Hong Kong artists create a poetic moment in Venice
Hong Kong’s collateral exhibition at the Venice Biennale, now in its 25th year, features the Hong Kong-born artists Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui
For Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice , the Hong Kong-born artists Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui are training visitors’ attention on the quiet moments and subtle details connecting both cities. The exhibition, marking the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s first participation in the Venice Biennale, is curated by the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA) and continues until 22 November. It is housed in a historic Venetian residential building in the floating city’s Campo della Tana neighbourhood, a setting that underlines the meditative, lived-in quality to the works.
“What we hope visitors take away from the exhibition is a moment of reflection,” says Dr Maria Mok, the director of the HKMoA. “Through Kingsley and Angel’s attention to everyday details, we hope visitors feel invited to slow down and become more attentive to their surroundings, even within the hustle and intensity of urban life.”
One of Kingsley Ng’s installations, for instance, Laundry Nocturne (2026), consists of a projection and soundscape that evoke the play of light across laundry hung between buildings. It was inspired by the artist’s experience visiting Venice, where billowing laundry on clotheslines is still common, though for Ng it also evoked memories of Hong Kong.
“The laundry becomes a point of entry into a wider soundscape of nighttime labour: recordings from a wastewater treatment plant, a newspaper-printing facility and a postal sorting centre evoke the work that continues while much of the city sleeps,” Ng says. “These modest, often overlooked processes that keep a city alive do not only connect Venice and Hong Kong. They are like a low hum in almost every city, to be picked up by an ear that doesn’t only listen to loud grandeur.”
For her installations, Angel Hui shines a spotlight on humble features of Hong Kong’s everyday life, including goldfish in plastic bags and a neighbour’s ornate but faded window frame. In her magical rendering, glowing plastic bags embroidered with goldfish motifs are suspended overhead, while a handwrought iron window made by Hui and traditional metalsmiths rotates slowly in the gallery.
“In Hong Kong, a goldfish bag is an everyday object; in Venice, it seemed almost precious, delicate and exposed,” Hui says. “The experience reminded me that a work does not need to be grand to hold meaning. Sometimes, its poetry lies in inviting us to look more attentively, and to meet the familiar with tenderness.”
Both artists, through their site-specific installations, encourage visitors to mark a pause while heightening their attention to details of light, sound, colour and texture. This invitation to contemplation is echoed in the exhibition’s title, Fermata , which is a type of musical symbol instructing a performer to hold a note or a pause for an extra moment, and the term for the places where Venetian vaporettos stop to let off and pick up passengers. For Hui, this title and its dual meanings resonate across the exhibition’s disparate locales.
“The difference in pace is pronounced: Hong Kong often presses forward, while Venice seems to make room for pause,” she says. “This is why Fermata, a moment of stopping, of stillness, felt so resonant. In both cities, the ordinary endures, and in that endurance, everyday objects acquire a quiet radiance.”
The exhibition’s title and installations also complement the theme of this year’s Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys , set by the late curator Koyo Kouoh.
“I come to see the works as experiences to return to and live alongside,” Ng says. “For me, that is one meaning of In Minor Keys : making time for the ordinary and immediate, the air, light and weather around us, and becoming more attentive to our presence within them.”
The artists’ ability to turn familiar objects and moments into tableaux where time pauses and senses are heightened is key to the exhibition’s power. It allows their installations to resonate across localities, from the Venetian Lagoon to Hong Kong’s cityscape.
“The artworks merge into the Venetian neighbourhood, from laundry hanging across nearby alleys and above our courtyard exhibition space to the view of the neighbourhood outside Kingsley’s Laundry Nocturne gallery, to wrought-iron windows that echo Angel’s work,” Dr Mok says. “All these details are blurring the boundary between the exhibition and its surroundings. They also show how small moments of daily life can quietly synchronise across different cities and audiences.”
