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WAN CHAI
BAFA Graduate Exhibition 2025 – Calling
5 Jul – 21 Jul, 2025
Hong Kong Arts Centre
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Cai Lei: Constructing Void
5 Jul – 16 Aug, 2025
Tang Contemporary Art (Central)
SOUTHERN
Freddy Carrasco: Return to Nothing
5 Jul – 2 Aug, 2025
WKM Gallery
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Familiar Strangeness: Xu Chenyang Solo Exhibition
4 Jul – 9 Aug, 2025
Art of Nature Contemporary (Central)
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Yan Jingzhou Solo Exhibition - Love is Love
3 Jul – 12 Aug, 2025
Tang Contemporary Art (Wong Chuk Hang)
SAI WAN (WESTERN)
HART Haus x r é n: Art Actions | Our Youth Our Future
27 Jun – 13 Sep, 2025
HART HAUS
KWAI TSING
MONUMENTS
21 Jun – 26 Jul, 2025
Hanart TZ Gallery
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In Free Flight
19 Jun – 22 Jul, 2025
Ora-Ora
SHEUNG WAN
Urban Reveries
19 Jun – 2 Aug, 2025
Soluna Fine Art
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Cherie Cheuk: A Wrinkle In Time
18 Jun – 6 Sep, 2025
Alisan Fine Arts
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Wing Po So: Polyglot
17 Jun – 9 Aug, 2025
Blindspot Gallery
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MUSE and TOTEM
13 Jun – 20 Aug, 2025
Boogie Woogie Photography
CENTRAL
Dreamscape
12 Jun – 29 Aug, 2025
3812 Gallery
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Doris Chui Solo Exhibition: “We Float, As We Slowly Fall Asleep”
7 Jun – 19 Jul, 2025
SC Gallery
CENTRAL
Kongkee: Future Jataka
30 May – 30 Aug, 2025
gdm (Galerie du Monde)
CENTRAL
Condition I-VI and Blue Room
29 May – 30 Aug, 2025
MASSIMODECARLO
SOUTHERN
Ailsa Wong: 1
24 May – 26 Jul, 2025
DE SARTHE
SOUTHERN
Zoran Music
24 May – 23 Aug, 2025
Axel Vervoordt Gallery
CENTRAL
Cy Gavin
22 May – 2 Aug, 2025
Gagosian
CENTRAL
Huang Rui: Sea of Silver Sand
22 May – 16 Aug, 2025
10 Chancery Lane Gallery
SOUTHERN
Lin Yan: Everlasting Layers
6 May – 16 Aug, 2025
Alisan Atelier
CENTRAL
Through Time—Print Art in Aberdeen Street
22 Feb – 31 Aug, 2025
Print Art Contemporary
OPENING SOON
Once It Sets
7 Dec – 25 Jan, 2025
Rossi & Rossi

Flatland (still), 2024, video projection with sound

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘set’ has some 430 definitions – until relatively recently, more than any other word in the book – and they have constantly evolved depending on the context. Hong Kong artist Nicole Wong (b. 1990) delves into the potential for such transformations in Once It Sets, her fourth solo exhibition opening at Rossi & Rossi Hong Kong on 7 December. Fixating on natural and artificial crystalline solids, the artist amplifies or repeats processes of material transformation, thus delineating structural changes during these critical states and illuminating the energy that erupts from them.
Amongst the seven works on view in the presentation, The Definition of Rain (2024) translates the dictionary entry of ‘rain’ into binary code. Opalite and glass beads, representing 1s and 0s of the coding language, are strung together into a suncatcher curtain that bisects the gallery space. When visitors pass through it, the code represented by the mineral stones becomes distorted as the swaying movement of the curtain disrupts its sequence and the meaning it embodies. Wong thus draws a parallel between the phenomenon of rain and the construction of meaning. Just as rain is made up of water droplets condensed from atmospheric water vapour, language and its meanings are crystallised through a specific sequence of symbols.
The artist further explores the continuous movement of water through our ecosystem in Falling in Reverse (2017), in which a pair of looping videos play from two identical CRT monitors, placed side by side. In one video, rain falls on a window, and in the other, soda bubbles well up in a glass – the two juxtaposed processes are reversals of each other. The proximity of a natural phenomenon and a human-made reaction point us to query the source that drives transformation, whilst another work, Scale Up, Shred Down (2024), places the question in the context of a completely artificial visual effect. Here, skin printed on paper was generated by artificial intelligence, but its exceedingly smooth surface appears to lack authenticity. To bring the image closer to reality, Wong added texture with origami folds, and in the end, the enlarged skin evokes the likeness of an arid land. On top of it, dewdrops or sweat do not evaporate. Instead, they are suspended in a state of condensation. The skin that clads the self is thereby decorticated to be part of the foreign, external world.
Returning to the prescient implication of Once It Sets, language and meaning likewise evolve unceasingly, and in 2011, ‘run’ overtook ‘set’ in the OED with 645 different meanings. The exhibition’s curator Chris Wan encapsulates the recurring juxtaposition of this presentation with the concept of traversée, or ‘crossing’, in which a network, like a crystal, continues to develop new meanings and relationships: it ultimately permeates dichotomies of artificiality and nature, the self and the other, and science and the occult.
Rossi & Rossi

Address: 11/F, M Place, 54 Wong Chuk Hang Road, Wong Chuk Hang

Opening Hours: Tue–Sat 11am–6pm

Phone: +852 2116 5282

Website: rossirossi.com