EVENT DESCRIPTION
deTour 2025 – design festival returns to PMQ from 28 November to 7 December 2025, infusing the vibrant lifestyle hub with 10 days of creative energy – transforming it into Hong Kong’s ultimate destination for aesthetic inspiration. Spreading across PMQ’s Courtyard & Marketplace and the Qube, this year’s edition presents a forward-looking programme of compelling exhibitions, immersive installations, and interactive public events – including workshops, dialogues, performances, and guided tours.
Organised by PMQ and sponsored by the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency (CCIDA), deTour 2025 explores the theme “The Shape of Yearning”, encouraging visitors to contemplate design objects through the “Design Trichotomy”, a framework comprising three layers. The first layer considers design’s aesthetics, functionality, and materials. The second layer examines how design reflects social structures, cultural influences, and historical context. The third layer takes a more speculative approach, asking whether design reveals the deeper desires and values of its creator or a collective. Viewed through this lens, design may uncover meanings that often go unnoticed.
Curated by designer Adonian Chan, deTour 2025 features 17 installations and exhibits, gathering designers from Hong Kong, the Chinese Mainland and across the globe to showcase stirring ideas. Visitors are prompted to experience a cornucopia of design through fresh eyes, not merely as functional or aesthetic, but as a vessel, a container for thoughts and hopes.
International Collaboration: Visionary Swiss Design Studio Lands in Hong Kong
Making their debut in Hong Kong, Encor Studio, a pioneering design team from Switzerland, brings their distinctive experimental practice to the city. Known for kinetic sculptures and sound visualisation, the studio introduces a new dimension of sensory engagement through movement and resonance. Their large-scale commissioned installation, “ALCOVE IN SITU”, reimagines the QUBE as a responsive, minimalist canvas through light, electrochromic films, sound, and visual composition. At its core, the installation reflects the tension between presence and absence, the seen and the intangible. Upon entering the space, visitors find their own perception becoming the medium. Objects dissolve into afterimages, and boundaries blur. Rooted in reflections on memory, loss, and perception, the work invites contemplation on how the immaterial can leave the most enduring imprint, and how involuntary memory illuminates fleeting moments.
Four Feature Exhibitions: Curated Interpretations of “The Shape of Yearning”
This year’s theme unfolds in part through four diverse explorations, each expressed in a unique language of form, material, and interaction. These works give form to how personal and collective aspirations mould the spaces we inhabit and the objects we create.
Home Ecology – The Philo Modular System by Hong Kong duo TOUN 亠 (Renee Neoh × Samuel Choi)
The Philo Modular System is a fluid home ecosystem designed for urban constraints, enabling space to evolve with daily life. Crafted from aluminium components that can be freely assembled, it creates a dynamic environment for adaptable and sustainable living.
Instrument.Play.Graphics – Modular Graphic Synthesizer – by Graphic Designer Shunta Sakamoto
This installation transforms graphic design from a purely visual medium into a tactile encounter. It introduces a physical patching system that merges bodily gestures with visual composition. By integrating touch, sound and sight, the work invites the audience to rediscover the visceral joy of “playing with design”.
primavera by Italian designer Lucia Massari
Inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s floral portraits, the “primavera” table lamps series reinterprets historical Venetian glassmaking traditions with bold, contemporary colours. This dialogue between memory and invention reframes ornamentation, shifting perspectives. Massari’s lamp transcends mere embellishment, and instead becomes a means to render tradition unexpectedly new.
Trueform by London/Hong Kong Creative Studio Nopqrst
A series of graphics and sand-cast aluminium sculptures, drawing inspiration from residual glue marks of removed street posters. These works fossilise fleeting urban traces into permanent form, transforming ephemera into artefacts. Through integrated AR effects, it extends into a hybrid digital space where audiences interact with AI-generated forms that float alongside their material counterparts.
Selected Entries
This year’s selection features 12 distinctive works that responded to the open call with creativity and depth. These entries weave together diverse inspirations, including cutting-edge technologies such as robotics and 3D printing, innovative materials, and even MBTI personality theory. The result is an engrossing experience that transcends time and space, reflecting the evolution of social aspirations and cultural impulses. Highlights include:
A Battle of Beasts by GROOVIDO: The installation reimagines the brick, a symbol of structure and permanence, and sees it assume a fluid, playful form. Adapted using an innovative ceramic printing process, the bricks become pieces for traditional Chinese board games, creating a canvas where tradition, and play converge, turning design into a cultural storytelling.
Becoming: Aerated Identities by Architecture and All | AAA: An interactive installation probing the fluid, performative nature of identity through a series of inflated masks and headwear, which visitors are invited to try on and reinvent themselves for a moment. The delicate, transient nature of the materials echoes the fragility of identity itself, sparking dialogue on self-expression, vulnerability, and transformation in an age where identity is continuously curated, inflated, and deflated.
BloomDentity by Embracefloral x Arfalization: This collaboration transforms MBTI personality data into bespoke 3D-printed vases, each design capturing the fluid complexity of individual traits. Moving beyond rigid personality frameworks, the work visualises identity as dynamic and multidimensional.
Public Programmes
Visitors are invited to immerse in The Shape of Yearning through a dynamic series of public programmes designed to spark creativity. From thought-provoking discussions to hands-on workshops, these activities foster exploration in all its forms, whether discovering new passions or deepening existing ones.
Workshops
From art-tech and craft to sound, design, and wellness, there’s a workshop for everyone. With over 10 unique workshops and 40 sessions, participants can explore, learn, and express themselves. Highlights include:
• Becoming: Aerated Identities AI Design Workshop: Design inflatable wearable art in 3D digital spaces. Examine your “desired real self” and translate hidden desires into wearable digital art that celebrates self-expression.
• Filing and Yearning – Visual Diary Workshop: Every design begins with a longing. Drawing inspiration from the lifelong observations of renowned designers and artists, participants will create personal visual diaries using provided materials, tools, and expert tips.
Guided Tours
Experience the festival through Designer & Creator-led Tour perspectives. Join curator-led tours for an in-depth journey across selected artworks, enriched with exclusive insights. Explore fresh viewpoints in special guest tours led by designers and influencers including Hector Chan, Chan Kit, Archipodcast, and Hong Kong Heritage. Dive deeper with co-creator tours, an opportunity to know behind-the-scenes stories and inspirations from the creative minds behind the works.
Creative Voice and Performances
A vibrant mix of design, performances, and creative encounters, an open invitation to participate. Hear from the voices exploring design, innovation and cultural narratives in Creative Voices talks and sharing sessions, including Swiss design studio Encor Studio, as they explore design philosophies and experience. Engage in influencer Hector Chan’s Design Club “Connecting Through Form: A Design Lovers’ Meet on Rams & Braun” for a thought-provoking discussion. Enjoy in motion through an eclectic lineup of live performances, from audio-visual live experience, live graphic generation, experimental sound and jazz.
deTour Kids
Building on its exciting momentum, deTour Kids continues to champion the role of design and creativity in a child’s development. In partnership with birdintree, the programme offers engaging parent-child experiences that spark imagination and inspire learning through hands-on design activities.
For more information about deTour 2025 design festival visit the website: https://detour.hk/
