Fermata in Venice: Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui Reframe the Everyday

Curated by the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA), Fermata: Hong Kong in Venice explores the poetry of everyday life through the work of Hong Kong-born artists Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui. 

Inspired by their native city’s cultural heritage and urban landscape, the artists use a range of media to reimagine ordinary experiences, creating a series of site-specific installations for Biennale Arte 2026. Together, the works offer a portrait of a city in constant change.

Like a fermata—a musical pause extended at the performer’s discretion—the exhibition invites visitors to linger a little longer with the everyday. It encourages a heightened awareness of the small moments, gestures and details that often go unnoticed, revealing how they shape our sense of attention, care and wonder within the city.

"The exhibition is a tribute to the serendipitous encounters within the surroundings we inhabit. My site-specific practice has always sought to illuminate the overlooked, often reconfiguring the familiar through the interplay of light," says Ng. The established artist is known for his poetic installations that expand the viewer's perception of everyday life.

Ng's Sometimes, There Are Clouds in Puddles welcomes visitors into the exhibition through a courtyard installation comprising five shallow pools of water illuminated by slowly rotating ribbons suspended above. Made from dichroic material, the ribbons cast shifting bands of neon-coloured light across the surrounding walls and water, evoking the atmosphere of a gentle rain shower. Through a constantly changing interplay of movement, colour and reflection, the pools seem to capture passing clouds, blurring the boundary between reality and illusion. 

Angel Hui, whose practice often reinterprets everyday objects through the lens of traditional craft, presents Drifting Sanctuary, an installation of suspended plastic bags, each containing a glowing light bulb and embroidered with goldfish motifs. Objects typically associated with disposability are transformed through Suzhou embroidery, a painstaking technique whose labour-intensive nature sits in striking contrast to the fleeting life of a plastic bag.

As the lights flicker, shadows of swimming fish ripple across the walls, appearing to drift towards Hui's second installation, I Would Like to Open a Window for You. Here, a rotating wrought-iron window frame, created in collaboration with Hong Kong metalsmiths, brings together motifs drawn from both Hong Kong and Venice. One side incorporates decorative patterns inspired by Venetian ironwork, while the other reproduces a floral vase motif found on a window grille in a historic building in Hong Kong's Prince Edward district. As the structure turns, it casts ever-changing shadows while creating a visual dialogue between the two cities and their shared traditions of craftsmanship.

The exhibition concludes with Ng's Laundry Nocturne, a projected sequence of hanging laundry rendered in silhouette and accompanied by recordings of Hong Kong's distinctive nocturnal soundscape. 

What binds the exhibition together is a shared attentiveness to the overlooked. Through light, shadow, movement and craft, Ng and Hui encourage visitors to slow their gaze just enough for ordinary things to reveal their quiet significance.