Adrián Villar Rojas
The Language of the Enemy
Art Sonje Center
Seoul
Sep 3, 2025–Feb 1, 2026

Argentine artist Adrián Villar Rojas desecrated Seoul’s Art Sonje Center, stripping walls to expose raw concrete, filling the entrance with earth, disconnecting climate controls, and eliminating institutional apparatus. Soil, fire, and plant life breached the architecture, collapsing the boundary between museum and ecology. The installation occupies all four floors—including the cinema, bathrooms, hallways, and peripheral spaces—transforming the institution into what Villar Rojas calls “a sculptural ecosystem.”

Manifesto of Spring
National Asian Culture Center (ACC)
Gwangju
Sep 5, 2025–Feb 22, 2026

“Manifesto of Spring,” a tri-institutional collaboration between Gwangju’s National Asian Culture Center (ACC), Hong Kong’s M+, and Germany’s ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, commemorates the ACC’s 10th anniversary. 15 newly commissioned works interrogate the evolving symbolism of “spring”—a term historically tied to Gwangju’s 1980 uprising, now reexamined amid economic globalization and ecological collapse. Through installations, videos, sculptures, paintings, and prints, the participating artists—Zheng Bo, Ho Rui An, Connie Zheng, and ikkibawiKrrr, among others—propose forms of solidarity and healing that transcend human-centered frameworks, envisioning futures built on symbiotic interdependence rather than resource extraction.

Kongkee
Electronic Heart Beat
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art
Kanazawa
Oct 18, 2025–Mar 22, 2026

“Electronic Heart Beat,” Kongkee’s first solo exhibition in Japan, advances the framework of “Asian Futurism”—a critical portrait of futurity rooted in East Asian history, philosophy, and aesthetics, positioned against Western-centric globalization. Merging ancient Chinese figures like Qin Shi Huang and Qu Yuan with a speculative dystopia where immortality, surveillance, and consciousness intersect, Kongkee probes the essential nature of human existence in relation to technology. Through animated videos, painted taxi doors inscribed with poetry, and his new Future Jataka series—where AI achieves Buddhist enlightenment—the artist assembles a multilayered urban imaginary.

Félix González-Torres
Somewhere better than this place / Nowhere better than this place
David Zwirner
Hong Kong
Nov 19, 2025–Feb 28, 2026

The first solo exhibition of works by Félix González-Torres in Hong Kong assembles key bodies of work, including his candy sculptures, light strings, paper stacks, photographic puzzles, and mirrored surfaces. Deploying a minimalist vocabulary and commonplace materials, his visual language collapses dualities between belonging and estrangement, the particular and universal, the fixed and fleeting. Active in New York from 1979 to 1995, González-Torres created ephemeral works inviting ongoing reinterpretation through participation: viewers can take candy, paper sheets, or puzzle pieces, enacting cycles of renewal and loss. The exhibition extends into Hong Kong’s urban spaces with simultaneous installations at Central Market’s Bauhaus stairwell and a Tai Hang storefront.

Un Cheng
Bedroom Paintings
Blindspot Gallery
Hong Kong
Dec 2, 2025–Jan 31, 2026

Un Cheng’s fourth solo exhibition at Blindspot Gallery showcases the artist’s “bedroom paintings”—a term coined by the artist inspired by lo-fi bedroom music—and presents 21 new oil-on-canvas works that function as intimate vignettes and visual diary entries. Rendered in expressive brushstrokes, Cheng’s depictions of fleeting encounters, hallucinatory cityscapes, and interior still lifes embody her inner landscape while alluding to the interconnectedness of human experiences.

Aisha Traub Chan is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.