Press Release

The days of August and September last year have long since vanished. What remains of that garden from then?

AU Hoi Lam and CHANG Hoi Wood used the remnants of their work ‘If there is a garden, where would I be?” as their creative materials to construct a temporary resting place at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026. Eaves, bamboo, wood, and stone constitute parts of the painting, fragments of the poem, segments of microscopic imagery. If something is determined to be ‘never will there be again,’ then let it become a void that allows people to pause and breathe before it disappears.

The weight of matter, traces of words, echoes in space, footsteps, places that once existed, time and shadows... How can we best remember all that has vanished?

​About the Artists

AU Hoi Lam focuses on drawing and painting. She also likes exploring text art and installation art. AU graduated from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (MFA 2004, MPhil in Philosophy 2009). AU has participated in solo exhibitions, including Being Fictional, Its Preconditions (Pointsman 2025), Painting, Its Reasons to Be (Hanart TZ Gallery 2024), My Father is Over the Ocean (Osage Gallery 2013) and Definitions of Time (Edge Gallery 2010), and dual exhibition If there is a garden, where would I be? (1a space 2025), among others. Her works are collected by the Hong Kong Museum of Art, M+, University of Cambridge and private collections.

CHANG Hoi Wood was born in Hong Kong and studied architecture. He practised at EDGE Design Institute and oversaw the project Suitcase House, Commune by the Great Wall (Beijing 2002). He was the artist-in-residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany (2003 – 05). His art projects include If there is a garden, where would I be? (2025), Geometry of the Sentiments (2024), Dimension of Living: A House is (2020), Island_Peninsula - Glamor, Efficiency, Orderliness & Constant Change: Making of the Hong Kong Architecture Landscape (2019), Horti Cultus (2004), SinoOneOneSix (2000), SIXHIBITION (1999), etc. He is currently coordinating Place-making and Arts Tech projects funded by The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust.

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About the Artist

Au focuses on drawing and painting. She also likes exploring text art and installation art. Her work is gentle and calm, using the language of painting to express profound but subtle ideas and emotions, embodying the delicate relationship between the individual and the lifeworld. She devotes herself to introspective thoughts and craftsmanship: capturing the ephemerals; exploring the relationships between text, time and space; contemplating the ways artwork exists; practicing memento, reminiscence and forgetting. Depending on the subject matter, her works sometimes have unforeseen leaps in appearance, revealing undercurrents of paradox.

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About the Gallery

1a space is an independent, non-profit contemporary visual art organisation founded in 1998 by a collective of Hong Kong art workers. It first opened in an old government warehouse on Oil Street—helping spark Hong Kong’s first artists’ village—before relocating in 2001 to its current base at Cattle Depot Artist Village in To Kwa Wan.

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Address
Unit 14, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Rd
Ma Tau Kok
Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Opening Hours
Monday – Friday
11am – 7pm
(1)
Hong Kong Unit 14, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Rd, Ma Tau Kok
1a Space
Unit 14, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Rd, Ma Tau Kok, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Opening hours
Monday – Friday
11am – 7pm
The art world in focus