Trevor Yeung’s “Courtyard of Detachments”

A part of Tung Choi Street in Mong Kok, Kowloon, is known as Goldfish Street. Aquariums and vivariums line the pavement, expanding like caves into the buildings, filled with all manner of aquatic life. Beneath neon lights, hundreds of clear plastic bags contain hundreds of jewel-like fish—some of which are artificially colored, and glow almost incandescently. In a dense metropolis like Hong Kong, where space is at a premium, fish have historically been the most convenient pets to house.

For Trevor Yeung, who has spent most of his life in the city and cared for pet fish as a child, Mong Kok’s goldfish market is a site of fascination. It has partly inspired an expansive mixed-media practice in which animals, plants, and objects are choreographed into staged scenes and sculptures that reveal power dynamics, desire lines, and the intricacies of human relationality—albeit from a distance. These themes manifested at scale at the 60th Venice Biennale, in an exhibition of installations that featured flowing liquids and fully operational aquariums housing no living fish. Yeung’s 2024 show “Courtyard of Attachments” entangled cultural symbols with pet shop displays, revealing the structures of artificiality that underpin the artist’s interests.

This year, in Hong Kong, “Courtyard of Detachments” is a response to its earlier counterpart—a new exhibition grown in a very different context. With both exhibitions curated by the former assistant curator of M+, Olivia Chow, it represents a coming home to the commissioning institution. Where tanks of salt water made contextual sense in the Venetian lagoon, however, the exacting Herzog & de Meuron–designed spaces offer less room for maneuver. For one, “Courtyard of Detachments” does not—because it cannot—include quantities of water. In one cube-like bamboo-clad gallery, titled by Yeung as the “Venetian Courtyard” and dated this year, Pond of Never Enough (Under Construction) (2025) offers an ironic nod to the arid conditions of the galleries. In Venice, this sculpture was a functioning fountain. In Hong Kong, it is boarded up and dry—decked seating in the center of the room that provides a pedestal from which to view a collection of sculptures delicately assembled from found objects.

Positioned close to a wall in the same gallery, Gate of Instant Love (2024) is a gleaming metal sculpture that nods to the hanging display of a Mong Kok fish shop, comprising mesh and S-hooks. Placed within its arch is a photograph: a print depicting wafer-thin clear plastic and set within a transparent acrylic frame. The image appears from a distance as weightless and clinical. Up close, its complexity reveals itself through light refractions, scratches, and soft light. Titled the stealth that doesn't hurt/the scratch that doesn't help (2024), it offers a subtle citation to the undercurrents of the show. Reminiscent of the images assembled for the publication and archive Cruising Archaeology, in which found remnants from cruising sites (such as soiled socks or used, ripped condoms) are flattened and photographed, Yeung’s photograph of clear plastic is the quiet centerpiece of the space.1

In another room Yeung stages an abandoned pet fish shop. Set beneath uniform neon-pink light, a wall of empty aquariums filled with ephemera demarcates a staged work—Little Comfy Tornado (After Typhoon) (2025)—that presents armatures of filtration apparatus required to keep certain fish alive in artificial environments. Wire, piping, and pumping machines are positioned together in a ritual circle to feed a shattered glass tank elevated on a plinth. The associated wall text clarifies that this is “a warning of the consequences of neglect”—a description that, much like many of the texts throughout the show, casts an unnecessarily hard light on Yeung’s soft, interpretative works.

Yeung stages the perimeter of tanks as a stack of readable layers. Clouded glass panes and lime-scarred rubber seams mark the tanks with a crust that is familiar to anyone who has spent time cleaning fish bowls. Drained of both water and life, these aquaria become structural models for the systems that organize us: frames that promise care while, in fact, delimiting it. Their dryness gives form to the sense of something missing or lost, be it longing, desire, or a fluid concoction of the two. In this carefully constructed absence, attachment (or detachment) is articulated as infrastructure. The room, which also features full-length mirrors, twists the economies of animal husbandry into a study of power: how we gaze and see, and how we are held and kept.