Within its dark, black exhibition spaces—conducive to heightening senses and creating an immersive viewing experience—Empty Gallery presents largely ephemeral, experimental, non-object, and time-based works. Its programme encourages experimentation with uniquely 21st century mediums. 

In lieu of the typical printing atelier one might find attached to a gallery, Empty Gallery offers artists the use of a fully-fledged digital studio for film and animation post-production.

Empty Gallery Artists

Seeking to establish cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary dialogues, Empty Gallery represents an international array of contemporary artists in various stages of their career—artists working in a range of mediums that include multimedia installation, paintings, sculpture, film, photography, sound, and performance.

Among Empty Gallery’s roster are established practitioners including the pioneering post-war Japanese video artist Toshio Matsumoto, who was also a visual theorist; Rei Hayama, one of the founding members of the Tokyo film collective [+]; influential Japanese experimental filmmaker Takashi Makino, who creates pulsating visual fields from altered footage of human, natural, and urban subjects; Swedish composer, writer, and installation artist Catherine Christer Hennix; and American artist and scientist Sean Raspet, who has quickly drawn international attention for his works consisting of liquid chemical formulations that produce flavours and scents.

Empty Gallery also represents emerging artists like Hans-Henning Korb, a former student of Hito Steyerl and Olafur Eliasson, who explores aspects of the human body and its natural and technological surroundings; Californian multimedia artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, who engages with the interplay of institutional power and the world of sound; Jes Fan, a New York-based sculptor who works with glass, silicon, and resin to create sculptures that question binary conceptions of race, gender, and identity, and Los Angeles- and New York-based photographer Diane Severin Nguyen.

Empty Gallery Exhibitions and Art Fairs

Within its distinct space, Empty Gallery hosts mostly solo, immersive, and multimedia exhibitions accompanied by film-screenings, interdisciplinary lectures, and musical performances. 

Each exhibition is curated to heighten the experience of artworks. In The Man Who Sleeps on His Breath (2015), historic photographs selected from the photography book The North American Indian (1907)—the magnum opus of early American master photographer Edward Curtis—were shown a darkened room with a soundscape by Italian electro-acoustic composer Valerio Tricoli.

Empty Gallery also presents its artists on the international stage, participating in major art fairs such as The Armory Show in New York, Frieze New York, Art Basel Hong Kong, ART021 Shanghai, Felix Los Angeles, and June Art Fair in Basel.