We speak with the contemporary Chinese artist about his latest exhibit at Pearl Lam Galleries and how his work invites viewers to draw from their own personal experiences

We speak to the Amsterdam and Beijing-based artist Ni Haifeng about his latest exhibit, Asynchronous, Parallel, Tautological, et cetera… which recently opened at Pearl Lam Galleries. The artist hopes his exhibit can serve as a consonance for viewers to draw parallels between his artworks and their own personal experiences.

It’s worth noting that the exhibit does not serve as a retrospective but as a means of opening up to the possibilities for reading artworks that are not bound by pre-conceived notions whilst touching on the cultural changes that have swept Hong Kong’s geopolitical landscape over the last three decades:


When the curator approached me half year ago for this exhibition, I immediately envisioned something like it is now. I didn’t come up with this title then, but I knew it would be something not linear, not simply a retrospective. The curator and I wanted to create a narrative that was multi-threaded and complex, and that would in some way echo the complexity of Hong Kong’s geopolitical position and history.

The exhibition is centred upon the notions of ‘self’, the body and labour in relation to time, locality and cultural conditions. Throughout the exhibition, a textual presence threads together various components. Although it is an open exhibition from which the viewers can draw their own readings, I do hope they can be emerged in the nonlinear narrative of the last 30 years and contemplate the times of which we are all part. 

The title is more metaphorical than descriptive. It not only refers to the works in the show, but also the times in which they are embedded. Just as history, things are sometimes not synchronous, a lot of parallels and sometimes cyclic. The exhibition itself is a new attempt to rethink, re-edit my own practice over the last three decades; it is also a subjective reordering of a chronology. 

My preferred medium is installation, as it is the most comprehensive in terms of spatial management and materiality. I do enjoy diversity of mediums and forms and I think they are sometimes concept-specific.

Each work deals with a specific issue, the central piece is The Keeping of Things (2015) which seems to sum up the overall themes of the exhibition. Through ‘monumentalising’ personal paraphernalia the work compares a personal micro-history to the grand history of our time and posits that both are the mirrored double of each other. The installation consists of 51 groups of objects casted in bronze placed on the floor. Each object or group of objects originated from, respectively, one specific year from 1964 to the present. A book on the pedestal gives a short account of the objects in a chronicle order and a list of events occurred in the world, accompanying the objects in each specific year.

In terms of the future, there is no clear plan; I follow my own natural evolution. My work evolves, not planned to evolve.


Asynchronous, Parallel, Tautological, et cetera…
Date: July 31 to September 2, 2015
Time: Monday to Saturday, 10:00am to 7:00pm
Venue: Pearl Lam Galleries, 6/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central