HONG KONG.- Pace presents Algorithms of Longing, a group exhibition at its Hong Kong gallery charting complex ideas, desires, and resonances in the Asian diaspora, situated in conversation with works that speak to post-Socialist and post-human longings. On view from January 14 to February 27, 2025, this focused presentation, organized by Pace’s Curatorial Director Xin Wang with support from the gallery’s President of Greater China Evelyn Lin, brings 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.
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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, debuts a new work titled Self-portrait (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.
Born in Ohio to first generation Chinese American parents, Ba spent the first five years of her life with her grandparents in Hefei, China. Her recent paintings—in which monumental nude figures, often in the artist’s own image, inhabit uncanny interiors and evocative urban environments—combine realism and fantasy to explore issues of desire and sexuality, capitalism and nationalism, and diasporic memory through lenses of queer and post-colonial thinking. Resurrection Site (2024), Ba’s new painting in Algorithms of Longing, takes Andrea Mantegna’s famously foreshortened composition Lamentation of Christ (1480) as a point of departure and provocation. In Resurrection Site, the artist’s own body is laid in the rubble of a construction site, monumental yet vulnerable to the relentless cycles of urban sprawl and decay.
Offering a drastically different take on our cultural and emotional ties to the land, Jiang’s new painting Harvest (2024) is the largest canvas in the exhibition. In her practice spanning painting, sculpture, animation, and performance, the artist explores intersections between scientific, psychological, and magical subjects. Jiang’s paintings possess a surrealistic, futuristic sensibility, proposing new ways of seeing the world around us and understanding our relationship to it. In Harvest, back-lit farmers reap supernaturally oversized produce under an iridescent nebula, inviting associations with Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vineyards near Arles (1888), agrarian dreamcore/sci-fi, the Great Leap Forward, and internet memes of the obligatory urge of Chinese migrants and expats to grow food wherever they are.
Pace’s exhibition in Hong Kong also features a 1975 work on paper by the late Ching Ho Cheng, directly from the artist’s estate. Cheng was born in Havana, Cuba in 1946 to a Chinese diplomat family. He studied at the Cooper Union in New York City, where he would become a member of the postwar downtown avant-garde scene, immersing himself in the teachings of Taoism as well as Tibetan art, Hopi and Navajo artifacts, and the work of Hieronymus Bosch. He rose to prominence in the 1960s with his psychedelic abstractions, the majority of which are part of institutional collections in the US, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Cheng’s composition Untitled (Wood grain series), inspired by the wooden floors in his studio at the storied Chelsea Hotel in New York, is the historical work that anchors Algorithms of Longing. The artist recalled that “in the peeling, crumbling, cracked walls of my studio, there is a lunar landscape. I travel through the wood grains of my floorboards.” In 2026, he will be the subject of a major solo retrospective titled Ching Ho Cheng: The Light Will Continue at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, accompanied by a catalogue co-published by the Addison Gallery and the nonprofit Visual AIDS.
Artist Jarod Lew, who will mount a solo show at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in spring 2025, presents Dislocation (Henry and Me) (2023)—a photo triptych from his recent series Long Time No See, From Somewhere Far Away—in the group exhibition at Pace in Hong Kong. Using photography and video to explore intergenerational diasporic loss, displacement, and post-memory, Lew said that his curiosity and yearning for a semblance of aesthetic authenticity in old Hong Kong and Chinese films as an Asian American “underscore the realities of my estrangement within the fantasies I create.”
Artist Lawrence Lek’s single-channel video Guanyin (Confessions of a Former Carebot) (2024), part of a multimedia commission by Frieze London in 2024 that also includes sculptures and an interactive game, brings a wry yet tender techno-dystopian dimension to Algorithms of Longing. In his animated video work named after the Buddhist goddess of mercy, a cyborg therapist embarks on a mission to save other artificially intelligent entities from destruction. Lek’s short film Empty Rider—originally commissioned for the 2024 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva—will have its world premiere in the Tiger Shorts Award program at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2025, and, in June 2025, he will present a solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
Works in this exhibition by Olowska, a Polish artist, and Tadić, a Croatian-born, New York-based artist, speak to the shared post-Socialist lineages, lived experiences, and hauntings that connect Asia with Central and Eastern Europe in deeply meaningful, often overlooked ways. Tadić’s painting Aleja Pomoraca (Alley of Sailors) (2020–24) draws on Croatian folk art in its depictions of Brutalist residential buildings in the artist’s hometown Zagreb—these buildings are just as recognizable and prevalent in northern Chinese cities. A small, oval-shaped aperture in the upper left corner of the composition reveals a street scene in New York City, the artist’s home in diaspora, as if, Tadić states, to reconcile reality and nostalgia “as a way to engage with my different identities.”
Unmistakable Soviet-era architecture with a distinct mosaic facade looms in the background in Olowska’s 2018 painting Prospekt Niezalezhnosti, whose central characters are a mother and child appropriated from a Yves Saint Laurent campaign. This anachronistic Socialist Realist scene epitomizes the artist’s abiding interest in consumption and desire through the lenses of socialism, fashion, and nostalgia. Like Tadić, Olowska is interested in “processing things that I find interesting or that have been omitted in the official discourse because they’re classified as unimportant.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a curated selection of publications—available to read in the gallery—that illuminates its rich contexts.
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