While in residence at Delfina Foundation, Mimi Brown spoke about the vision for Spring.

“Michael was one of the most brilliant, multi-talented theater artists of our time. He was also a miracle of a human being: loving, kind, generous, hilarious, thrilling. His loss leaves a hole in the theater world that cannot be filled, and a hole in the hearts of those who loved him that will last forever.”

– Oskar Eustis, The Public Theatre

*Please RSVP at rsvp@springworkshop.org listing the event title in the subject line.

A presentation by Ari Benjamin Meyers, An exposition, not an exhibition is the debut of the foundational themes of Kunsthalle for Music (KFM), a new institution conceived and directed by composer and artist Meyers and founded in collaboration with Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and Spring Workshop.

A part of An exposition, not an exhibition, Hong Kong Solos is an artwork by Ari Benjamin Meyers that will take place at six non-profit art organizations—M+, Asia Art Archive, Para Site, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Things that can happen and soundpocket. Meyers invited six local Hong Kong composers to create new works for staff members at these organizations across the city.

If you wish to book a visit, kindly complete the RSVP here. Registration is on a first-come-first-served basis and places are very limited.

We are over the moon that the talented artist/composer Shane Aspegren has agreed to teach our children’s workshop for this show.

The workshop will demonstrate how a smartphone can be used as a simple tool to create modern music. Led by Shane, the children will learn basic ideas about sampling everyday sounds to use as building blocks for their own musical compositions.

*Please RSVP at rsvp@springworkshop.org listing the event title in the subject line.

Music and the Museum: a discussion between composers and artists Ari Benjamin Meyers, Samson Young and Spring Workshop curator-at-large Christina Li, chaired by frieze deputy editor Amy Sherlock, on the evolving cultural contexts in which contemporary music is produced, performed and collected.

*Please RSVP at rsvp@springworkshop.org listing the event title in the subject line.

We welcome Ari Benjamin Meyers to Hong Kong as he researches and lays the groundwork for a Kunsthalle for Music, a new institution co-founded by Meyers, Spring Workshop and Witte de With.

For Stationary, a new collection of stories published by Spring to be launched in 2015, co-editors Heman Chong and Christina Li invite artists, curators and writers to take stock of, chart and elaborate on their obsessions, fascinations and influences within a suspended temporal moment as a recess from their own productive practices.

Ari Benjamin Meyers, who is back for his second research residency at Spring while he continues to build the foundations of the Kunsthalle for Music, will present his durational performance Serious Immobilities (2013), using his own music compositions as a jumping off point.

Please RSVP at rsvp@springworkshop.org

For their fall residency at Spring Workshop, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff will produce a film at Spring, staging a series of public events which will function as scenes in service of a larger narrative. The filming and the film itself will act as a semi-fictionalized audit of the institutional mechanics of Spring Workshop.

This August we welcome American artists-in-residence Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, a duo based in Berlin whose practice includes parsing, developing and running creative spaces. During their first research residency in Hong Kong, Henkel and Pitegoff are studying several arts organizations and community-based projects here as they prepare for their program at Spring Workshop this autumn.

Wong Wai Yin has invited fellow artist Sarah Lai to a conversation about their respective working processes. Moderated by curator Anthony Yung, the afternoon’s discussion will shed further light on the exhibition publication The ten seconds that determine whether A gets made into a work which explores the moment that an artist decides to transform her idea into an artwork.

The talk will be in Cantonese with the possibility of whispered English translations. 

Please RSVP at rsvp@springworkshop.org

Spring Workshop is delighted to announce the first solo show in 5 years of established Hong Kong artist Wong Wai Yin (黃慧妍). Marking a change in the direction of her artistic practice, Wong’s new work considers the profound ways that motherhood has transformed her personal convictions and philosophy on making art.

We are in full swing at Spring Workshop with artist Wong Wai Yin (黃慧妍) in residence in Autumn Studio. Wong is here creating new work for her first solo show in five years that will open at Spring at the end of August. 

Tyler Coburn’s publication I’m that angel (2011—) explores the conditions of how we work on and against the computer, narrated from the perspective of a “content farmer”: an online journalist contracted to generate articles based on words peaking in Google Trends. For this talk, Coburn will share images and stories from his tour; discuss the industrialization of online writing; and describe the role of data centers in the ever-expanding physical Internet. 

Limited capacity: please kindly RSVP at rsvp@springworkshop.org

Each year, Spring publishes an artist’s hand-made map of Wong Chuk Hang that is meant to guide culturally-hungry (and also calorically-hungry) visitors around the neighbourhood, while also serving as documentation on the evolution of a place.  We want you to be able to find the gems in this vibrant area, so our map shows artspaces, eateries and a few of our beloved WCH landmarks.

This year’s map competition is now open to all artists! Please click here for guidelines on entering. Deadline to express interest is July 17 2016.

For the finissage of Duilian, we invited two Hong Kong feminist poets Cao Shuying and Sonia Wong to host the Mutual Love Society II, a special evening of poetry appreciation dedicated to the spirit of Qiu Jin and Wu Zhiying. Cao and Wong will share their own poems on themes of female desire and subjectivity, and guide participants in a new round of (mis)translation. Bring your pen and your wit.

*Limited capacity: please kindly RSVP at rsvp@springworkshop.org

Spring Workshop is delighted to present the world premiere of Duilian, a film installation that is the culmination of a decade-long research project by visual artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang. The multi-media exhibition centers around Duilian, a newly-commissioned film is loosely based on the life of Qiu Jin (秋瑾 1875–1907), a turn-of-the-century Chinese revolutionary poet, and her calligrapher friend Wu Zhiying (吳芝瑛, 1867-1936).

Inspired by the history of Qiu Jin’s multiple burials as well as the struggles by different groups and individuals to claim the symbolic meaning and resting place of her body, we invite you to join us at this special event where Qiu’s multiple legacies will be incinerated through Chinese practices of ancestral mourning.

The event happens during Art Basel’s South Island Art Brunch on Thursday, March 24 from 10am to 2pm.

We welcome artist Wu Tsang to the first of two residencies looking into the Chinese poet and heroine Qiu Jin, which will culminate in new work to be shown in 2016. Check back for details on a talk in late May.

The fall program draws attention to the roles of host and guest over a three-month period. Curated by Christina Li, the show and surrounding events magnify the nuances politics mired in hospitality.

Welcome home to Christina Li!  She begins her role as the new director of Spring in August 2015 with the program Des hôtes after spending ten years as an independent curator and writer in Hong Kong and the Netherlands.  Read more about Christina here.

In September 2014, Hong Kong Farm conducted a green takeover of Spring Workshop’s main terrace to kick off a year-long residency. Their extended program included multiple public access points to experimental, community-based urban farming, such as an autumn edible harvest workshop, planter-building lessons, seed-bombing with student groups, documentation of both the farm and HK’s farming protagonists, a talk-to-your-plants and plant selfie booth, a winter discussion and finally The HK FARMers’ Almanac (2015) created during an intensive three-day embodied knowledge book sprint.

During the month of June, three composers will be at Spring as part of the Modern Academy, an in-depth short course in modern music run by HK New Music Ensemble for eighty composers, conductors, instrumentalists and vocalists.  Come listen to our halls reverberate….

Spring Workshop will present Days push off into nights, curated by Christina Li from February 28 to April 26. It features artists including Moyra Davey, Elmgreen & Dragset, Cevdet Erek, Lee Kit, Job Koelewijn, and Magdalen Wong among others.

Spring Workshop and Para Site present joint exhibition, Islands off the Shores of Asia, based on the ideological, historical, mystical, and fictional interpretations of the remote and largely uninhabited islands claimed by different nations across East Asia. Curated by Cosmin Costinas and Inti Guerrero, the show features artists including Julieta Aranda, Rosa Barba, Charles Lim, Pak Sheung Chuen, James T. Hong, Ming Wong, and Zheng Guogu.

For A Fictional Residency in June 2013, which is part of Moderation(s), the ongoing collaboration between Witte de With and Spring, Dutch novelist Oscar van den Boogaard will be writer-in-residence at Spring, working with five Hong Kong-based artists, journalists, and writers. These encounters will inspire a volume of short stories, scripted together with the invited guests.

Ming Wong is back in Hong Kong for his second Spring/Para Site research residency in September. He will complete a new commission based on research carried out in the first residency, focused on Cantonese opera and cinema.

The new work will be shown in Islands off the Shore of Asia, joint exhibition presented by Spring and Para Site.

Comprised of hundreds of incredibly thin metallic bamboo poles, the Industrial Forest acknowledges the origin of Wong Chuk Hang’s heritage by translating the yellow bamboo that used to grow there into a new landscape. Read more about it in Zoe Li’s article Very Real Fake Nature in the Industrial Forest Installation.

The forest is open to the public and awaits your visit.

Spring welcomes Christodoulos Panayiotou for a two-month residency in Hong Kong from March to May, 2014. He will embark on a project in Guangdong province, researching artificial flower factories. A workshop by fellow artist Philip Wiegard will engage children in creating handmade wallpaper in a series of patterns developed by the artist from a historic artisanal technique that requires the small fingers of children. The resulting collaboration between the artists will be exhibited at Spring accompanied by activities and events.

Spring and Asia Art Archive have invited Sumangala Damodaran, along with Pritam Ghosal, Mark Aranha, Neelambari Bhattacharya, and Simon Hui from the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, will perform a concert featuring songs from India’s anti-colonial and immediate post-colonial resistance movement.

In partnership with Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, we are delighted to host Mehta for a composer residency from May 19 to June 9. Mehta will invite the Hong Kong community into his musical cosmos by sharing the development of his ongoing music-architecture project “Sounding Buildings”. He will conduct workshops involving members of the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble and students from The Modern Academy and the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, and engage the wider public through an Open House on June 6. Click here for more event details.

What can we discover by not speaking about something?

The Social Contract, a work by A Constructed World, is the third act in Hong Kong of Moderation(s), the ongoing collaboration between Witte de With and Spring.

EXHIBITION NOW CLOSED

Come see the highly-detailed maps of leading Chinese artist and thinker Qiu Zhijie 邱志杰 . These maps redefine our world in a close examination of its concrete and conceptual territories. During his residency at Spring Workshop in May 2013, Qiu re-imagined the terrain again with spheres of steel, wood and glass set against the expansive backdrop of his large-scale maps, some made in conjunction with artists from his two-day workshop with HK university art students. Click here for more details.

Singaporean artist, curator and writer, Heman has been invited by Defne Ayas, Director and Curator of the Witte de With (Rotterdam), and Mimi Brown, Founder of Spring Workshop (Hong Kong), to develop and lead the 2013 collaborative project  Moderation(s) as The Moderator.

Do you believe in productive misunderstandings? How often, if ever, do you feel manipulated? Would you say yes if I asked you to moderate me?

A key program for Spring Workshop in 2013 and 2014, Moderation(s) brings together an international group of more than 50 artists, curators and writers in a year-long program of contemporary discourse and production between Witte de With in the Netherlands and Spring in Hong Kong. Moderation(s) will engender a conference, three exhibitions, three residencies and a book of short stories.

Artist-in-Residence
October 2012

Obie-award winning composer and writer Michael Friedman is interested in the politics of popular music and the ways in which music reflects the intersections of different cultures. Friedman writes: “Hong Kong, with its polyglot culture, is a perfect place for me to continue this exploration, tracing song (sea shanties, Cantonese opera, cantopop, children’s songs, etc. at the crossroads of East and West, and at the edge of empire.”

Please join us on the evening of Saturday, October 27 for a musical soirée with Michael.