Wednesday 7 May 2025
11:30—12:20 Construction tour

Thursday 8 May 2025
13:00—14:30 Forum Hong Kong’s Public Architectures
14:45—16:15 Forum Tropicality and Development
16:30—18:00 Forum Archiving of Architecture and Urbanism

This representation of Hong Kong in the 2025 Biennale Architettura in Venice wishes to respond to the call for “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective” by highlighting the “collective intelligens” of the public infrastructures, shaped in the metropolis’ formative post-war decades, and showcase their climatically-responsive tropical modernism already anticipating the Anthropocene turn. Remarkable in their realizations of the ordinary architectures that have been fundamental to Hong Kong’s global aspirations—from the co-operative housings and multifunctional market-library-sports public buildings to the composite and modernist industrial buildings—and designed by the likes of Chung Wah-Nan, Wong & Ouyang, Ng Chun Man and Dennis Lau, P&T, the Public Works Department and architects indigenous to the territory, these structures are until-now little documented, analysed nor shared internationally. Already starting to be replaced by rapidly-changing demand-sophistication and depleting in face of the proliferation of sealed curtain walls, those that remain of these everyday types will one day become the city’s sole “future heritages.” This exhibition thus wishes to highlight to the world and to Hong Kong, these overlooked representatives of the city’s paradigm-shifting era, when the intelligens for collective conceptions are realized in spite of density and economic priorities.
With the premise of returning to uncover and catalogue this representative recent past, in the way urban archaeologists discover the civilizational cosmology through material artefacts, the exhibition transplants these findings to the Campo della Tana site across from the Arsenale, which was once a manufacturing site of industrial scale in a pre-modern world.

Curators
Fai AU, Ying ZHOU
Sunnie S.Y. LAU

Opening hours
11am—7pm
from 10.5—28.9
10am—6pm
from 29.9—23.11

Fai Au (HKIA) is the founder and principal of O Studio Architects, and Associate Professor of Practice in the University of Hong Kong. His practice has received numerous awards and honor including 2021 Prix Versailles Continental Winner, 2020 Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard and 2011 HKIA Medal of the Year. His research focuses primarily on the topic of high-density city living, congestion, gentrification, and social inequality.  Besides his parallel involvement in practice and academia, he has also actively participated in various platforms of knowledge exchange. He is the co-curator of 2017 HKSZ Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Hong Kong), and the curator of 2022 PMQ HKU Architecture Gallery Exhibition. His works have been featured in various exhibitions including 2023 The Architecture of Prayer Exhibition, 2019 Good Design Award Exhibition, 2018 Venice Biennale, 2018 Play to Change Exhibition, 2017 HKSZ Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, 2017 PMQ 10×100 Exhibition, 2016 “REVEAL 2: +-x÷” Exhibition, 2015 “Past Present Future – Tracking Hong Kong” Exhibition and 2013 Agoras Green Architecture Exhibition.

Dr. Ying Zhou (AIA Assoc.) is an architect and urban theorist teaching at the University of Hong Kong. She is also the current chair of DocomomoHK and is on the editorial board of Architectural Histories, the journal of the European Architectural History Network. She taught and researched with the chair of Professors Herzog and de Meuron at the ETH Studio Basel and Professor Kees Christiaanse at the Future Cities Laboratory of the Singapore-ETH Centre. She has exhibited at the Rotterdam Biennale, Swiss Architecture Museum and the Haus der Kunst, amongst others and her writings appear in Urban China, Critical Planning, Time and Architecture, Topos, Art Journal, and more. Her first book was The Metro-Basel Comic from 2009, also in Chinese on the occasion of the 2010 World Expo. Her research on the contemporary urban transformations of Shanghai was published in the book Urban Loopholes: Creative Alliances of Spatial Productions in Shanghai's City Center in 2017. Her current research looks at how the burgeoning of art spaces manifest the shifts in the arts ecologies of East Asian cities, and their intersections with heritage conservation, gentrification, and the rhetorics of creative cities. Her concern for architecture’s agency in the civicness of the city has compelled her current research into the conceptions and aspirations for the Urban Council complexes since the 1970s in Hong Kong.

Dr. Eunice Seng (Ir-Arch, AIA Assoc., HKIA Assoc.) is Head of Department and Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at The University of Hong Kong. She is the founding principal of the architecture and research practice SKEW Collaborative SH-HK-SG and a founding member of Docomomo Hong Kong. She received a BA(AS) from the National University of Singapore, an M.Arch from Princeton University, and a PhD in Architectural History from Columbia University. Her research and scholarship focus on the interaction between historical contingency and the built environments in Asia and Southeast Asia and attending to the interdisciplinary intersections, transnational connections, and agency in architecture, housing, gender, labor, and public space. She is the author of Resistant City: Histories, Maps, and the Architecture of Development (2020) and editor of themed issues of the Journal of Architecture, Architecture Theory Review, and Ardeth. Seng is writing a book on the contingent architecture of housing and development in postwar Hong Kong. 

Wing Yuen is a founding partner of YY Projects, an architecture and design practice with a portfolio spanning Hong Kong, China, and the United States.  YY Projects has been showcased in venues such as the Architectural Institute of Japan Gallery, Hopkins Wharf Gallery in Maine, and the Druker Design Gallery. Their projects have been featured on platforms including Leibal, Shinkenchiku, KoozArch, and Gooood (China).  The practice has received accolades including the Bronze Prize at the Panasonic (China) Living Space Design Competition and the Merit Award at the 50th Nisshin Kogyo Architectural Design Competition.  Before relocating to Hong Kong, Wing practiced in architecture offices in the US and China, including NADAAA, Weiss/Manfredi, IwamotoScott, and Neri&Hu.  Spending her formative years in the Bay Area, Wing earned a B.A. in Architecture from the University of California Berkeley and an M.Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she contributed as a teaching assistant and instructor for graduate-level courses and workshops.