On the move across 2027
Para Site is on the move! We’re leaving Quarry Bay and working towards a new home in Hong Kong. Our nomadic programme across 2027 gives us room to try things out in different places, nurture collaborations, and rethink how we gather. What we present along the way will help shape the space we build: one that we arrive at with a deeper understanding of what it needs to make possible.
That exploration is already underway. "Elsewhere in Me", a series of new live art commissions across Hong Kong throughout this year has included River Lin (My Body is a Para Site) and Tong Wenmin (Towards Solace), and continues with Justin Talplacido Shoulder (Phasmahammer) in November and Yim Sui Fong in December. This summer, Para Site convened the first International Conference since 2019, "Unsubscribe All!", and the 9th edition of our Workshops for Arts Professionals. Recently, "Para Site is Live" convened our community near and far for a radio broadcast asking what an institution carries as it changes. You can listen again on Hong Kong Community Radio. Those conversations inform four principles guiding our next chapter:
Good things take time
We understand Para Site’s role as a custodian of conditions: creating the circumstances in which artists, ideas, and conversations can develop fluidly, over time, and across disciplines. With three decades of work as our foundation, Para Site is now taking time to consider what an institution is understood to do in the specific conditions of Hong Kong. There is more for us to learn about who finds a place in Para Site, and who has yet to find one. By working closely with artists, creatives, and thinkers, we are questioning the assumption that institutional health can just be expressed through expansion. We are seeking methods that give ideas space to mature, continuing to support experimentation, and attending to the social ecologies that allow such work to happen.
Memory is a method
Para Site was founded as a platform that embraced experimental practices not easily adopted into the commercial and institutional structures of the time. The organisation has since been shaped by successive teams, artists and curators, and by everyone who has given it time and trust. From Kennedy Town to Sheung Wan to Quarry Bay, Para Site’s journey has unfolded across many homes, responding to the needs of the moment. This history guides how we meet the ambitions of artists, creatives, curators, and participants today.
Context and process
Hong Kong’s cultural ecology and its global exchanges are Para Site’s engine. It’s a site of continual transition, and the place from which Para Site thinks and works. An artist may need time to pursue an uncertain idea or resources to make work that has no obvious setting. A public may form around a performance or a shared question. These possibilities require an institution to pay attention and to make room – or even redesign the room itself.
Beyond a site
A fixed space is one way an institution meets the world; an exhibition is one way art and creativity becomes public. Through our nomadic period across 2027, Para Site connects to the roots of its name—beside or beyond a ‘site’—to test assumptions about how we operate through reciprocal relationships with those who make these encounters possible. Working across different places, we're learning from what works and considering what can change. These experiences are helping to build the brief for our relocation: a new anchor point for Para Site in Hong Kong shaped by artistic practices and public encounters, with long-term sustainability on our horizon.
As it moves through its thirtieth anniversary year, Para Site carries an extraordinary depth of experience, a generous community of collaborators, supporters, and friends, and an ambitious team. We are based at our interim office in Kennedy Town, near to where Para Site first began programming in 1996. All of our activities are free of charge, and we look forward to sharing our 2027 programme later this year.
About Para Site
Para Site, a non-profit contemporary art and cultural institution in Hong Kong, champions original developments in contemporary art by centring artistic voices and creative innovation. Through developing benchmark exhibitions, commissioning transformative works, and cultivating new talent, Para Site foregrounds contemporary art’s capacity to reshape our understanding of society. Since its founding in 1996 by seven Hong Kong-based artists as an alternate cultural space in the city, the organisation has mounted over 300 exhibitions locally and globally, hosted over 80 international residents, and delivered over 1,000 public programmes.
For media inquiries, please contact Lydia Tai at lydia@para-site.art.
