Of all the works in this gathering of cosmological and ecological perspectives, one is anchored directly to the exhibition title. Two moon gates open up the wooden frame enclosing Candice Lin’s Kiss under the tail (all works 2023 unless otherwise stated), where floorspace padded with tatami mats hosts ceramic cats, one with a house for a head, and an indigo-dyed carpet whose patterning replicates a nineteenth-century diagram of a castration by a western missionary who studied eunuchs in China. These gates, and the transformational space they envelope, reference a central location in Tsui Hark’s 1993 movie, Green Snake, a retelling of an ancient Chinese folktale about two female snake demons who endeavored to become human. In the film, the single-minded White Snake pursues the love of a studious male, while the free-wheeling, shapeshifting Green Snake tries to understand the desire that drives her centuries-long companion to her doom. In the end, Green Snake rejects the human world with its apocalyptically heteronormative devotions and questionably immutable morals, realizing she had known love as an affirmation of life all along. So she returns to the water, or rather to nature; an idea that runs through this show. Projected onto a massive wall …

Hong Kong’s art history has traditionally been overshadowed by its status as a trading post for galleries and institutions showcasing internationally established artists. “Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys,” an exhibition organized by Asia Art Archive (AAA), brings different stories to light by exploring what archives are and can be. Claire Hsu and Johnson Chang founded AAA in Hong Kong in 2000, with the objective of documenting existing and developing Asian art histories from Asian perspectives. Their action anticipated wider movements advocating the reclaiming of historical narratives, which have in recent years dominated discourses engulfing the art world and cultural sphere. Now home to one of the most valuable and comprehensive collections of materials pertaining to recent and contemporary Asian art, AAA demonstrates how crucial archives are to local art ecosystems, as well as to artists’ practices. By making the process of documentation accessible, they make the unseen seen. Curated by Michelle Wong, a former researcher at AAA, this exhibition stems from a project initiated by the institution in 2014, delving into the vast personal archives of the late self-taught Hong Kong artist Ha Bik Chuen (1925–2009). Ha’s collection of printed materials including exhibition catalogues, art books, and photographs—known as his “thinking …

A citywide rally on December 8, 2019, marked six months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. 800,000 people attended—a tenth of the total population. When I arrived the following weekend, the streets were quiet. I wasn’t there for the protests—I was there to see art. Yet I couldn’t escape the feeling that we were, as Allan Sekula wrote of the 1999 Seattle protests, “waiting for teargas”—in the lull, anticipating the moment when revolution and counter-revolution show their true selves. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong police were thinking about art, too. On December 12, they posted a parody of Maurizo Cattelan’s Comedian sculpture (2019) to social media; in their version, instead of a banana, a teargas canister is duct-taped to the wall. This is possibly the most pitch-perfect, frank response from the government so far: lobbing riot grenades is a day job for some, but only an artwork can express the underlying depths of official apathy. The Hong Kong “banana” joined the graffiti along the roadways in Central, slogans like “thx president trump / make hk great again” and “je me révolte, donc je suis”: messages meant, on some level, for outsiders like me. The art scene, too, seemed to be steeling …