendered miniatures present an intimate picture by picture scene, expanding on the tale’s sociopolitical metaphors around class, hierarchy, and sacrifice.

Love, hate, desire, disgust, birth, decay, death—are we perhaps waiting for some tenderness in all of this? Some vulnerability? When you find a bruise on your body, do you trace it with your finger? Do you feel those soft reverberations of pain and pleasure? Do they sing to you?
We invite you to explore “Tendering,” the second group exhibition hosted at PHD Group, and the sequel to our inaugural show, “Rendering.” Marking the gallery’s two-year anniversary, the show and its roster of artists expresses tender growth and change. Marking the gallery’s two-year anniversary, the show and its roster of artists expresses tender growth and change. We are pleased to present works by Leelee Chan, Chan Ting, Michele Chu, Dew Kim, Firenze Lai, Lee Eunsae, Yuko Mohri, Sasaoka Yuriko, Shang Liang, Eunice Tsang, and Virtue Village.

Opening reception: 1 December, 6-9pm

Make an appointment for visit.

PHD Group are pleased to announce Zheng Mahler’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, “What is it like to be a (virtual) bat?”

“What is it like to be a (virtual) bat?” marks Zheng Mahler’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. The show features new videos and installations in an multi-sensory environment, and explores animal, more than human, and machine experiences through the lens of assisted meditation.

Opening: September 2, 1-6pm

Gallery location: Gooseneck Bridge, Wan Chai

How does one confront loss—personal and collective? In her past works, Michele Chu has engaged in relational art within the context of acute social disruption, building installations and participatory performances that rewrite public gestures. For her debut solo exhibition, “you, trickling,” the artist further mines rituals of intimacy and vulnerability, inviting viewers to participate in a meditative journey that renders the autobiographical as shared experience, and memory as material.

Throughout the exhibition space, the loss of a body—or bodies—reveals a spectral map that oscillates between the ghostly interpersonal relationships of the artist and her ailing mother, foregrounded by water leaking, reforming, condensing, and fracturing. At the entrance, the visitor is met with a wall of fabric separating two spaces: the exterior world, ruled by social order and automaticity, and the fragmented interior, where trauma, memory, and the self resides. Walking further into the exhibition, one encounters a series of rituals faintly reminiscent of a bathhouse experience that cleanses, soothes, and unsettles. From there, a collection of body parts emerges: a belly button, cast in bronze; a softened hand reaching out; sharp perforations on skin; a woman’s back toward us, lying still and silent. Demarcated by tunnels and fabric passageways, the space encloses the visitor in its umbilical recollections of birth, menstruation, excretion, and death.

By appointment.

PHD Group is pleased to announce our next solo exhibition, "Cold Rub," by South Korean artist Lee Eunsae. Referencing the phenomenon of uranium glass—a type of decorative glass with a distinctively lustrous, and potentially radioactive, sheen—Lee’s new paintings slide between distance and surface, gaze and desire, and object and subject.

Lee Eunsae (b. 1987, based in Seoul) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice questions methodologies of traditional painting, imagery, and subjective realism. Lee’s works have been exhibited at the Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul); Nam-Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul); Suwon Museum of Art (Suwon); SeMA Nanji (Seoul); and MMCA Gwacheon.

The exhibition opens February 3, 2023. By appointment only.

Gallery location: Goose Neck Bridge

The shapes and forms in Dylan DeRose’s 10 sculptures are at once familiar and conspiratorial. Where might one have seen them before? In what environments do they typically exist? What are their names and histories? Are they route signs, formal abstractions, or a set of codes—operations?
Clues to the origins of this shape might lie in the sculptures’ production cycle, which begins with the artist raising worms in his studio, crafting ideal conditions for them to grow and thrive. The vermin are then guided through blocks of polystyrene–which they eat to move through–before their abrupt eviction, leaving behind only tunnelled absences.
Other indicators of meaning might be found in the works’ material formulations, in which a veneer is built up by tissue-thin layers of grayscale paint, or in the worm craters set within an austere grid. Enigmatic titles such as “Reuniongate-annex,” or “Pythonegg-annex,” hint at a playfully deconstructive nature. Yet the sculptures maintain a neutrality. Shipped from the semi-sealed environment of DeRose’s Los Angeles studio and vaulted straight into PHD Group, they have not yet functioned as objects in the alleged “real world”—they exist almost purely as signifiers. The assumptive lines between reality and fantasy are challenged here; DeRose reminds us that our environment is as constructed as the existential terraformations of Disney World or the connotations we have loaded into our societies and systems.

By appointment.

PHD Group is pleased to announce "Planaria," the first solo exhibition by Kyoto-based artist Sasaoka Yuriko in Hong Kong, opening September 17.

In the three-channel video installation "Planaria" (2021), Sasaoka explores mortality through a surrealist ritual of death and regeneration. At the center of this narrative are 12 handmade dolls with fish heads collected by the artist. These dolls appear alongside 12 new embroidered canvases in a setting that extends from the ambitious, carnivalesque video installation.

Designed and built by Sasaoka herself, the stage, set, and props all play into her distinct visual language, which derives from global theater traditions and subverts monolithic historical narratives. As in her previous seminal work, "Icarus’ Bride" (2016-19), Sasaoka builds herself into these narratives as both observer and complicit passenger, this time not as a cursed bride but as a tortured figure grappling with the question of what it means to live in a hostile world.

PHD Group and the Korean Cultural Center in Hong Kong are pleased to announce "Flèche," a duo exhibition featuring new works by Michele Chu and Lee Eunsae. The show opens August 25 with a reception from 4-6pm.

"Flèche" means “arrow” in French, but when spoken, evokes skin. How can a site of piercing—of trauma—also reveal the self? Two artists investigate somatic experience and porousness, creating space for what our flesh remembers, reveals, and holds on the surface. Inspired by the poetry book of the same name by Hong Kong poet Mary Jean Chan, these autobiographical works burrow into and around skin, refuting orderly definitions of the body and self.

Opening reception: Thursday, August 25, 4-6pm
Venue address: Korean Cultural Center in Hong Kong, 6/F, Block B, PMQ, 35 Aberdeen Street

Larger than a hamlet, smaller than a town: the traditional village comes to mind as a cluster of physical spaces, agrarian and neighborly. Horses and oxen live nearby, chewing on local grasses; figures mingle freely in small courtyards and gardens; within hermetic houses, couples grow into families, families into clans.

Yet how can this concept of “village” be updated for the conditions of contemporary, globalized communities? Clashes between the individual and the collective deconstruct notions of the communal as homogenous society. The replacement of rural animalia with machinery and cyborgian identities lends itself to new horizons of transhuman existence. The ancient ritual is commodified as charm and trinket, and yet there is still magic in the act of gathering, of transformation. In our post-internet, post-human world, what does it mean to build, live in, and reproduce as a village?

These themes foreground the first major solo exhibition of Virtue Village, in which the gallery is transformed into a neighborly estate of queerness, referencing the long histories of gay villages as sites of anti-capitalism, counterculture, and safe spaces away from violence and death.

By appointment only

Gallery address: Goose Neck Bridge