Six Must-See Exhibitions During Hong Kong Art Week 2025

^{Pablo Picasso. Figures by the Sea, 1931. Oil on canvas. Musée national Picasso-Paris. © Succession Picasso 2025. Image: © GrandPalaisRmn (Musée national Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau}

This weekend kicks off the start of Hong Kong Art Week with exhibitions, parties, events and off-site installations popping up across town in anticipation of Art Basel Hong Kong which previews from 26 March. From modern masters to emerging artists, make sure you catch these six gallery and museum exhibitions.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS: SOFT LANDSCAPE at Hauser and Wirth

25 March – 21 June 2025

^{Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1993. Painted wood and fabric wall relief. Image: Christopher Burke.}

Consisting of a selection of works from the 1960s up until her death in 2010, ‘Louise Bourgeois: Soft Landscape’ presents a series of five interlocking dialogues that explore the dynamic relationship between landscape and the human body in Bourgeois’ work. An iconography of nests, holes, cavities, mounds, breasts, spirals, snakes and water, tie into recurrent themes and preoccupations that Bourgeois explored over the course of her career: the good mother, fecundity and growth, retreat and protection, vulnerability and dependency, and the passage of time. Her forms, which oscillate between abstraction and figuration, are expressed using diverse materials such as bronze, rubber, lead, aluminium, wood and marble . The exhibition will also feature Mamelles (1991), a large installation presented for the first time in the region.

Sasaoka Yuriko: Animale at PHD Group

March 22 – May 24 2025

^{Sasaoka Yuriko, Working Horse – Brown, 2025. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group, Hong Kong. Photo by Felix SC Wong.}

Osaka-born artist Sasaoka Yuriko presents ‘Animale’, a surreal, immersive video installation exploring the complex relationship between humans and the natural world through the lens of labour, dependency, and societal narratives. Drawing on themes of animism, masquerade and theatre, and from historical stories like Wojtek, the Syrian brown bear who served in World War II, and Laika, the Soviet space dog, Sasaoka investigates the roles animals play in human society, challenging human superiority in highlighting the fact that we all engage in labor.

The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia—A Conversation at M+ Museum

15 March – 13 July 2025

‘Picasso for Asia – A Conversation’ presents the works of Spanish-born modern master, Pablo Picasso, in intergenerational dialogue with Asian artists. The exhibition comprises over 60 pieces of work from the late 1890s to the early 1970s by Picasso, including Portrait of Dora Maar (1937), and Massacre in Korea (1951), on loan from the Musee National Picasso-Paris. These are placed in conversation with 130 works by Asia and Asian-diasporic artists including Luis Chan, Gu Dexin, Wilfredo Lam, Haegue Yang, Yoshihara Jiro and Firenze Lai.

Sin Wai Kin: The Time of Our Lives at Blindspot Gallery

24 March – 10 May 2025

^{Sin Wai Kin, The Time of Our Lives, 2024, two-channel video.}

‘Sin Wai Kin: The Time of Our Lives’ immerses audiences into the London-based artist’s cinematic multiverse, comprising a recurring repertoire of characters, all played by Sin. The works in the exhibition fuse speculative fiction and fantasy world-building, drawing upon science-fiction, metaphysics, cinema, drag performance, history, theater, and architecture to challenge the dichotomous perceptions of time, objectivity and gender. The exhibition features Sin’s latest video works: The Time of Our Lives (2024), The Fortress (2024), and Asleep (2024) which will be shown alongside face wipes imprinted with the make-up of Sin’s characters featured in the films.

Emma McIntyre: Among My Swan at David Zwirner

25 March – 10 May 2025

^{Emma McIntyre, White chalk south against time, 2024.
© Emma McIntyre. Courtesy the artist, Château Shatto, Los Angeles, and David Zwirner, New York}

Drawing its title from a 1996 Mazzy Star album that inspired New Zealand–born and Los Angeles–based Emma McIntyre, ‘Among My Swan’ presents a series of the artist’s vivid and gestural abstractions. Created with oil paint and unconventional materials like oxidized iron, McIntyre explores the alchemical possibilities of the painted medium and expands traditional understandings of landscape and the natural world. Invoking the element of chance in her process, McIntyre pours pigment from above, letting paint pool, splash, and drip across the canvas, gradually building up her surface with layers of spontaneous and dynamic mark making and atmospheric washes of colour.

Sopheap Pich: Cambodian Metal at Axel Vervoordt Gallery

22 March – 24 May 2025

Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich fuses modernity with tradition throughout his practice, drawing on local history and culture in his use of materials like rattan and bamboo, common to crafts in Cambodia. In this exhibition with Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Pich continues to make use of bamboo, but also incorporates repurposed metal like recycled aluminium and rice pots to create abstract wall reliefs, which evoke the imagery of corrugated roofs and urban landscape of the country. These creations delve into the essence of materiality, serving as a confluence of Pich’s labour-intensive artistic process and connecting the past, present, and future of Cambodia.