dreamedcore

EVENT DESCRIPTION

dreamedcore, the second exhibition at GOLD by Serakai Studio, presents a multi-sensorial exploration of digital-age nostalgia, bringing together artists, designers, fashion labels, and creative studios from across Asia. Taking on the format of an art exhibition, concept store, and runway show, dreamedcore looks at how a new generation is re-imagining visual culture—conditioned by increasingly fluid channels of production and distribution—and constructing dreamy worlds from internet nostalgia and hazy atmospheric tones. Curated by Shirley Lau (Associate Curator, Serakai Studio) and Tobias Berger (Co-Founder and Curatorial Director, Serakai Studio), the exhibition opens on Saturday, 6 June in Wong Chuk Hang and will be on view through Saturday 1 August, 2026.

dreamedcore begins with a feeling: late-night strolling through empty streets, vacant malls, and softly lit corridors that seem both distant and strangely familiar. The exhibition proposes treating the algorithmic aesthetic of “dreamcore” — which draws heavily on visual textures from the 1990s and early 2000s — not simply as style or subculture but as a generational condition. For artists, designers, and creative practitioners born in the 1990s, growing up amid tremendous urban change and now hitting their 30s, such imagery returns as hazy afterimages of an uncanny world, shaped as much by platform circulation and algorithmic repetition as by lived memory itself.

dreamedcore is therefore less about direct recollection than a collectively reconstructed atmosphere, assembled through memory, platforms, and circulating images. Featuring twenty-two emerging multi-disciplinary artists and creative practitioners from Asia, the exhibition maps out how we remember, adapt, and resist within an age of endless imagery and accelerating information. Between digital archaeology and future fantasy, the exhibition traces the emotional pulse of a generation shaped by overload and longing.

The exhibition unfolds in two parts. “Chapter 1: The Lure” draws visitors into the soft familiarity of dreamcore aesthetics, with fluid lamps, surreal furniture, and works by artists such as Li Shuang evoking hazy internet-era memories. “Chapter 2: The Twist” shifts toward the uncanny, diving into nostalgia, kitsch, and subtle unease through works by random clichés and glass and screen sculptures by Peng Ke, revealing a past that feels personal yet which has never truly existed. Set around a central runway stage, the exhibition is immersed in ambient lighting, surrounded by art and design objects as well as mannequins. A mini cinema, featuring a chandelier by File Studio and sofas designed by kar, screens a video work by artist Wong Ping, inviting visitors to slow down and linger — an essential part of the dreamedcore experience.

Assembling artists, fashion brands, and design studios, dreamedcore is the culmination of deep research by Serakai Studio into emerging artistic and design practices in China and across Asia. These include Li Shuang, Liu Yin, Wong Ping, Liu Shuwei, Chen Wei, Ming Wong, Jiū Society, Peng Ke, together with Penultimate, HuDieGongZhu, YAT PIT, VANN, IWANNABANGKOK©, fabric qorn, bias, envy envy, studiososlow, Atelier V&F, random clichés, kar, File Studio, and Nidea·Nlight.

This generation — now mostly in their 30s and early 40s — share their formative years during Asia’s economic boom in the late-90s and early-2000s, a period marked by rapid urbanisation and new technological infrastructures. Whether from Mainland China or elsewhere, many of the works are influenced by the early-to-mid phases of the internet age, with its particular codes and styles, from vaporwave aesthetics to glitch, from a post-punk visual language to a gloomy, dreamlike atmosphere, among others. For some of them, their practice began during the pandemic, a moment of constraint that also offered new possibilities and a shift towards direct-to-consumer operations (WeChat, Xiaohongshu). These same digital ecosystems have equally enabled niche aesthetic worlds to circulate through images, mood, and atmosphere, allowing artists, designers, and fashion labels to build emotionally specific visual languages outside traditional cultural structures. For many, this is their first presentation in Hong Kong.

Ultimately, dreamedcore reflects a broader shift in how culture is produced, circulated, and experienced today. Bringing internet-native aesthetics, independent creative practices, and cross-disciplinary collaboration into a shared curatorial space, the exhibition deliberately collapses distinctions between exhibition, retail environment, social experience, allowing garments, objects, artworks, and design pieces to circulate within the same landscape — visually, emotionally, and operationally. In doing so, dreamedcore positions GOLD not only as a space for visual art, but as a contemporary Salon for emerging forms of visual culture, testing out new relationships between art, community, commerce, and visual culture across Asia.