Square Street Gallery is pleased to present Anabelle Lau’s first solo exhibition, ‘Readymades’ from 12 December 2024 to 18 January 2025. In her Hotmilk series, Anabelle Lau appropriates the monthly Japanese erotic periodical Comic Hotmilk with three specific interventions: painting an exacting reproduction of the work in oil; painting directly on the pages of said magazine; or by simply framing the publication, as is.

Join us on the evening of 11 December, 2024 for the opening reception of the exhibition

Gallery address: 21 Square Street

Save the date for Gianluca Crudele’s Echo

Square Street Gallery is please to announce Gianluca Crudele’s second solo exhibition with the gallery wherein he examines language, disembodiment, and the dissonance of choice through the myth of Narcissus and Echo.

The artist will be present at the opening.

Opening: Thursday | 6 - 10 PM

Gallery address: G/F 21 Square Street, Sheung Wan

DI- / (action)
AKAL / mind
DIAKALIN

Vernacular culture is rooted in action: to find ways, to make-do, and to improvise solutions. It is grounded in its environment and responsive to changes; an abundance of cool-green architecture and tarpaulins in the Philippines are among the many ways locals combat heat. Sensitive to finite resources, we reimagine new lives for old objects; single-use bottles become containers of multitudes and are eventually reimagined as decorations. Often, it is jaw and teeth, grit and perseverance. It is the people of Jakarta hauling cargo too heavy for their mopeds, intensely strapped on to secure their weight. But it is also the soft caress of a mosquito net or the assortment of chairs scattered around the alleyways, beaches, parks, and basements of Hong Kong. Aesthetics that arise from these actions, from the ways that people find solutions to continue working or how inhabitants of a place make their environments more hospitable, are thus often shared and familiar.

This group exhibition at Square Street Gallery seeks to capture not only the aesthetics but the ways of production and interaction with space that exists in the vernacular. The show looks to present works by artists who are observers and note-takers of the vernacular in their locales, as well as those whose processes possess the spirit of improvisation and groundedness in their environments.

Opening Reception: Thursday, 29/08, 6–8PM

Gallery address: G/F, 21 Square Street, Sheung Wan

Square Street Gallery is pleased to present The Archivist Augurs, the Larper Dreams—a group exhibition which creates a dialogue between works by Dony Cheng, Dave Chow, These Faces (a.k.a. Jennifer Yeung), and Brandon Tay. The title of the exhibition borrows from Tay’s 2024 video work Emulator, which will also be included in the show. By working with Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui’s essay “For a Planetary Thinking” (2020), the exhibition brings together a group of artists engaged with a skeptical framework as they question the prescriptive paradigms with which we approach technology and its relationship to the material world.

Since the industrial revolution, and the ensuing globalization, our relationship with technology follows a particular logos; a machine completes a task it was produced to complete. Drawing upon what German philosopher Martin Heidegger called Gestell or “enframing,” Hui argues that this logos closes off the possibility of technology, and thus fits within the model of accelerationist development that has been decided and laid out for us. He suggests instead that the challenge to such models can be found in artmaking, wherein the enframing of the same technology used to facilitate the flow of capital breaks its relationship with instrumentalisation, opening it up to risk and alterity. This exhibition thinks through this approach to technology through the works of four artists.

Opening 25 July, 6 - 8 pm

Gallery address: G/F, 21 Square Street

Mother of flesh, mother of cloth, mother of wire. A set of signifiers linger in the air, holding on to a mid-century experiment: The American psychologist Harry Harlow conducted a series of experiments in the 1950s, each thinking through forms of attachment and motherhood. His most infamous inquiry involved separating a newborn rhesus monkey from its mother and giving it prosthetic mothers—one made of cloth, and the other of wire. Putting on hold, for a moment, the ethically questionable outcomes of this experiment, we are prompted to contemplate the libidinal energies that shape attachment.

Drawing from the words of the artist Chloe Bass, we ask “How much of love is attention?” And what precisely captures our attention? Is it tactile sensations? The proximity we seek? In Square Street Gallery’s upcoming group exhibition “Harlow’s Monkey,” the artists E8MKBOY, Kary Kwok, Maari Sugawara, and Amy Tong critically examine attachment as currency, offering renewed positions which consider the forms of alienation prevalent today.

Opening reception: June 6, 2024, 6 - 8 pm

Gallery address: 21 Square St, Tai Ping Shan

For her first solo exhibition at Square Street Gallery, Hong Kong artist Wong Ka Ying (b. 1990) explores the layered relationship between people and their possessions, from kitschy plastic toys won after countless hours at the claw machine to million-dollar luxury pets bred to perfection after numerous experiments. Testaments of victory and status symbols, these cute, shiny, and fluffy objects and animals share a melancholic entanglement in Wong’s work; the way in which they accessorize and embellish our lives points toward an emptiness—a void often caused by grief, isolation, or nihilism—that we attempt to fill. The delightful exteriors of these coveted properties often distract us from further examination of darker truths: addiction, obsession, waste, and illness. Wong’s presentation, which includes paintings, drawings, and sculptures, accentuates the “plastic” qualities of these objects both materially and conceptually as synthetic, false, and superficial.

Simulating the operating hours of popular claw machine stores in Hong Kong (often a choice venue for late-night dates), the gallery will extend its opening hours to 12pm–10pm for the week of Art Basel and Art Central Hong Kong, 25 to 30 March, 2024.

Opening reception on 21 March from 6 - 8 pm

Gallery address: G/F, 21 Square Street, Sheung Wan

To think about fiction is to think about what lies before and beyond it. It is to think through conflicts and climaxes, heroes and villains, battles and fights, winners and losers. But to think about fiction with Ursula Le Guinn—author, speculator, creator of worlds—is to think through potatoes and oatmeal and gourds and pouches instead. We have been asked to consider and incorporate the hero (the protagonist, the winner, the fighter, the sword) and his conflict (his fight, his battle, his beast, his mammoth) into our stories since we were children. They are, after all, what makes fiction—or are they?

The Giant’s Foot Scrubber brings together works by Gianluca Crudele, Alice Dos Reis, Chan Ka Kiu, Sissi Kaplan, Andrew Luk that address the suspension of disbelief, the occult, and landscape

Opening this Saturday, Feb 3, 4-8 pm

Gallery address: G/F, 21 Square Street, Sheung Wan

In Feminist scholar Monique Wittig’s seminal text “One is not born a woman” (1981), she departs from a materialist feminist reading of masculinity and femininity. The title of the text—and this exhibition—takes from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. For Wittig, the theoretical possibility of a lesbian society (notedly, she does not advocate for a matriarchy) reveals the artifice of the category of “woman.” In initiating an analysis of the production of the category of woman, as one would do with understandings of master/slave, coloniser/colonised, bourgeois/proletariat, the idea of woman no longer becomes a natural category, but an ideological one.

Through works by Anabelle Lau, Hou Lam Tsui, Tekla Tamoria, and IV Chan, the exhibition seeks to think about Wittig’s text today and to revisit a fundamental question: How does one go from being a girl to a woman? What might it mean to read against the grain of the Bildungsroman?

Curated by KY Wong and Aaditya Sathish

Opening reception: 6 – 8 pm
Gallery address: 21 Square Street, Sheung Wan

There’s something punk about collages. Perhaps it’s the throwback to the do-it-yourself ethos of zine-making. Perhaps it’s the appropriation of images. Perhaps it’s the tapping into a shared mythology—ranging from the rhizomatic subcultrual niches to the lingua franca of pop culture. It is under this pretext that Square Street Gallery presents its first solo exhibition of @___cucurrucucu , work on paper.

Join us for our opening reception on Thursday, 26 October, from 6 to 8 pm.

Gallery address: 21 Square Street, Central

Sediments of Memory: Wendy Tai, Daisuke Tajima, Emily Kueis

The experience of a thing, our recollection of the same, and its consequent narration are necessarily incongruent. In her 1991 essay “The Evidence of Experience,” American historian Joan W. Scott examines the reading and interpretation of oral histories and suggests that they should be read as literary texts subject to interpretation rather than static bits of objective information. Scott’s argument rests on the premise that our experiences and how we feel about them change as we do. Her claim allows us to consider the formation of memory—vis a vis language—as a sedimentary process, such that the original experience is inevitably inaccessible, buried under layers of bedrock where each layer is formed in a diachronic way: as we evolve, so do our recollections.

Gallery address: 21 Square Street, Central

Square Street Gallery is pleased to present Phantasmagoria, a solo exhibition by Kary Kwok. Marking the Hong Kong artist’s first solo presentation at a commercial gallery in over two decades, Kwok will showcase a series of black-and-white nude self-portraits from 1993.

Kwok’s series was inspired by the mystical erotic drawing The Hermaphrodite-Angel of Peladan (c. 1950s) by American artist Raymond Carrance (1921–88)—also known under his pseudonym Czanara—which references a French Occult Revivalist who found radicality in the androgyne. Here, Kwok situates himself in the corner of his studio sporting minimal makeup and costumes. His gaze unaverted, he guides his body to reach the limits of gender.

Opening reception next Thursday, June 15. 6 - 8 PM

Gallery address: 21 Square St, Sheung Wan

Situated between the dual axes of misery and the inevitable, Hellish Gags [地獄哏], a term arising from the digital Sinosphere, examines the utilisation of dark humour to address historical and affective truths. In this exhibition, the ambivalence of lived experience speaks in the two-tongued idioms of auto-criticism and macabre. If, following Freud, humour is a pathway to open up once inaccessible sources of pleasure, then the artists of Hellish Gags offer up possible recourses in some of the darkest recesses of the social landscape.

Elliot Jamal Robbins
Namio Harukawa
Clara Wong
Qin Xiaoshi
Jason Pulgarin

Opening this Thursday, 6-8 pm

Gallery address: 21 Square Street, Central

Square Street Gallery is pleased to present Commodity-Fetishism, curated by Aaditya Sathish. The exhibition brings together works by Luke Ching Chin Wai, Go Hung, Alexander Si, Chan Ting, and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer — a group of artists who investigate the absurd realities that have risen from the alienation of social relations in post-industrial capitalism.

Commodity-Fetishism examines the abstraction of the human to units of exchange which is central to capitalist production. In response to the evolving webs of power and capital, the exhibited artists hone in on specific dynamics between labour, commodity, and exchange value, which in turn prompt reflections on emerging forms of subject-formation.

The exhibition opens on 9 February, 2023, from 7 - 9 pm.

There will be a performance activating Alexander Si’s UNBOX (2020) on the opening night at 8pm

Gallery address: G/F 21 Square Street, Central

Square Street Gallery is pleased to present Ticko Liu’s first solo exhibition 無厘頭觀看之道 | Nonsensical Ways of Seeing.

As Liu discards his rigid studio practice and instead pursues disengagement from reality, “set your sights,” or more formally “to set one’s sights on,” becomes an appropriate idiom to contextualise his work. It suggests that we can project a certain future and, with the necessary discipline, achieve it. By letting his gaze wander, Ticko Liu challenges this very conception which underlies the logic of Hong Kong —a city known to favour fast-paced structured development with measurable outcomes.

The title plays with the Chinese title of 觀看之道 [Ways of Seeing] (1972) by John Berger. By prefixing to it the word “無厘頭,” roughly translated to English as “nonsensical,” Liu references a popular form of slapstick humour from 20th Century Hong Kong, which plays on the subtleties of the Cantonese language such that the jokes seem to emerge from nothing.

Gallery address: G/F, Square Street, Central

Square Street Gallery, in collaboration with @ejar.ragora is pleased to present Lousy People a solo exhibition of
Hong Kong artist @lousylousy , a culmination of his residency in the Shau Kei Wan industrial building.

Lousy People choreographs the vitality of humanoid figures, each caught in the midst of a shrouded revelry. It nods to the animated entities that comprise the underground scene. As bodies gather, group, and perhaps even gabble, each appears to make sly references to either ceremony or celebration.

By establishing a speculative link between the now and a now-forgotten then, Lousy’s new body of work is jubilant and alive, yet aptly anachronistic. The figures he renders — much like their historic predecessors — are beyond the paroxysms that accompany culture today. Instead, they open up a liminal space, suggesting a commonality in the genesis of our grand narratives.

Time: 7-10pm
Venue adress: 18 A Kung Ngam Village Lane Hong Kong

Square Street Gallery is pleased to present “8 Minutes from the Sun”, a solo exhibition by Hong Kong photographer Stephanie Teng curated by Francesca Marcaccio Hitzeman.

The exhibition brings together selected works created between 2019 to the present day, incorporating photography with installation. In “8 minutes from the Sun” the artist captures her encounters with nature creating resonance in stillness and motion, balance and counterbalance, and finding an equilibrium between different states of being.
Stephanie Teng is a photographer born and raised in Hong Kong. She received her B.A. in Psychology with a minor in Fine Arts from Scripps College, California. Her work is shaped by her fascination with the human condition—she sees photography as a metaphor for life, an infinite cycle of attempts at self exploration. By capturing the subconscious vulnerabilities of the psyche and fleeting moments lost to the effluence of life, her creative approach carries a sensitivity to the many instances we may have missed. Often paired with original poetry, there is an underlying intent of empowerment and therapy in her work.

Gallery address: 21 Square Street, Sheung Wan

Square Street Gallery is proud to present “From see you one eye, I shit love you” < 從第一眼見你，我就糞便的愛你 > by Amy Tong, curated by Yang Jiang. Departing from a selection of Greek myths, Tong explores the dynamics where total authority is enveloped in love, encouraging viewers to examine its various contradictions.

Translated to English as “From see you one eye,” the first half of the title ‘從第一眼見你’ is an expression which roughly holds the same meaning as “from the moment I first laid eyes on you.” Meanwhile, the second half “我就糞便的愛你,” which literally translates to “I shit love you,” does not follow semantic rules in either Chinese or the translated English. In both languages, the title reads as a grammatical glitch; the mini loveletter highlights the asymmetric relationship between two, in this instance the addresser and addressee.

Tong’s practice is a relentless process of experimentation with diverse media such as ceramic, paper, gelatine, textile and paint, where the artist reflects on myths, morals, and grand narratives, all structures that govern the production and understanding of our emotional responses. Both her subject matter and her sense of material suggest delicacy, intimacy, and romance. In her new series of paintings, Tong explores the elusive yet toxic power dynamics in contemporary romantic relationships. Entwining human bodies, animals, and landscape, the interaction between Tong’s subjects engender relationships where emotional faculties become compromised and, instead, jealousy, control, and love slide between each other. Set in a ritual atmosphere, each artwork offers itself like an open wound, breathing and vulnerable.

Gallery address: 21 Square Street, Sheung Wan

Square Street Gallery is thrilled to present the first solo exhibition of Hong Kong artist @g.o.h.u.n.g “周[zau1]身[san1]骨[gwat1]痛[tung3]” curated by @suneileen1

Drawing inspiration from the alleyways in Hong Kong, the artist has created an immersive site-specific installation transforming the entire gallery space.

The show will open from Sep 2nd to Oct 10th, with an opening reception on Sep 1st from 6-8pm.

Gallery address: 21 Square Street, Sheung Wan

Nice and Dangerous is Hong Kong artist Nobody Here’s first solo exhibition. Featuring a series of canvas works and a bronze sculpture, the show is inspired by recent social happenings. Putting various public figures and cultural icons on canvas, the artist intends to highlight the hypocrisy, danger and destruction behind the superficial niceness, which has become the guiding rule in social interactions, public images, and contemporary culture and society more broadly.

Gallery address: 21 Square Street, Central

Square Street Gallery is pleased to present Zhi The Outlaw, a solo exhibition by Gianluca Crudele aka Barlo (@mr.barlo), co-curated by @riccardo_chesti and @suneileen1 opening on the 27th of May at 7pm.

Gianluca Crudele (born 1989), often under the pseudonym of Barlo (@mr.barlo), is an Italian painter and designer based in Hong Kong. Having been drawing since childhood he started painting on walls at the age of fifteen, and later extended his creative exploration by studying design in Milan and Nottingham. After a brief period in London, he moved to Hong Kong where the local art scene and energy of the city injected new vitality into his artworks.

As part of Zhi the Outlaw, Barlo has completed a new mural titled “The outlaw’s companion” at 21 square street, this mural will be removed after the show probably so drop past and enjoy it while it’s up.
This is Gianluca Crudele’s second solo exhibition in Hong Kong, featuring a series of new canvas works inspired by the fictional character Zhi from the renowned Taoist text Zhuangzi.

Square Street gallery is excited to present its inaugural exhibition, Modern cave, a solo exhibition by Hong Kong artist @wongszechit curated by @suneileen1 featuring a collection of new paintings, drawings and installation works. The show will be open at 21 square street from 16 April - 2 May 2021.

Gallery address: 21 Square Street, Central