HONG KONG.- Tai Kwun Contemporary is presenting Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008, a panoramic exhibition comprising two chapters and featuring over 70 artists, curated by Dr Pi Li, Head of Art, and Ying Kwok, Senior Curator. The first chapter, Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud (26 Sep 2025 to 4 Jan 2026), with more than 35 artists, is installed across three floors of JC Contemporary and in F Hall Gallery at Tai Kwun.

Beginning with Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud and continuing in Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe (27 Feb to 31 May 2026), the two chapters are framed through the lenses of digital technology and the manufacturing supply chain, respectively, to portray the diversity of current artistic practices.

Along with the two interconnected chapters, Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008 encompasses cross-disciplinary activities, including video screenings, curatorial talks, learning and engagement programmes, and the launch of a companion publication produced in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong).

Stay Connected: Navigating the Cloud

Navigating the Cloud showcases 35 artists and groups active in China and internationally whose innovative and alternative practices reflect the integration of the internet, social media platforms, and digital technologies into all aspects of daily life.

Since the emergence of the internet, openness has been one of its defining features, enabling users to access a vast array of images, data, and ideas. Yet this promise has been increasingly hampered by rapidly evolving technologies and the systems designed to govern online spaces. In response to the specific conditions of the internet, artists have cultivated their own wild, unruly creativity. Many artists today are exploring ideas of community, solidarity, and mutual support as they seek to reconnect isolated individuals across expansive networks and to explore solutions for society’s many unfolding crises.

More than 50 artworks, including three commissioned works, are presented in eight thematic sections that highlight subjects such as information bubbles, artificial intelligence, communities formed through the internet, and the changing nature of human labour with the use of digital technologies. These sections guide the audience to reflect on how we can overcome boundaries and divisions in order to ‘stay connected’ in a world where the digital and physical realms are already inseparable.

Featured Artworks

In the first chapter, Tai Kwun Contemporary presents commissioned artworks by Lu Yang, Shao Chun and Zhang Yibei. Lu Yang’s project The Material World Knight Space Battle (2022/2025) takes the form of a video game where players navigate fantastical worlds. Shao Chun’s new installation, Inner Beads (2025), features rotating hanging elements and floor projections of motifs related to gender dynamics. Zhang Yibei’s installation Limpid, Golden, Calling (2025) resembles mushrooms and flowers emerging from the gallery floor vents.

Other highlights from Navigating the Cloud include the animated video What Is Your Favorite Primitive (2023) by Li Yi-Fan, who creates a universe of digital avatars and a studio space where they participate in absurdist scenes. Using game-engine and motion-capture technology, Li explores how humans are gradually losing agency over digital tools as they shift from users to subjects bound by terms and conditions.

Wong Ping’s darkly comical, brightly coloured animation, Dear, can I give you a hand? (2018) reflects the challenges faced by Hong Kong’s elderly amid a prolonged housing shortage in an increasingly ageing society. Inspired by real-life scenarios and laced with morbid humour, the narrative captures the ruthless pace of the digital economy and the tensions of multigenerational cohabitation.

Developed by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu in collaboration with KUKA Robotics, Can’t Help Myself (2016—2019) is a giant robotic arm wielding a rubber squeegee to wipe away thick, dark-red liquid pooled on the floor. Incorporating advanced programming and visual recognition systems, this monumental artwork is on view for the first time in Asia after being commissioned in 2016 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and its subsequent showing at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.

The flashing 3D-animated texts on six screens in the JC Contemporary lobby echo once-popular design styles found on Chinese internet platforms, reflecting a unique vernacular aesthetic. For LAN Love Poem.gif (2016), Miao Ying adapted these phrases from awkward, comical love poems that circulated online and paired them with the interfaces of blocked foreign websites and social media platforms, such as Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

On Valentine’s Day in 2015, Li Shuang walked through a snow-covered Times Square in New York City for six hours, wearing a large sign that read ‘Marry Me for Chinese Citizenship’. She encountered diverse reactions from passersby, exposing the pervasive realities of racial prejudice, migration, and the basic human-rights issues faced by immigrant communities worldwide.

During the 16 days of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Chinese artist Chen Shaoxiong, Korean artist Gimhongsok, and Japanese artist Ozawa Tsuyoshi formed the collective known as Xijing Men to stage an alternative competition. The competitions of their satirical ‘Xijing Olympics’, named for an imaginary ‘western capital city’, were humorous and intentionally modest in scale, in contrast to the nationalist fervour of the mainstream Olympic Games.

Dr Pi Li, Head of Art at Tai Kwun, said: ‘Tai Kwun Contemporary is very proud to present Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008 in Hong Kong, a city where, historically, leading artists from China have met the world on the international stage. Stay Connected offers audiences the most comprehensive survey of twenty-first century artistic practices from and about social realities in Greater China at the quarter-century mark. Spanning two exhibitions, screenings, public programmes, and a forthcoming publication, Stay Connected positions artists’ practices in a global context where their innovative approaches and alternative narratives find resonances with social conditions around the globe’.

Ying Kwok, Senior Curator at Tai Kwun, said: ‘In Navigating the Cloud, artists reveal deeply human narratives within our technological landscape. These works explore not just digital technologies, but how our identities and communities transform in an age of hyperconnectivity, showing that even as we navigate the vastness of the cloud, we remain grounded in our shared human experience. This human-centred approach continues in Supplying the Globe, where artists examine the physical infrastructures and intangible relationships that connect us globally’.