Sea Change will feature new oil paintings and drawings inspired by Manning’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, which shaped a new perspective on the human body, and further exploring and pushing the boundaries of figurative painting. The works on view also include the collaboration between the artist and the New York City Ballet in spring 2023, for which Manning not only designed the sets and costumes, but also made art that incorporated dance. The drawings, made on washi and cold-pressed paper, were created as Manning watched rehearsals; her marks on the paper correspond with those of the dancers’, reflecting her perception and felt experience of the performance. She says, “I was delighted and surprised by the impact of speeding up the paint application, I believe the viewer can feel that there is no time to spare in every piece. It has been a great joy to explore the application and tone of paint in a direct conversation with sound and music as well.” 

Magdalen Wong is interested in human desire and ambition—specifically, she says, “how people and societies struggle with the need to have a goal or dream, and the constant endeavour to reach this determined ideal through repeated attempts and failures”. Her new exhibition at Current Plans, Sour Punch, examines how our inner desires are often suppressed and dictated by societal norms and constructs, but with a twist: it uses the lens of a clown. 

Historically, clowns were not only entertainers but also functioned as critics of society. On view for the exhibition are Wong’s videos Spa (2023) and Drumroll Rim-shot (2023), in which clowns portray mundane routines, revealing how the uncertainties experienced in our daily decision-making, and the subsequent results are reflective of our understanding (or lack thereof) of our deepest desires and needs. Drumroll Rim-shot, for example, which is played behind layers of red theatrical stage curtains, depicts the escalating frustration of never being able to achieve perfection by showing a clown repeatedly playing the drums, trying to find the perfect drumroll and rim-shot for his own stage entrance. While Wong hopes for a “diverse perception of the works and exhibition”, she seeks to highlight how the outcome, whether success or failure, is second to the endeavour.  

Luminous, rich in colour, and sometimes ambiguous, Louise Giovanelli’s paintings immediately draw viewers in. The Manchester-based artist uses painting as a point of departure to understand and challenges our perception and how we see things. She draws from a repository of found images from a wide range of sources to isolate specific moments on canvas, often reworking and closely cropping details of paintings, photographs, classical sculpture, architecture and theatre.

Her upcoming show in Hong Kong, for example, will feature a new body of work depicting a central female protagonist in multiple pieces, frozen in a moment of ecstasy. She says, “A painting should be the beginning of something. The best paintings are those that endure in your mind because there’s this sense of mystery to them.”

Her first exhibition at White Cube London in 2022 was a breakout moment on the international art stage; her second solo show with the gallery is also her first solo exhibition in Asia. Looking ahead, the artist is seeking to further push the boundaries of her art. “Since a large part of my practice is about the mechanics of looking and the psychological aspects of colour, new territory for me to navigate could be within the idea of looking through and looking back into and out of paintings. I think this could be a rich vein to explore.”

Hailing from Karachi, Pakistani artist Naiza Khan is best known for her cartographic explorations through a range of media. Her new solo exhibition, Unruly Edges, is her fourth with Rossi & Rossi, and will feature drawings, sculptures and paintings that look at how colonisers inflicted change on maritime bodies throughout history. Specifically, she looks at hydro-infrastructure: how harbours, dams, canal colonies and port cities are built to account for peoples and landscapes. Khan engages with migration histories and their relationship with the ocean to explore issues of displacement and the shaping of urban spaces.

Khan’s work has been exhibited at exhibitions and institutions globally; most prominently at the 58th edition the Venice Biennale, where it featured in Pakistan’s inaugural pavilion.

Since the mid-1990s, Sarah Morris has been making abstract paintings and films, the content of  and inspiration for which are often derived from urban architectural details and a sensitive scrutiny of how cities function. Since her 1998 debut film Midtown, which captures a day in the life of New York, she has made 16 films about cities around the world including Rio de Janeiro, Beijing and Los Angeles. “Since 1998, Sarah Morris has always directed her films at a very specific moment in time in a very specific place, uniquely chronicling our post-globalised world,” says Tobias Berger, Tai Kwun’s curator-at-large.

This year, she applies her acute observations to Hong Kong in ETC (2024), a cinematic portrait of the city which she filmed during a visit in the spring of 2023, which captures familiar locales such as the HSBC Main Building and Sham Shui Po’s electronics market as well as iconic figures—Josie Ho, to chart the city’s evolution in the post-Covid era. “ETC” playfully recalls the Electronic Teller Card, one of the first digital banking devices to be used around the world, and the film’s aesthetic was in part inspired by Henry Steiner’s early design for HSBC’s card, part of the M+ collection. 

ETC was first screened on the M+ facade, and will be transported to JC contemporary at Tai Kwun on March 16, where it will be screened with a sound component made by Liam Gillick. “Having her direct such a deep investigation into Hong Kong when the city is crawling its way back to life is a great manifestation of Hong Kong now—its people, their stories, and the underlying interconnections,” says Berger. 

Along with the film, the Tai Kwun exhibition Who is Who will feature a newly commissioned, site-specific wall painting, Lippo [Paul Rudolph] (2024). 

Wong Kit Yi, who has shown her work and performed at institutions including London’s Tate Modern and Queens Museum in New York, is best known for her karaoke lecture performances which exemplify her works’ unique merger of pop culture and academia. For instance, in Inner Voice Transplant (2022), a recent work commissioned for the Front Triennial 2022 in the US, she uses the history of a voice box transplant as the point of departure to explore interconnecting themes among medicine, spirituality and consciousness. She presents it as a video installation with a karaoke machine attached, making for an unusual viewing experience that allows viewers to participate should they choose, and almost become a part of the work itself. Wong has been exploring karaoke-inspired videos since 2015; she says she is interested in “the double narrative aspect of it, whereby the eyes of the audience have to work to constantly catch up with the running subtitles, as though their eyeballs are on a treadmill, while they hear the narrator’s voice reading the captions out.”  

Her upcoming show at PHD, +852 Ghost-JPG, was conceived during her recent residency at Chianti Foundation in Marfa,Texas–a museum set up by famed American minimalist artist Donald Judd in 1986—during which she researched historical railway sites around the area built by Chinese labourers. A new video work, Dial 432 to See the Light (2024) that will be showcased was inspired by her research drawing connections between seemingly disparate narratives around the politics of ghost images, televised funerals, alternate realms and hidden frequencies. She was also reintroduced to bagpipe music, which featured heavily in Judd’s music collection, and also evoked memories of Wong’s experience growing up in Hong Kong, when she heard it during televised funerals for officials of the  British colonial government. The video work is accompanied by new installations such as screen paintings, derived from so-called “ghost jpegs”. “When we allow a non-moving image to reside on a screen for too long, it burns into the screen and leaves a permanent scar that we call a “ghost image”, says the artist, clarifying that she’s not interested in the usual “scary” allusions associated with ghosts, but rather “with images that get burned into the subconscious in a parallel way: images that come in and out without appointment”.

Beijing-based Yang Bodu explores the construction and perception of the “art scene” in her paintings. She depicts architectural landscapes comprising various art institutions such as museums and galleries, and explores the contrasting nature of personal, and intimate encounters with artworks, with that of the public nature of the exhibition venues in which they’re displayed. 

For her forthcoming show, Death of Ying at Mou Projects in Wong Chuk Hang, Yang will show a selection of recent paintings, transforming the gallery into a theatre complex resembling a sort of public plaza. She says, “moving forward, I anticipate further engagement within physical spaces where immersive scenes will abound throughout the exhibition, and painting will assume its role as a window into existence. I believe that everything possesses transformative potential and can be captured on canvas.” 

Vivid landscapes and mysterious spaces inspired by the depiction of the fictional Marabar Caves in EM Forster’s 1924 novel A Passage to India feature in her paintings as well as a personal she wrote about the death of her childhood painting teacher. In addition to her show at Mou Projects, Yang has a presentation, Portrait of Space, on view at Massimo De Carlo’s Pièce Unique in Paris this year. 

Acclaimed painter Maggi Hambling, known for her artistry as well as her status as a queer icon, is set to showcase her upcoming exhibition titled The Night. This exhibition marks her first presentation in Asia since her retrospectives in Beijing and Guangzhou back in 2019. At the age of 79, Hambling’s artistic process continues to grow, and she says, “It evolves constantly, each new work is an experiment; otherwise it would become mannered and static.”

Throughout her career, night-time has been a recurring theme in Hambling’s art. She first painted the night sky from bedroom window at 14 years of age. The artist cites Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem The Night as a source of inspiration for her works.

Her upcoming exhibition at Pearl Lam Galleries will include Night Sky and Night Cloud paintings made in 2021, as well a 2023 series including works such as Sexy, Sexy Dream and About to Kiss, which explore the themes of seduction and intimacy that transpire during the night. “The night is a mysterious realm, where dreams meet reality and sex meets mythology. In painting, in bronze and in silver, I venture into this universal territory of night clouds, intimacy, life and death.” Another new painting, Wall of Water will be on view at the gallery’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong.

Curated by Vera Lam, director of the nonprofit art organisation Hart, and sponsored by The Henderson, Collective Light: From Legacy to Future features works by eight female artists who use light as an artistic medium. Works on view range from painting and sculpture to digital installations and moving images, by Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Carla Chan, Jacqueline Hen, Sarah Lai, Betty Ng, So Wing Po, Raha Raissnia and Liz West. 

The works presented by Chila Burman, Jacqueline Hen and Liz West are on loan from the global digital platform Women in Lighting. The exhibition takes the late architect Zaha Hadid’s legacy as a point of departure, embracing the use of light, shadow and materiality in both her artwork and space design. It serves as a prelude to the opening of the Zaha Hadid Architects-designed The Henderson in autumn 2024; three artworks by Chan, Lai and So were newly commissioned to respond directly to the architecture of the new building.

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