Hong Kong
Hong Kong
ArtAsiaPacific’s issue 149 (July/August 2026) attends to a certain quality of light particular to projection rooms, where memory, place, and technology—whether analog or digital—intertwine.
The issue’s cover Feature highlights Uzbek filmmaker Saodat Ismailova. On the eve of her solo exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC, Ismailova spoke with Marcella Lista, chief curator at Centre Pompidou, about cinema’s capacity to summon other histories: mythical voices, spectral figures, conversations between the living and the ancestral.
Our second Feature traces the artistic career of Ellen Pau and the legacy of Videotage, the pivotal media art organization she co-founded in Hong Kong in 1986. Pau’s long-overdue midcareer retrospective at New York’s SculptureCenter coincides with Videotage’s 40th anniversary, affirming her and the organization’s foundational place in the history of media art.
For Inside Burger Collection, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, curator at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, considers the intimately scaled self-portraits of Sang Woo Kim, discovering in them a meditation on the dynamics of the gaze—who looks, who is looked upon, and the power that accumulates in the process. In our Up Close column, we track new works by Lotus L. Kang, Jen Liu, and Simon Liu—three artists who extend this attention to consciousness, embodiment, and place.
In Essays, Sunny Cheung, curator of design and architecture at Hong Kong’s M+, examines the work of Yuma Kishi, Memo Akten, and Lee Bul in relation to AI, sensation, and nonhuman consciousness. For Where I Work, AAP’s Los Angeles desk editor Jennifer S. Li visited Refik Anadol’s studio ahead of the inauguration of DATALAND, the world’s first museum dedicated to AI-generated art.
In Profiles, on the occasion of Ding Yi’s solo debut in Venice at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, AAP associate editor Louis Lu sat down with the Shanghainese artist to chart the evolution of his cross-hatched rhythms of urban and cosmic transformation. In Hong Kong, AAP managing editor Michele Chan met with Brian Yue and Claire Bi, the young couple spearheading the Cheng-Lan Foundation, whose targeted support for artists from the “global majority” represents a deliberate alternative to the market’s usual hierarchies.
Elsewhere in the issue, Indonesian curator and researcher Ibrahim Soetomo files a Dispatch from Jakarta, while our Reviews include the Venice Biennale’s central exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” along with shows across various cities, from Manila and Dubai to Milan and New York.
Finally, for The Point, Ute Meta Bauer—who has helmed important exhibitions worldwide, including Germany’s Documenta, the Istanbul Biennial, and the US and Singapore pavilions at the Venice Biennale—wonders whether recent controversies that overshadowed this year’s Venice Biennale point to something larger coming undone.
A digital edition of the full ArtAsiaPacific 149 issue (Jul/Aug 2026) is now available for purchase on Zinio, Google Play, iTunes, and Magzter.
