TREVOR YEUNG

Yeung’s major projects including Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), Soft breath at Para Site (2024), Soft ground at Gasworks, London (2023), Underwater Haze at Kestner Gesellschaft (2023), and Garden of the Nine Suns at CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux (2026) have brought Trevor Yeung’s work to leading international institutions and audiences.

Early life and Career

Yeung was born in Guangdong in 1988 and moved to Hong Kong as a child, later graduating from the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2010. In conversation with Anna Dickie for Ocula, he has linked his experience as an immigrant in Hong Kong to feelings of shame and not-belonging, recalling how accents marked newcomers at school; this sense of being both inside and outside a place continues to inform the emotional charge of his environments. For his undergraduate final project, he collaborated with visually impaired participants using photography, sound, and Braille-labelled containers, an early indication of his interest in how perception, access, and care are structured.

From a practice initially rooted in Hong Kong, Trevor Yeung’s career has expanded onto an international stage through solo and two-person exhibitions in Asia, Europe, and beyond. Key milestones include exhibitions at Blindspot Gallery and Gallery Exit in Hong Kong, Galerie Allen in Paris, Gasworks in London, Para Site and M+ in Hong Kong, as well as projects at Aranya Art Center, Kestner Gesellschaft, and other institutions that have consolidated his reputation as a leading figure in contemporary art from Hong Kong.

Works, methods and Venice Biennale project

Trevor Yeung’s installations often begin with familiar materials and living systems: fish tanks, terrariums, planters, mushrooms, scaffolding, ribbons, cages, and choreographed lighting. Rather than treating these as neutral display devices, he uses them to stage psychological and social situations, creating environments that hover between care and control, seduction and discomfort. Viewers encounter not only living organisms but also the infrastructural apparatus—filters, cables, supports, platforms—that quietly regulates them, echoing how emotional and social life is organised.

Aquarium and horticultural works are central to Trevor Yeung’s practice because they model what it means to cultivate and manage life under observation. In these pieces, plants and animal life often stand in for forms of attachment and dependency, while subtle gestures—an obstructed view, a drained tank, a raised walkway, or an oddly placed barrier—suggest the limits of access and communication. Yeung has described his interest in feelings that are present but difficult to articulate, and has spoken about using art to set up situations that prompt an emotional response rather than spelling everything out in words. He has also remarked that, although he cannot fully control how people respond, he thinks carefully about how to guide viewers through an exhibition, sometimes comparing this to the way Chinese gardens or Hong Kong shopping malls use hidden cues to shape a visitor’s path.

Trevor Yeung’s Venice Biennale project, Courtyard of Attachments, Hong Kong in Venice, was the Hong Kong Collateral Event at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2024, curated by Olivia Chow of M+. Comprising newly commissioned works—including Pond of Never Enough, Salty Lover (Venice), Gate of Instant Love, and Night Mushroom Colon (Hong Kong in Venice)—the exhibition transformed a Venetian courtyard into an immersive environment of aquariums, architectural interventions, and suggestive details that probed longing, projection, and the structures underpinning attachment. For many viewers and institutions, this Venice presentation has become a key point of entry to Trevor Yeung’s work and its recurring themes.

Garden of the Nine Suns at CAPC

In Garden of the Nine Suns (2026), Trevor Yeung’s first institutional solo exhibition in France at CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, the artist extends his interest in controlled ecologies through a large-scale transformation of the museum’s main hall. Drawing on the Chinese myth in which Hou Yi shoots down nine of the ten suns after their chaotic convergence, Yeung turns the nave into a giant vivarium bathed in green light, recasting overwhelming celestial forces as a managed, enclosed ecosystem. At the heart of the space, a scaffolding bridge allows visitors to rise into the height of the hall and experience the exhibition from shifting vantage points, emphasising how perspective and elevation condition what can be seen and felt.

This bridge structure at CAPC also supports coloured ribbons that visitors are invited to hang throughout the exhibition, using it as a kind of wishing tree; as the ribbons accumulate into a rainbow in progress, Garden of the Nine Suns gives natural phenomena and personal desires sculptural form and makes collective aspiration visibly material. The exhibition offers a clear example of how Trevor Yeung translates myth, environment, and social ritual into installation, and will be an important reference point for future readings of his work in Europe.

Themes and Context

Across his work, Trevor Yeung explores intimacy, desire, vulnerability, longing, queer subcultures, and the behavioural scripts that govern human relationships. Rather than addressing these issues through direct narrative, he approaches them through systems of maintenance and display, suggesting that emotional life is shaped by care routines, enclosures, and the infrastructures that sustain or restrict contact. His use of scent, light, and temperature, as noted in Ocula‘s spotlight, activates what cannot easily be seen, drawing attention to “cloudy undercurrents and emotions that are felt, but are not easily explained.”

Trevor Yeung’s practice can be situated within broader tendencies in contemporary art that use ecology, everyday systems, and installation to think through social and psychological questions. Yet his approach is distinctive in its focus on small shifts in environment and mood, and on the way seemingly benign structures—fish tanks, garden plots, fences, bridges, ribbons, lighting rigs—encode power, distance, and desire. The works operate as both formal compositions and intimate allegories, making the politics of attachment felt through atmosphere and material detail.

Trevor Yeung Exhibitions and Recognition

Trevor Yeung has presented his work at institutions including M+, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Para Site, Blindspot Gallery, and Gallery Exit in Hong Kong; Gasworks in London; Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai; Singapore Art Museum; Power Station of Art in Shanghai; Aranya Art Center in Qinhuangdao; Kunsthal Aarhus; Hong Kong Museum of Art; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Kestner Gesellschaft; Stiftung Skulpturenpark Köln; and CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux. He has participated in major biennials and triennials such as the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (as a Collateral Event artist), Biennale of Sydney, Lahore Biennale, Kathmandu Triennale, Singapore Biennale, and Lyon Biennale.

Trevor Yeung’s works are held in public and private collections including Centre Pompidou, M+, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, KADIST, Vancouver Art Gallery, FRAC Alsace, Stiftung Skulpturenpark Köln, and Sunpride Foundation. He was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize in 2021 and the Sigg Prize in 2023, milestones that mark his visibility and influence within international contemporary art.

Trevor Yeung FAQs

Ocula | 2026