As the much-awaited Art Basel Hong Kong approaches, galleries across Hong Kong’s Southside district are bustling with new exhibitions. At the upcoming Southside Saturday on March 23, galleries from Wong Chuk Hang to Tin Wan are opening a diverse range of shows, from solo surveys of local and international artists as well as curated group shows. To help navigate Hong Kong’s busiest art month, AAP’s editors have compiled a list of the top shows to see in the city’s Southern District.

(Read our previously published recommendations for gallery shows to see in Central and Kowloon and the eastern neighborhoods of Hong Kong.)

Mar 23–May 11
Xiyadie: Butterfly Dream
Blindspot

Hailing from the millennia-old craftsmanship tradition, self-taught Chinese papercut artist Xiyadie presents his debut solo exhibition of more than 30 works from the early 1980s to the present, including some previously unseen by the public. His papercuts chronicle his journey of being queer in rural China, as well as the struggle of a marginalized individual becoming an urban migrant worker. 

Mar 23–May 11
Naiza Khan: Unruly Edges
Rossi & Rossi

“Unruly Edges,” the third solo exhibition of Karachi- and London-based artist Naiza Khan, features new oil paintings, drawings, and brass reliefs made in the past two years. The show centers around Khan’s ecological research on the changes imposed on bodies of water throughout colonial history. Her works appear as multilayered diagrams and maps, alluding to issues of land, borders, and resource extraction of empires. 

Mar 23–May 11
Daido Moriyama: City Drifter
WKM Gallery

“City Drifter” showcases renowned Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama’s career. Since the late 1950s, Moriyama has produced grainy, blurred, and even distorted images of people, objects, and urban environments in Japan. His candid, high-contrast photographs, shot with a point-and-shoot camera, re-examine Japanese identity, shifting focus from postwar sorrow to the student movement and Tokyo’s lively subcultures. 

Mar 24–May 25
Le Contre-Ciel 
Empty Gallery

Organized by New York-based curator Olivia Shao, “Le Contre-Ciel” gathers artworks from 25 international and local artists to propose a speculative epigraph of traditional Chinese aesthetics within modern art history while posing questions on its historical and contemporary engagement. The first group exhibition at Empty Gallery looks at the “embrace of chance” as a defining characteristic in Chinese art across millennia.

Mar 23–Apr 27
Lov-Lov: Everything is Unreal Until It’s Not 
De Sarthe

New York-based artist Lin Jingjing’s AI-inspired artist identity, Lov-Lov, debuts a semi-organic installation as well as a new collection of videos and works on canvas that contrast the idyllic with the unsettling. Highlighting comforts and catastrophes in the digital age, Lin probe questions about the authenticity of virtual images to re-imagine perceptions of reality—where “everything is unreal until it is not.” 

Mar 23–May 18
Renato Nicolodi: Concealment and Disclosure
Axel Vervoordt

Belgian artist Renato Nicolodi presents a series of new works and sculptural reliefs made out of paper. His architectural art, including painting, sculpture, and videos, allude to classical austerity and emptiness. Structures of stairs, corridors, and columns create stark shadows within the works, leading the viewer’s gaze toward an apparent void. 

Mar 24–Apr 12
Celestial Mechanics: Form and Future in the Work of Gerhard Richter and Sean Scully
Asia Society Hong Kong Center
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Mar 23–Jun 29
Ben Brown Fine Arts

Ben Brown Fine Arts presents a duo exhibition of eminent painters Gerhard Richter and Sean Scully at both Asia Society Hong Kong and the Wong Chuk Hang gallery. Curator and art historian Joachim Pissarro seeks to evoke dialogue between the two artists, presenting a selection of works on diverse mediums that exemplify their influences on both 20th and 21st century art. 

Mar 23–Apr 20
Stephen Wong Chun Hei: The Star Ferry Tale
Gallery Exit

Stephen Wong Chun Hei’s latest landscape paintings blend real and imagined Hong Kong scenes. Inspired by his ramblings and virtual journeys during the pandemic, Wong’s works depict a strange yet familiar world, prompting contemplation on the interdependence of humans and nature. The exhibition speaks to the post-pandemic experience  of Hong Kong and the realities of a transformed natural and urban landscape. 

Mar 23–Apr 27 
Carrie Yamaoka: lucid / liquid / limpid
Kiang Malingue, Tin Wan

A founding member of the queer art collective “fierce pussy,” New York-based artist Carrie Yamaoka presents works since 2009 that span painting, photography, and sculpture. The exhibition at Kiang Malingue’s Tin Wan space provides insight into Yamaoka’s interest in chance operation, material transformation, and medium exploration. 

Mar 23–May 4
Weirding Worlds: Shuyi Cao, Anastasia Komar, and So Young Park
Podium

The inaugural exhibition at Podium is “Weirding Worlds,” featuring paintings, sculptures, and video works by Shuyi Cao, Anastasia Komar, and So Young Park. The show takes inspiration from Donna Haraway’s idea of the “Chthulucene,” as the artists’ boundary-defying use of media challenges linear progression and apocalyptic rhetoric inherent in Western-centric frameworks. Through imaginative queer vocabularies and practices, they visualize a necessary third history, beyond the narratives of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. 

Mar 23–May 21
Yang Bodu: The Death of Ying
Mou Projects

Yang Bodu’s second solo exhibition features eight paintings crafted over the past two years from her acclaimed In the Museum series (2011– ). The works spotlight moments of theatricality and the “abstract atmosphere” in exhibition spaces. “The Death of Ying” explores personal narratives and literary allusions, chronicling a journey of persistence and reconciliation anchored by a memoir-like story and vivid excerpts from EM Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). 

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