Top art exhibitions to see in Hong Kong this week

There’s no denying Japan has the ability to come up with the quirkiest and most innovative designs – falling anywhere on the spectrum of cute to the bizarre. To celebrate their design feats, Hong Kong's Gallery 27 and Japan’s Topawards Asia have joined forces to showcase 100 outstanding F&B packaging and food-related design. Each of the exhibits has managed to incorporate distinctive Japanese cultural and design element – think sake bottles painted like a koi fish and portable lamps shaped like bread. Make sure to register a spot to see the awesome designs!

While most audiences would often relate Takashi Murakami to imagery and motifs featuring clusters of cartoon sunflowers with smiley faces on it, his repertoire expands far beyond it. Continually evolving while blending everything from traditional Japanese painting to otaku subculture to Western art theory to hip-hop. Presenting new paintings seen by the public for the first time, the solo exhibition features variations of Murakami’s own larger-than-life characters and a mural-sized painting that perfectly encapsulates his flirtation with high art and popular culture.   

German artist Susanne Winterling takes over the black-cube Empty Gallery to present her artworks that feature the marine victims of climate change – dinoflagellates, the micro single-cell algae and plankton that support the basis of the food chain in the deep sea. The centrepiece of the exhibition is an immersive video projected against an enormous curved screen. Accompanying the film are sculptural 3D-printed dinoflagellates and turtle that have been cast out of Hong Kong beach sand to warn the public that our precious marine life is at risk. With a sense of aesthetic wonder, the exhibition interprets cyberpunk magic realism with the wonder of projections.

Rendered through pop-art creations and graphic novel motifs, Timekeeper is a series of colourful portraits of tattooed individuals. O’Flynn tattooed characters exude complex, wry and humorously cynical perceptions of our world today. From symbols of the Illuminati and Third Eye, to Virgin Mary embellished with an “om” symbol and quotes about mind control and John Lennon’s “Imagine”, Timekeeper will have you swallowing the red pill and journeying down the rabbit hole to meet the myriad of influences, contradictions and questions of contemporary society today.