Jota Mombaça / Wong Kit Yi

The Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) is pleased to announce its fall-winter 2026 season, featuring a solo exhibition by Natal and Almada-based artist Jota Mombaça and a two-part presentation by Hong Kong and New York-based artist Wong Kit Yi. These projects mark both artists’ first institutional solo presentations in Asia.

Despite their distinct formal and aesthetic registers, the exhibitions are animated by a shared inquiry. As RAM Executive Director and Chief Curator X Zhu-Nowell notes, they “both unsettle our conventional understanding of the human voice. They raise a series of interconnected questions: What does a voice carry when it leaves the body? Who or what does it belong to once it begins to circulate? And what continues to exist when the body, or even the world to which that voice once belonged, has disappeared?"

For Jota Mombaça, the force, sound, and form of words play an important role in her practice, which often draws on cacophony, polyphony, noise, and low frequencies. Her attention to more-than-human sensibilities, her exploration of the relationship between art and spirituality, and her commitment to anticolonial and abolitionist perspectives inform the relational aesthetic of her exhibitions and presentations.

In stuck in movement (in the tide) a newly commissioned project reimagines traditional opera as an environmental installation spanning RAM’s fourth floor gallery, accompanied by an earlier moving image work and a selection of recent paintings and studies across the third to fifth floors. Displacing vocality from the human body into the natural environment, the work invites visitors to follow the journey of She (the planet’s foreigner), an unnamed protagonist, as she unlearns her humanity and transitions into a geological entity. Reflecting this transformation, the exhibition features neither a stage nor live performers. Instead, audiences navigate a fantastical landscape populated by hand-sculpted earthen mounds with embedded sound systems. By dispersing recorded vocals through earth, air, and collective sound, Mombaça treats the voice as a distributed material presence, inviting audiences to experience listening as a way of connecting with a vast, more-than-human ecological field.

Known for her karaoke-inspired lecture-performances, Wong Kit Yi mobilizes popular song, spoken text, and projected imagery as critical tools. Her practice engages with institutional critique and interrogates knowledge hierarchies through Chinese divination, ghostly presences, pseudosciences, and speculative systems that unsettle colonial narratives and modern distinctions between belief and evidence, body and spirit.

In Wong’s two-part project, BANK-A-OKE and TEM-PLE-OKE, the first and second floor galleries of the museum museum are transformed into a fictional bank and a temple, bringing financial systems into contact with spiritual beliefs and karmic consequences. In BANK-A-OKE, visitors can deposit their voices through karaoke-activated ATM machines, entering an imaginary economy in which voices can be borrowed as assets, bundled with other voices, and exchanged in otherworldly debt markets. Positing that even when a voice is technologically detached from its physical source, it retains its creator’s qi—the vital life force that animates all living beings in Chinese philosophy—Wong asks whether this enduring spiritual tether can ever truly be severed. The work raises questions about who ultimately bears the lasting consequences and burdens of debt once a voice circulates away from its origin.

Meanwhile, in TEM-PLE-OKE, a newly commissioned lecture-performance invites visitors to watch a feature-length video and lend their voices to it. Guided by running subtitles rather than a fixed speaking voice, the work moves between layers of reality and mediation. Through a series of incidental and staged encounters, it examines how financial obligations become entangled with karmic, bodily, and spiritual debts in the metafictional narrative of a jiangshi—a hopping undead figure from Chinese folklore popularized by 1980s Hong Kong horror-comedy cinema—and his encounters with a cast of zany, eclectic characters.

As Zhu-Nowell writes: “What interests me is that neither exhibition treats death as an absolute condition of silence. Something continues beyond the disappearance or transformation of the body: a voice, an attachment, a debt, a form of grief, or an obligation that has yet to be fulfilled. In this sense, spirituality is not simply a matter of belief in another world. It becomes a way of questioning the boundaries through which we distinguish the living from the dead, the material from the immaterial, and the individual from the relationships that constitute their existence.”


For more information, interviews with the artists, X Zhu-Nowell, and other press inquiries, please contact:

International Press: Khuroum Bukhari, Sutton rockbundartmuseum@suttoncomms.com

Chinese Press: Marianne Li, Rockbund Art Museum marianne.li@rockbundartmuseum.org