A hollow in a world too full – Cao Fei

Description

This exhibition, Cao Fei’s first large institutional exhibition in Asia, revolves around a newly commissioned film that engages directly with Tai Kwun's layered history. Prison Architect unfolds as a poetic dialogue across time between two characters—a prisoner and an architect—who represent the building complex’s past as a police, judicial, and penal institution and its future as a cultural institution. Shown in an installation setting designed to embody this same complexity, the film makes references to colonial history, Hong Kong cinema, and the contemporary on the Mainland and globally, asking if we as viewers might be, like the inmates who inhabited this place before us, waiting indefinitely for trials to come.