In the Hong Kong Collateral Event “Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice” at the 61st Venice Biennale, Hong Kong artists Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui rediscover the quiet rhythms of the everyday through new site-specific installations.

Amongst the bustle of the Venice Biennale, the Hong Kong Collateral Event turns to a quieter register. Curated by the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA), Hong Kong’s first public art museum, the exhibition “Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice” marks the museum’s first curatorial undertaking for the Hong Kong exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Comprising five site-specific installations by artists Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui, the exhibition unfolds as a resonant journey rather than a series of isolated encounters, foregrounding the quotidian and the understated with a renewed attention.

The exhibition borrows fermata as its title and curatorial concept. In a musical score, it marks a moment of suspension, where a note or rest is prolonged at the performer’s discretion. In the Venetian cityscape, a fermata is a vaporetto stop—a threshold where passengers momentarily alight and embark. Resonating with the theme “In Minor Keys” of Venice Biennale 2026, the exhibition explores poetic rhythms in everyday life. Drawing on familiar yet fleeting moments in Hong Kong that subtly resemble those of Venice, the exhibition brings two cities into dialogue through shared conditions of everyday experience. Rooted in sensibilities shaped by Hong Kong, Ng and Hui bring distinct artistic approaches to a shared journey of self-discovery within the flow of life.

The fermata begins in the courtyard with Kingsley Ng. Ng is an established artist whose multimedia and spatial interventions often transform the familiar and the ethereal into meditative environments. Evolved from earlier renditions, his three installations for Venice trace his impressions between Venice and Hong Kong, attuning visitors to the overlooked rhythms of urban life. Sometimes, There Are Clouds in Puddles comprises mechanically triggered dichroic ribbons that reflect sunlight, creating the illusion of rain falling into five translucent, turquoise pools. Inspired by a poem by the late Hong Kong poet Leung Ping-kwan (Yasi), the work captures the fleeting magic of a rainy day.

This quiet observation continues indoors with Sky Well, where soap bubbles rotate within a hemispherical structure inspired by the spatial archetypes of wells in Hong Kong and Venice, as a single bulb sways above. The light is duplicated across the concave surface, creating an optical illusion that evokes an imagined cosmos and an image of impermanence.

Ng’s final installation, Laundry Nocturne, revisits the everyday ritual of drying laundry, a common sight across Hong Kong and Venice. A projected silhouette of a lone sheet sways under moonlight, accompanied by field recordings of Hong Kong’s night-time labour, from newspaper printing and sewage treatment to teahouses preparing for the day ahead. Gently bridging time zones, the sounds of nocturnal Hong Kong are carried into daytime Venice, as a tribute to the unseen labour. Across three installations, Ng reinterprets his impressions of Venice and observations of Hong Kong through humble materials, appreciating the everyday acts of maintenance that sustain urban life.

Alongside Ng’s immaterial approach, Angel Hui offers a tactile and sensory counterpoint through a practice grounded in material experimentation, daily objects and traditional artistic language. Known for her signature series of plastic bag embroidery, Hui, in her Venice debut, continues to transform the utilitarian into object for contemplation through traditional craftsmanship.

Envisioned as one holistic spatial intervention, Hui’s two installations Drifting Sanctuary and I Would Like to Open a Window for You, span across two rooms as an imagined sanctuary, synchronised through light, sound and movement. In Drifting Sanctuary, plastic bags commonly used in Hong Kong to carry pet fish are stitched with goldfish motifs using traditional Suzhou embroidery technique, gently floating and flickering overhead. The shadows of the fish move across walls, drawing the gaze towards I Would Like to Open a Window for You, a slowly rotating wrought-iron window decorated with patterns characteristic to Hong Kong and Venice hand-crafted by Hui in collaboration with Hong Kong master artisans. The boundary between the two installations dissolves as the patterned silhouette of the window frame is cast across the rooms. Experienced as one immersive space,  the two installations guide visitors towards Hui’s everyday observations in which overlooked objects hold care and delicate beauty.

The exhibition is neither a retreat nor a withdrawal from daily occurrences, but an invitation to linger with the familiar. Nestled in an old Venetian building opposite the main entrance of the Arsenale, “Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice” gives the uneventful everyday a moment to pause, remain and begin again.

Jointly presented by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC), and jointly organised by the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA) and the HKADC, the Hong Kong Collateral Event “Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice”, curated by the HKMoA, is currently on view in Venice (Campo della Tana, Castello 2126, 30122) through 22 November 2026.