EVENT DESCRIPTION
Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong presents a group show featuring artists profoundly engaged with the cultural tapestry of Asia and its diasporic narratives, including Luis Chan, Haneyl Choi, Nicole Coson, Shota Nakamura, Peng Ke, Yeh Shih-Chiang and Hauser & Wirth artists Bharti Kher, Tetsumi Kudo and Zhang Enli.
‘Aura Within’ is organized by Hong Kong-based curator and scholar Anqi Li and is presented in collaboration with Clearing, Hanart TZ Gallery, Make Room, P21 and Silverlens. The exhibition invites the audience to return to the body as ground zero in the turbulent currents of our time and to explore urgent contemporary topics of existence and perception, identity and memory, and the interplay between nature, urban landscape and spiritual dwelling.
London-based Filipino artist Nicole Coson makes her debut in Hong Kong with two large-scale oil paintings ‘Double Doors I’ (2025) and ‘Double Doors II’ (2025), created for this exhibition. Coson employs her body to activate the canvas, translating shipping container doors that symbolize globalization and the ties between Hong Kong and Manila––her homeland––into heavy, resonant traces. In Berlin-based artist Shota Nakamura’s new painting ‘Untitled (garden)’ (2025), he draws on art history, personal memory and popular culture to portray figures in states of rest, meditation, or quiet detachment, delicately intertwined with their surrounding environments to evoke emotional depth and a sense of introspection. South Korean artist Haneyl Choi’s ‘Landscape of Abuse’ (2025) and ‘Play: Rhythm of Abuse’ (2023) are exemplary works of his ‘trauma-scapes.’ Through the juxtaposition of fragile organic forms and cold industrial matter, these works reveal a paradoxical symbiosis in which struggle and resistance, confinement and sanctuary, pain and repair coexist. Based between Shanghai and Los Angeles, Chinese artist Peng Ke extends her photographer’s gaze in ‘Begin Again’ (2024), transforming mundane urban fragments––such as a bare tree stump or autumn leaves lodged in concrete cracks––into luminous stained-glass panels, sanctifying a trembling tenderness beneath the city’s seemingly rational order.
The exhibition also highlights established names, including the late Hong Kong artist Luis Chan and late Taiwanese artist Yeh Shih-Chiang. In ‘Untitled (Legend of Goddesses of the Sea)’ (1968), Luis Chan, inspired by monotype printmaking, allowed accidental splashes of ink to evolve into whimsical figures he might have drawn from people he saw on television or observed in Hong Kong’s everchanging society. In ‘Green Sea and White Sail Framed in a Window’ (2007), created during Yeh Shih-Chiang’s later years in rural seclusion, the lone white sail drifting across the water is not a mere scenic depiction but a reflection of the artist’s grounded inner self.
Based between London and New Delhi, Bharti Kher will show three iconic works made with bindis—a cultural symbol linking the real and spiritual worlds, and a recurring motif in her practice that evokes tensions and questions around identity and belief. The works are on view alongside the late Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo’s cages, where Kudo stages miniature theatres of a pathological allegory of modern civilization, and Chinese artist Zhang Enli’s abstract and gestural canvases.
The exhibition stands as a testament to the gallery’s broader initiatives and enduring commitment to fostering dialogue and collaboration within the art communities it calls home, such as Hauser & Wirth Invite(s) in Paris and Zurich, ‘An Uncommon Thread’ and ‘Present Tense’ at Hauser & Wirth Somerset and ‘Nonmemory’ at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles, each reflecting a shared ethos of collaborative arts ecosystem.
