Collateral Event of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
PROJECTING FUTURE HERITAGE: A HONG KONG ARCHIVE
傳承未來: 未來傳承
curated by Fai Au, Ying Zhou e Sunnie S.Y. La
Campo della Tana, Castello 2126 – 30122 Venice
10 May – 23 November, 2025
Opening hours: 11:00 am – 7:00 pm from 10 May to 28 September, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm from 29 September to 23 November
Closed on Monday (except 12 May, 2 June, 21 July, 1 September, 20 October, 17 November)
Hong Kong to Celebrate Its Unsung Public Infrastructures
at the Biennale Architettura 2025
Hong Kong is a city far more fascinating—and with much more to teach the world—than its popular image suggests.
This more fascinating Hong Kong is not found in its dazzling skyscrapers that overlook old junk boats crossing Victoria Harbor, in its open-air dai pai dong where global financiers in bespoke suits eat lunch at plastic tables, or in the nostalgic images of neon-drenched Kowloon streets.
Rather, this city is found in places the world does not often look: in the extraordinary but unsung public infrastructures that make Hong Kong the singular urban miracle that it is. These infrastructures that have shaped the city in the early postwar decades will be showcased in "Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive," Hong Kong's official exhibition at the Biennale Architettura 2025. The exhibition will reveal how the city's often-overlooked architectural and urban achievements have for decades fulfilled the pressing mandates that cities around the world now face, like combatting climate change, managing extreme density, and maintaining a cultural life for citizens in shared public spaces.
Responding the theme of the Biennale Architettura 2025, curated by Carlo Ratti, “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective”, the exhibition curators Fai Au, Ying Zhou, and Sunnie S.Y. Lau will highlight the collective intelligens of Hong Kong’s public infrastructures that represents the city’s shifting paradigm. The selected projects include composite buildings, estate centres, market complexes, and public housing—structures designed by local architects that are little documented, studied, or shared internationally. Many of these, including vernacular villages, are on the brink of redevelopment or already closed down, making them the sole specimens of Hong Kong’s future heritage.
With the premise of cataloguing these representations of the recent past, the exhibition is designed in two distinct portions of the Campo della Tana in Venice: the outdoor courtyard and the former warehouses. Inside the warehouse spaces, visitors will engage with archaeological documentation of an urban cosmology: measured drawings, scaled models, photographs, diagrams, texts, artefacts, and ephemera.On opening the sets of archival drawers, they will discover academic research on the future heritage of Hong Kong.
The site itself is reminiscent of the ancient production of ship's elbows and ropes, made within the Venetian Arsenale—the world’s largest pre-modern industrial complex. To underline this connection, the exhibition brings the shifu, or Hong Kong’s bamboo masters, to construct a bamboo scaffold in the outdoor courtyard. Bamboo scaffolding is an ubiquitous—though now embattled—part of Hong Kong and its circular economy, where some built between the post-war era to the turn of the millennium are already slated for replacement. Choreographing the courtyard as a space for a projective future, the temporary scaffold will frame the rich history of Campo della Tana, as well as serve as a backdrop to juxtapose the entrepot cities of Hong Kong and Venice in their shared precarity between the natural and artificial.
The exhibition is jointly organised by The Hong Kong Institute of Architects Biennale Foundation (HKIABF) and Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC), with The Hong Kong Institute of Architects (HKIA) as partner. Its lead sponsor is Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency (CCIDA) of the Government of Hong Kong SAR.
“Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive” will return to Hong Kong in the fourth quarter of 2026. More information will be released on the official website, Facebook Page and Instagram in due course.
Curatorial Statement
This representation of Hong Kong in the Biennale Architettura 2025 in Venice wishes to respond to the call for “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.” by highlighting the ‘collective intelligens’ of the public infrastructures, shaped in the metropolis’ formative post-war decades, and showcase their climatically-responsive tropical modernism already anticipating the Anthropocene turn. Remarkable in their realizations of the ordinary architectures that have been fundamental to Hong Kong’s global aspirations—from the co-operative housings and multifunctional market-library-sports public buildings to the composite and modernist industrial buildings—and designed by the likes of Chung Wah-Nan, Wong & Ouyang, Ng Chun Man and Dennis Lau, P&T, the Public Works Department and architects indigenous to the territory, these structures are until-now little documented, analysed nor shared internationally. Already starting to be replaced by rapidly-changing demand-sophistication and depleting in face of the proliferation of sealed curtain walls, those that remain of these everyday types will one day become the city’s sole ‘future heritages.’ The exhibition thus wishes to highlight to the world and to Hong Kong, these overlooked representatives of the city’s paradigm-shifting era, when the intelligens for collective conceptions are realized in spite of density and economic priorities.
With the premise of returning to uncover and catalogue this representative recent past, in the way urban archaeologists discover the civilizational cosmology through material artefacts, the exhibition transplants these findings to the Campo della Tana site across from the Arsenale, which was once a manufacturing site of industrial scale in a pre-modern world. The exhibition will remind an international audience that it is these public infrastructures and its collective intelligens that make for the rise of great commercial hubs of the world. While one had been read as a pile of barren rocks once and the other emerged out of the murky waters of the lagoons, the island cities of Hong Kong and Venice have since become crucial nodes, though of different eras, in the global flows of goods, knowledge and cultures. Both exist in the precarious equilibrium between the “natural” and the “artificial.”
In addition to showcasing Hong Kong’s collective intelligens inside the former storage spaces of Campo della Tana ( the term “tana” denoted itself a resource brought by water for the Corderie’s rope production in the Arsenale), this edition also choreographs the outdoor courtyard as a space for a projective future. The juxtaposition of the two cities will be activated by transplanting Hong Kong’s ubiquitous bamboo scaffolding, a practiced and existing construction method in Hong Kong that is also already part of the circular economy and a yet-to-be recognized intangible heritage for construction knowhow, and the shifu or masters who shape them. On the occasions of the Dragon Boat, the Hungry Ghost, and Mid-Autumn Festivals in late May, July and October, the scaffolding will serve as the stage to the seasons, bringing the cities and their pasts and aspirations together through the shifting tides and the lunar cycle.
Visitors, by entering into the Campo della Tana site will be, performing their own journey between the projective and the archival, heritage and future, collective intelligens and natural/artificial.
Curatorial Team
Ar. Fai AU (HKIA) is the founder and principal of O Studio Architects, and Associate Professor of Practice in the University of Hong Kong. His practice has received numerous awards and honour including 2021 Prix Versailles Continental Winner, 2020 Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard and 2011 HKIA Medal of the Year. His research focuses primarily on the topic of high-density city living, congestion, gentrification, and social inequality. He is the co-curator of 2017 HKSZ Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Hong Kong), and the curator of 2022 PMQ HKU Architecture Gallery Exhibition. His works have been featured in various exhibitions including 2023 The Architecture of Prayer Exhibition, 2019 Good Design Award Exhibition, 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2018 Play to Change Exhibition, 2017 HKSZ Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, 2017 PMQ 10×100 Exhibition, 2016 “REVEAL 2: +-x÷” Exhibition, 2015 “Past Present Future – Tracking Hong Kong” Exhibition and 2013 Agoras Green Architecture Exhibition.
Dr. Ying ZHOU (AIA Assoc.) is an architect and urban theorist teaching at the University of Hong Kong. She is the current chair of Docomomo HK and is on the editorial board of Architectural Histories, the journal of the European Architectural History Network. Her concern for architecture’s agency in the civicness of the city has compelled her current research into the conceptions and aspirations for the Urban Council complexes since the 1970s in Hong Kong. She also researches the arts ecologies in East Asian cities through their spatial productions, and their intersections with heritage conservation, gentrification, and creative cities. Prior to Hong Kong, she taught and researched with the chair of Professor Kees Christiaanse at the Future Cities Laboratory of the Singapore-ETH Centre and the chair of Professors Herzog and de Meuron at the ETH Studio Basel Contemporary Cities Institute.
Ar. Sing Yeung Sunnie LAU (HKIA) as the founder of SOS Architecture Urban Design Studio, believes that human-centric design promotes inclusive communities with innovative sustainable design strategies and urban designers & architects play important roles within the built environment. She initiated the Smart City and Sustainability initiatives at the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node (2019-2024) as Director, co-taught and led the “Hacking Kowloon East” 2021 IAP Workshop and Spring course with Prof. Brent Ryan (MIT) ; and “Beyond Smart Cities- 10 min self-sustainable neighbourhoods in Island South” 2022 IAP Workshop with Prof. Kent Larson (City Science Group, Media Lab, MIT) ; Urban Technology Week 23-24 with MITDesignX, MAD, MIT. Taking up the roles of both practitioner and educator, she has been promoting architecture by designing, exhibiting, writing as outreach, and engaging communities. Published research includes: “Kowloon East Inclusive Innovation & Growth”, “Urban Mobility and Smart Infrastructure”, “Urban Resilience by Design – Adaptive Landscapes for PRD”…etc. She was Co-Curator & Exhibitor of the Hong Kong Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale Of Urbanism\Architecture (Hong Kong) 2017, 2019, and an exhibitor at the Biennale Architettura 2021 (HK) in Venice.
Released on behalf of "Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive", Collateral Event of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia.
Contacts
Official website:
http://2025.vbexhibitions.hk/
Social media platform:
Instagram
Facebook
International Media:
Future-Future
Jean-Francois GOYETTE
Email: jfg@future-future.global
Tel: +1 438 838 6916
Hong Kong, Mainland China & Taiwan Media:
Radiance
Mandy LAW
Email: mandy@radiancehk.com
Tel: +852 9611 5027
About co-organisers, partner & lead sponsor
The Hong Kong Institute of Architects Biennale Foundation www.hkia.net
Hong Kong Arts Development Council www.hkadc.org.hk
The Hong Kong Institute of Architects (HKIA) www.hkia.ne
Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region https://www.ccidahk.gov.hk/en/index.html
Acknowledgment
Co-Organisers
The Hong Kong Institute of Architects Biennale Foundation
The Hong Kong Institute of Architects
Lead Sponsor
CCIDAHK
Coordinator in Venice
CS Art Management
Disclaimer: The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region provides funding support to the project only, and does not otherwise take part in the project. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in these materials/events (or by members of the project team) are those of the project organisers only and do not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau, the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency, the CreateSmart Initiative Secretariat or the CreateSmart Initiative Vetting Committee.
