On Kawara
On Kawara: Rules of Freedom, Freedom of Rules
Tai Kwun
May 23–Aug 17

“On Kawara: Rules of Freedom, Freedom of Rules” is the first major institutional solo exhibition in Asia of the pioneering conceptual artist since his passing in 2014. The exhibition presents a comprehensive selection of works spanning five decades, mapping the artist’s systematic daily documentation of his existence and revealing a tension between self-imposed rules and the freedom of a nomadic life. On view are examples of his iconic Date paintings—monochrome canvases inscribed with the date they were made, each presented alongside a news clipping—as well as postcards, telegrams, and calendars that chart his travels and personal correspondence. The exhibition also features a special room dedicated to Kawara’s visit to Hong Kong in 1978. The artist’s meticulous process and rigorous conceptual methodology transcends cultural and geographical boundaries, inviting profound contemplation on how we mark our existence in an ever-shifting world.

Robert Ryman
Robert Ryman
David Zwirner
May 28–Aug 1

The debut solo exhibition of pivotal American artist Robert Ryman in Greater China is now on view at David Zwirner Hong Kong, featuring a selection of works from the early 1960s through the 2000s. Best known for his lifelong exploration of the color white, Ryman delved into the many nuances of different materials and painterly techniques through minimal yet tactile and highly innovative works. The exhibition features examples from Ryman’s early paintings from the 1960s, including a representative work from his Crazy series (1962–64), as well as paintings and drawings from the 1970s through 2000s that exhibit his interest in different mediums, supports, installation methods. Presented nonchronologically, the exhibition emphasizes the enduring innovation and vitality of Ryman’s art that persisted throughout his six-decade-long career.

Li Hei Di
Tongues of Flare
Pace Gallery
May 29–Aug 29

Born in 1997 in Shenyang, China, London-based artist Li Hei Di paints dynamic, effervescent canvases that explore desire, intimacy, embodiment, and displacement. Their new solo exhibition “Tongues of Flare” at Pace Hong Kong—Li’s first solo show with the gallery—features vibrant canvases in which ethereal bodies and luminous biomorphic forms intertwine and pulsate amid abstract washes of color. Li’s fluid and ambient spaces—where figuration and abstraction blur—embody nuanced perspectives on gender, sexuality, monstrosity, and metamorphosis. The exhibition presents 11 new paintings and a recently produced wood sculpture. After its Hong Kong debut, “Tongues of Flare” will travel to Shanghai’s Pond Society during Shanghai Art Week this autumn.

Chou Yu-Cheng
borrnnn
Kiang Malingue
May 23–Jul 5

On view at Kiang Malingue’s Hong Kong space, “borrnnn” features new paintings by Taiwanese artist Chou Yu-Cheng, created in 2025 in response to the birth of his first child. Situated between still life and portrait, the series explores themes of fertility, tenderness, and renewal through the motif of ripened gourds, which are long associated with life force in Chinese visual culture. In these works, Chou further develops his unique language of gradient painting and collage by using self-ground earth pigments, which allows the gradation of colors to pervade in a more organic fashion. He then cuts and assembles the pieces of paper with meticulous precision, building compositions comprising organic forms and playful colors. At Kiang Malingue’s Sik On Street gallery, the works are suspended back-to-back from the ceiling or poised, free-standing, on pedestals, revealing Chou’s interest in spatial physicality.

Zoran Mušič
Zoran Mušič, Solo Exhibition
Axel Vervoordt Gallery
May 24–Aug 23

On view at Axel Vervoordt is the first exhibition in Hong Kong of Slovenian modernist Zoran Mušič, marking the 20th anniversary of his passing and coinciding with his large retrospective at Palazzo Attems-Petzenstein in the artist’s hometown of Gorizia. Born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Slovenia, Mušič’s survived captivation in the Dachau concentration camp during WWII, and is best known for his series, We Are Not the Last, which depicts the harrowing scenes he witnessed during his stay in Dachau. Distilling horror, personal trauma, and historical catastrophe into art, Mušič’s landscapes, vegetal forms, cathedrals, and self-portraits emanate poetry and quiet resilience. With a minimal yet evocative palette, and rhythmic brushwork, Mušič’s paintings evoke a deep spirituality and melancholic silence.

Mit Jai Inn
Pressed Matter
Rossi & Rossi
May 24–Jul 12

Rossi & Rossi presents “Pressed Matter”, the second solo exhibition by Thai artist Mit Jai Inn with the gallery. Renowned for his large-scale installations and distinctive color-based paintings and sculptures that respond to aesthetic, social, and political contexts, Mit’s practice blends Western artistic influences with traditional Thai aesthetics and Buddhist philosophy. Exploring the action of ‘press’ as both material force and psychological tension, the exhibition features works from a series titled Squeeze (2024), in which mounds of pigment are forcefully pressed down, reimagining the canvas as a sculptural surface and a site of embodied presence. These paintings are shown alongside sculptural works from 2022, including examples from the two series Marking Stones (2022) and Marking Lights (2022), which draw inspiration from the boundary stones used in Buddhist temples.

AILSA WONG
1
DE SARTHE
May 24—Jul 26

For her first solo exhibition at DE SARTHE, Hong Kong artist Ailsa Wong transformed the gallery space into an immersive cave-like environment constructed to recall the interior of an ant nest . Through a mechanical sound installation, kinetic sculptures, an interactive 3D video game, a 2D visual novel game, and other mixed media works, Wong constructs a techno-animist universe where all entities—organic, mechncial, or otherwise—exist as parts of a “pantheistic superorganism.” Drawing parallels with the collective intelligence of ant colonies and philosophise about cosmic unity, the exhibition probes how humans would exist within an interconnected system where even non-humans possessed soul and agency.

Sumiko Iwaoka and Kaoru Taguchi
A Room Of One's Own
Sansiao Gallery
May 29–Jun 27

Presented by Sansiao Gallery HK, “A Room of One’s Own” brings together works by Japanese artists Sumiko Iwaoka and Kaoru Taguchi in dialogue with a work by British artist Tracey Emin. Through painting as well as refined paper collage techniques, Iwaoka interrogates the shifting ideals of beauty and women’s roles throughout history. Taguchi, meanwhile, reflects on religious iconography and memory through her layered woodblock prints. Shown alongside Emin’s Just a Reflection (1998), the exhibition examines the tension between inherited self-expectations shaped by social norms and the pursuit of individual freedom. It offers a space for quiet observation, inviting viewers to contemplate what liberation means in contemporary life.

Joyce Jingyi Ge is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.