21 February 2024
Hong Kong-based contemporary art gallery PODIUM is delighted to announce its grand opening and inaugural exhibition on 23 March 2024 during Hong Kong Arts Month. Spearheaded by Charlotte Lin and Cusson Cheng, PODIUM operates as a robust platform that champions underrepresented emerging and mid-career artists where they can make their statements by interweaving compelling visual languages with scholarly complexities. Through dynamic exhibition programmes, publications, and institutional collaborations, the gallery remains steadfast in fostering transnational dialogues and synergic and experimental growth among the international artistic community.
The 2,500 sq. ft. gallery, designed and built by Hong Kong-based Napp Studio & Architects and IDS respectively, is located in E Tat Factory Building in the burgeoning Wong Chuk Hang neighbourhood. The gallery space comprises a meticulous vertical system of customised stainless steel perforated panels, which elevates the original infrastructure and forms a highly autonomous and flexible backbone to support an array of gallery happenings and maximise the potential of contemporary art as socially engaging discourses. Meanwhile, by respecting the generous amount of existing windows, the design with limited opaque coverings allows ample natural sunlight to pervade the exhibition space, materialising site-specific nuanced dialogues between the art and the exterior landscape.
The signature hallmark of the gallery, with its sage green terrazzo tiles, radiates a soft, earth tone that creates a distinct space imbued with balance and vitality amid the coarseness of the industrial district. It is also reminiscent of Hong Kong in the 1950s and 60s, when Chinese traders introduced such architectural craftsmanship from Nanyang, Guangzhou, and Shanghai, embodying the city's extensive history of vast openness and connections to diverse cultural influences.
Charlotte Lin, Executive Director, PODIUM, said: 'We are thrilled to announce the opening of PODIUM will take place before the 2024 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, where international and local communities can gather with us at the gallery to celebrate our grand opening. By harnessing Hong Kong's distinct role as an influential cultural hub in Asia, we look forward to bridging artistic exchanges across regions, and connecting the creative communities from Hong Kong and beyond by offering experimental and exciting possibilities powered by our artists.’
Cusson Cheng, Curatorial Director, PODIUM, said: ‘At PODIUM we work with some of today’s underrepresented yet visionary artistic voices, and we are excited to reveal our research-driven programming to our guests. Through meaningful collaborations with esteemed colleagues, we are committed to contributing to the Hong Kong art landscape by advancing our artists' presence in museums, institutions, and biennales worldwide, where audiences can critically engage with their practices through exhibitions, acquisitions, and publications.'
The gallery will kick-start with the inaugural exhibition 'Weirding Worlds'. Taking Donna Haraway’s 'Chthulucene' as the line of flight, the participating artists' distinct yet intertwined aesthetical trajectories and boundary-defying use of media visualise the necessary third history beyond the mastery narratives of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene, challenging the linear progression and apocalyptic rhetoric inherent in Western-centric frameworks with imaginative, queer vocabularies and practices. More information about the debut exhibition will be announced before the gallery’s grand opening. This year's programs will include emerging and mid-career artists from Asia, Europe, and the United States, whom many have never exhibited before in Hong Kong.