BANGKOK DESIGN WEEK 2026, 29 JAN–8 FEB

Hong Kong in Venice 2025 Roving Exhibition

Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive

This edition of the Roving Exhibitions continues the vision and aspiration of the highly regarded Hong Kong representation at the 2025 Biennale Architettura in Venice, through the re-presentation of the archive of future heritages. At the centre piece of this vision will be the presentation of a selection of the physical architectural measured drawings excerpted from the Venice archive that highlight the ‘collective intelligence’ of the city’s public infrastructures, shaped in the metropolis’ formative post-war decades, and showcase also 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 the 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.’ While the Venice exhibition highlighted to the world 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, the Bangkok exhibition will culminate in a filmic documentation of the entirety of the physical archive of public architectures from Hong Kong presented in Venice and a physical archival shelf as artefact from the Venice exhibition. The exhibition juxtaposes the three cities of Bangkok and Hong Kong by way of Venice, all based on the productivity as well as precarity of water, and nodes in the prehistoric and contemporary global flows of resources and know-how, in the ways future heritages are conceptualized and recognized. Visitors, by entering the space in Bangkok, will be performing their own journey between the archival and projective as they experience both the found objects from Venice, bringing them to Hong Kong.