
Shanghai Week building global audience for Hong Kong arts and culture
The forward momentum of Hong Kong's arts scene is evident, and it is about to move beyond the city's boundaries. Since its establishment in 2008, the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority has nurtured artistic talent and presented their strengths and creativity through a wide variety of programmes and exhibitions, many of which have won local and international acclaim.
Advertisement
Now we are embarking on the next step in our mission, which is to help the city's unique cultural programmes go global. The 2025
WestK Shanghai Week , which takes place from June 18-22, marks an important milestone in this ambition.
We chose Shanghai for the first major West Kowloon Cultural District (WestK) venture outside Hong Kong for a good reason – the two cities are connected in many ways. Both are vibrant East-meets-West
centres of cultural exchange with a truly international outlook. Both cities have rich and diverse heritage that fosters the development of the arts and creative industries, and both are home to sophisticated audiences who always look for fresh and innovative cultural experiences.
The best of Hong Kong will be on show in Shanghai this week. Highlighted programmes of 2025 WestK Shanghai Week include the mainland debut of the original Cantonese musical
The Impossible Trial , which was a great hit in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Palace Museum is staging a brand new exhibition 'City Rhythms: Chinese Traditional Culture Reinterpreted' exhibition at
the Zhangyuan complex
M+'s highly acclaimed exhibition '
I.M. Pei: Life Is Architecture ', which opened in the Power Station of Art in late April, has generated a real buzz in Shanghai.
Advertisement
In addition to musicals, the Shanghai audience will see a string of other performing arts genres showcasing Hong Kong's top artistic talent, from traditional Chinese opera and jazz to contemporary dance.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


South China Morning Post
11 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
This week in PostMag: art deco in Hong Kong, meditative martial arts and street dance
Last weekend, I was riding the tram (I know – a dead giveaway that I'm new here and have a kid under five) when I noticed some old lettering on a building I've passed dozens of times. It was the name of a stamp company that occupied the space decades ago. There's a lot of that in Hong Kong: traces of the past that fade into the background, until something makes you look again. In a way, this issue's cover story picks up where last week's feature on Hong Kong's tiles left off. Both explore the fragments of design history still visible in the city, if you know where to look. This week, Paul French pieces together what's left of Hong Kong's flirtation with art deco. In Kowloon's Kadoorie Hill, a cluster of houses from the 1930s still shows the clean lines and modern ideals of the time – light, air and a new kind of domestic ease. It's a thoughtful dive into how the city once imagined its future. Though these days, bougainvillea climbs alongside CCTV cameras. In Mui Wo, Annemarie Evans visits artist Jessica Zoob, who paints vast, luminous canvases out of a former hardware shop that she's turned into a studio-gallery. Her art unfolds in layers – both literal and emotional – as she builds up colour and scrapes it back down again. Now, 25 years into her fine-arts career, she's planning to give away 25 works to 25 causes later this year. Over in South Korea, Cameron Dueck checks into a Buddhist mountainside temple to try seonmudo, a meditative martial art that blends monastic discipline with physical intensity. What he finds is a kind of rebellion against modern momentum: morning silence, repetition and 108 prostrations. It's both exhausting and quietly transformative. Meanwhile, back in Hong Kong, street dance is having a moment. Joyce Yip covers this year's Red Bull Dance Your Style university qualifier and the growing momentum around street dance in the city. What started in community centres and as youth programmes is increasingly drawing the interest of institutions, sponsors and even museums. The irony isn't lost on me, but the result is a more supported creative community, and one that's gaining room to grow. In My Life, we hear from activist investor and data transparency advocate David Webb. Through his site, he's spent decades holding Hong Kong's institutions to account. Now, facing terminal illness, he reflects on what it means to hand that work over, and how to exit with clarity and care.


South China Morning Post
15 hours ago
- South China Morning Post
Jessica Zoob wants you to connect with her art at her Hong Kong studio
Children tend to glimpse little fairies, men start to cry, some see mountains, valleys, Asian temples, the sweep of a dragon, rivers and rainfall. Others perceive their own memories, a vision of themselves, a portal into their soul. The work of London-born contemporary artist Jessica Zoob summons multiple reactions and emotions in viewers of her evocative paintings, created over a number of years, often with around 40 layers of oil paint. On the same canvas have been multiple paintings often destroyed or created anew, as the final work cuts through the layers to bring out Zoob's stories as well as our own, allowing us to be a part of the creative process. Zoob is not intentionally figurative, but she's keen to see what we see. Dreamscapes, yes, but also some paintings with drama and undertones less comfortable to view. Some artworks are a considerable two metres by 2.5 metres and up. Most span walls or are split into triptychs, which is why Zoob needed to find a studio with sufficient workspace. Then (Triptych) is one of Jessica Zoob's larger artworks. Photo: courtesy Jessica Zoob Zoob, a long-time Lantau resident, lives in Cheung Sha, on the island's south. A 20-minute ride from her house is her new gallery and workspace, in Mui Wo , on Lantau's eastern coast. There's a garden in the front with a fire pit, and then a white modern building housing Zoob's studio and gallery, Gaia, where visitors can view her latest exhibition and also see the artist at work. 'I think it was within maybe 36 hours of seeing the space we had the keys,' says Zoob, as she walks across the grass. 'We covered the beautiful stone floor with timber so that I can make a mess without ruining it. There's this beautiful light that comes in and when you look out of the windows you're just seeing trees, you can just hear birdsong. I look up at the mountain; it's just a piece of paradise.' Paint and tools on a workbench at Jessica Zoob's studio gallery and workspace, in Mui Wo, on Lantau's eastern coast in Hong Kong. Photo: Eugene Chan Zoob and her husband, Alastair Hill, a pilot, previously lived in an apartment in Discovery Bay , where the artist, impressively, painted in the confines of the second box bedroom. Back in Britain, near Lewes in Sussex, Zoob and her husband have a centuries-old house with a studio the size of a warehouse and a duck pond nearby.


South China Morning Post
a day ago
- South China Morning Post
M+ museum showcases 20th century Cantonese art
The latest marquee exhibition to open at M+, Hong Kong's museum of contemporary visual culture , is 'Canton Modern: Art and Visual Culture, 1900s-1970s', a sweeping exploration of Guangdong province's artistic evolution and its enduring influence on Asian modernism . Debuting on June 28 and running until October 5, the show assembles more than 200 works from institutional and private collections, many of which have never before been displayed publicly, to trace the interplay between Cantonese creativity and the sociopolitical currents of the 20th century. Known throughout much of Chinese history as part of the Lingnan region, Guangdong witnessed a shift from the restrained aesthetics of classical ink painting as artists confronted the rapid societal changes of the time. Pioneers such as Gao Jianfu , whose 1932 masterpiece Flying in the Rain reimagined traditional bird-and-flower motifs through dynamic movement and emotional intensity, epitomised this shift. Flying in the Rain (1932) by Gao Jianfu. Photo: courtesy Art Museum, CUHK Art mirrored the region's position as both a cradle of revolutionary thought – Sun Yat-sen's 1911 uprising originated in Guangdong – and a laboratory for artistic experimentation. As printmakers, photographers and cartoonists, these creators used mass media to document social upheaval, from the Japanese occupation to post-war reconstruction, creating a visual vocabulary that balanced regional pride with a national consciousness. Cantonese artists mastered the art of going viral long before social media. The 1940 'Exhibition of Guangdong Cultural Heritage' showcased woodblock prints and political cartoons that circulated through clandestine networks, amplifying leftist ideologies during the second Sino-Japanese war. Liao Bingxiong's satirical sketches, for example, skewered wartime corruption while Yau Leung's street photography captured Hong Kong's post-1949 identity crisis – caught between British colonialism and Communist influence from north of the border. As M+ curator Tina Pang Yee-wan notes, the works of these creators 'takes us back in time as witnesses to the formation of our image-driven world'. Mother and Child in the Rain (1932) by Fang Rending. Photo: courtesy MK Lau Collection The exhibition's second act examines how artists negotiated shifting gender norms amid revolution and reconstruction. Wong Siu-ling's 1941 oil painting Sewing for You subverted traditional guixiu (gentlewoman) tropes by portraying a woman as an agent of wartime resilience. After the formation of the Chinese Communist state in 1949, socialist realism co-opted this imagery, transforming women into symbols of state vitality.