New Hauser & Wirth Space Opens in Hong Kong
By Anna Lentchner
Exterior of Hauser & Wirth’s new street-level gallery on Queen’s Road, Central, Hong Kong. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.
The Swiss mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth launched its new street-level space in Hong Kong’s Central Business District on January 24 with the inaugural exhibition, “Faces,” by Shanghai-based painter Zhang Enli.
The new gallery is located on the street level and first floor of 8 Queen’s Road Central, between Ice House Street and Duddell’s Street. With glass walls on two sides facing the city’s busy streets, the gallery was designed by Annabelle Selldorf of Selldorf Architects, marking the New York-based firm’s eighth collaboration with Hauser & Wirth since the gallery’s founding in 1992. Hauser & Wirth’s previous Hong Kong location in the H Queen’s building occupied two floors, the interior of which Selldorf also designed.
“With this beautiful new gallery space in Hong Kong we’re taking a ground-up approach,” president Iwan Wirth stated on the move. “[It] is perfectly located to create exciting opportunities for our artists to present their exhibitions and to welcome the city’s informed and engaged communities, those from wider Asia, and beyond.”
Installation view of ZHANG ENLI’s "Faces," 2023, at Hauser & Wirth, Hong Kong. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Zhang joined Hauser & Wirth in 2006 as the first Asian artist to be represented by the gallery. At the time, Zhang’s oeuvre was focused on “the more prosaic aspects of contemporary life,” as seen in oil paintings such as Dustbin (2006), Bucket 9 (2007), and The Bed (2008), which depict their titular subjects in stunning simplicity. In “Faces,” however, Zhang’s new work, including A Guest from Afar and Melon Farmers (both 2023), will demonstrate his practice’s progression into gestural abstraction, with free brushstrokes capturing only the essence of his subjects.
The artist said of his upcoming exhibition: “Sometimes, the obscured object also creates a trace with the passing of time. This is the origin of my recent abstract paintings. When I look at a wall, or sky, it is full of traces, and then I name these traces after someone; it becomes very interesting, it is visible yet invisible.”
Zhang was born in Jilin province in 1965. After graduating from Wuxi Technical University in 1989, the artist relocated to Shanghai, where he continues to live and work. Zhang has held solo exhibitions in major institutions such as West Bund’s Long Museum (2023), Power Station of Art in Shanghai (2020), London’s Royal Academy of Arts (2018), and Kunsthalle Bern (2009), among numerous others. “Faces” is on view through March 9.
Anna Lentchner is assistant editor at ArtAsiaPacific.
