BANGKOK DESIGN WEEK 2026, 29 JAN–8 FEB

Hong Kong in Venice 2025 Roving Exhibition

Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive 2.0

This edition of the Roving Exhibitions proposes to continue the vision and aspiration of the highly-regarded Hong Kong representation in the 2025 Biennale Architettura in Venice, in its physical manifestation of a projective future heritage. As centre piece of this vision will be a piece transplanting a part of Hong Kong’s ubiquitous bamboo scaffolding, a yet-to-be recognized intangible heritage for construction knowhow, to Bangkok, a city of resonant climatic and cultural sensibility. Bamboo’s unique and continued contemporary use in construction in Hong Kong, notably for all the highrises that make the city’s skyline world-renowned, stands out in being a product of socio-cultural as well as political economic factors, and not only of technological modernization. In this iteration, bamboo is intended to underline the site-accommodations the system allows and the inherent sustainability of the material and the knowhow embedded in its selection and construction. The proposed performative materialization of the bamboo structure serves as backdrop to moving image projections that have archived the archive constructed in Venice, underlying the output of the bamboo as part of the archive of the public infrastructures, shaped in the metropolis’ formative post-war decades, and showcase their climatically-responsive tropical modernism already anticipating the Anthropocene turn. The archive brought to an international audience 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. Bringing them to Bangkok will resonate also with the city’s whose own modern-era infrastructures.