Algorithms of Longing

Pace Gallery | Hong Kong

Yifan Jiang, Harvest, 2024 © Yifan Jiang | Courtesy Pace Gallery

Algorithms of Longing
through 27 Feb 2025

12/F, H Queen's
80 Queen's Road Central
Hong Kong

---

Currently on view at Pace Gallery Hong Kong: Algorithms of Longing, a group exhibition charting complex ideas, desires, and resonances in the Asian diaspora, situated in conversation with works that speak to post-Socialist and post-human longings. This focused presentation is organised by Pace’s Curatorial Director Xin Wang with support from the gallery’s President of Greater China Evelyn Lin, bringing together works by Amanda Ba, Ching Ho Cheng, Oscar yi Hou, Yifan Jiang, Lawrence Lek, Jarod Lew, Paulina Olowska, and Stipan Tadić. Featuring seven artists outside Pace’s program, this exhibition reflects the gallery’s collaborative ethos, as well as its ongoing efforts to highlight new voices in its exhibitions around the world.

Activating the unique history and cosmopolitan culture of Hong Kong, Algorithms of Longing speaks to the collective familiarity of diasporic experiences and the distinct cosmos of experience and imagination embedded in each artist’s practice. In her curatorial statement, Wang explains that she aims to bring together “a robust and refreshing grouping of artists whose curiosity towards certain aspects of otherness—be it cultural, technological, post-Socialist or post-Human—expand the possibilities of knowledge for both self and the world. To revisit time as place and fantasy as home-coming.”

The exhibition features new, never-before-exhibited paintings by Ba, Hou, and Jiang. Hou, who presented his first institutional solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2022–23, will debut a new work titled Selfportrait (26), aka: yat ming (2024), along with another recent painting titled To look, aka: Realest Blue (2024). Liverpool-born and New York-based, Hou creates portraits of himself and other queer, Asian, diasporic artists, and his works are often characterized by a unique syntax of symbols, references, and emotional intimacy. Replete with queer iconography and references to poetry, East Asian history and visual culture, as well as American popular culture, Hou’s paintings conjure narratives that serve to represent and mystify their subjects—himself included.