Our New Street-Level Gallery in Hong Kong

From early November, ‘Art in the Street’ launches its second site at this new location. ‘Art in the Street’ is a new program of site-specific artist commissions that takes art to unexpected locations through takeovers of building hoardings and advertising billboards, allowing international audiences to encounter the works at new scales and within the urban fabric of the city.

Zhang Enli has been represented by Hauser & Wirth since 2006 and has exhibited both internationally and regionally; his solo exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai opens on 7 November 2023. Titled ‘Expression’, the exhibition features painting works by artist Zhang Enli created in the past three decades. The nearly 100 works on view include figure paintings from the 1990s to early 2000s and the artist’s everyday objects series from the 2000s to early 2010s, along with abstract works from early 2010s until the present day.

Zhang Enli first gained acclaim in the 1990s for symbolic, figurative paintings. Within these early works, the perspective was often skewed to heighten the drama of the object’s shape, or to enlarge its symbolic importance. Zhang Enli has frequently returned to a personal iconography centered on the more prosaic aspects of contemporary life, drawn to imagery of quotidian objects that are sensitively rendered and imbued with stories. In more recent years, the artist has turned to the outside world, urban dwellings and nature, blurring the boundaries between inside and out. In a series of installations, known as Space Paintings, Zhang Enli paints directly onto the walls of a room to create immersive environments. These range from the abstract, where color and gesture recall sights and sounds of a particular place, to more figurative reproductions.

Titled ‘Faces,’ the inaugural exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s new location in Hong Kong will feature new paintings by Zhang Enli. These gestural canvases reflect Zhang Enli’s progression to looser, freer brushwork that has become prominent in the artist’s style in recent years and reveals the artist’s compelling and continued exploration into abstract form. While anchored in figuration with descriptive titles, Zhang Enli seeks to capture the ‘essence’ of his subjects rather than their physical representation through these works.

‘With this beautiful new gallery space in Hong Kong we’re taking a ground-up approach,’ explains Iwan Wirth, President. ‘The space by Selldorf Architects is perfectly located to create exciting opportunities for our artists to present their exhibitions and to welcome the city’s informed and engaged communities, those from wider Asia and beyond.’

‘We’re are looking forward to opening the doors to our exhibition by Zhang Enli in our beautiful street level gallery in the heart of Hong Kong,’ says Elaine Kwok, Managing Partner Asia. ‘The passion for art and collecting continues to thrive in this city and we believe our newly located ground floor space will enhance the experience of exhibiting, viewing and learning, allowing our artists’ work to reach an even wider audience.’

Solo Exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong

Glenn Ligon, March 2024
In March, coinciding with Art Basel Hong Kong, Hauser & Wirth will present American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon’s first solo exhibition in Greater China. Over the past three and half decades, Ligon has explored American history, society, and literature to pose incisive questions about race and identity. His art demonstrates the ways in which a given subject permeates culture over time, magnetizing our attention to the mutability of images, ideas, and language, as well as our perceptions of them. Best known for his landmark text paintings, which incorporate the writings of important cultural figures such as James Baldwin, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Pryor, Ligon has continued to expand his practice to include films, drawings, prints, photographs and neon sculptures.

Lucio Fontana, June 2024
In June, a survey of Italian modern master Lucio Fontana will be unveiled at Hauser & Wirth in Hong Kong, bringing the artist’s celebrated series of works to new audiences in Asia, focusing on that aspect of the Spatialist art movement between 1949 and 1968 that is most masterfully summarized in Fontana’s iconic ‘Holes’ (Buchi) and ‘Slashes’ (Tagli). The final highlight in a trilogy of exhibitions, this project follows a landmark presentation at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles that focused on Fontana’s Environments (Ambienti) and a New York exhibition that explored his sculptures. Together, the series of exhibitions attest to Fontana’s place as a visionary whose practice continues to exert influence upon artists internationally. The trilogy is curated by leading Fontana scholar Luca Massimo Barbero—Director of the Institute of Art History of the Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice and editor of the Fontana drawings and ceramic sculptures catalogues raisonné—in collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana. The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue, the first monograph written in Mandarin dedicated to the artist, published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers.