Outdoor Artworks

Antony Gormley, Another Time XX, 2013

Antony Gormley is a British artist widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. This sculpture, part of his series Another Time, is one of a hundred casted from the artist’s own body. Looking over the fast-paced city from the Asia Society Hong Kong Center (ASHK)’s highest rooftop, the sculpture stands frozen in time to make us reflect on what it means to be alive as an individual, and how human beings fit in with the scheme of the world.

Vaan Ip, Lost City No. 52, 2017

Vaan Ip works with sculpture and light installations to explore the cityscape, architecture, and psychology of urban space in Hong Kong. In 2017, during ASHK’s exhibition Breathing Space: Contemporary Art from Hong Kong, he was inspired by the skyscrapers towering over  ASHK’s Joseph Lau and Josephine Lau Roof Garden to create a site-specific abstract geometric sculpture. Made with stainless steel, it highlights the overbuilt claustrophobia of Hong Kong. The artist includes a kite soaring out of his steel complex to symbolize hope against ceaseless urban transformation.

Adrian Wong, Untitled (Grate XI: Electric Bauhinia), 2017

Adrian Wong created a site-specific artwork during ASHK’s 2017 exhibition Breathing Space: Contemporary Art from Hong Kong that continued his ongoing Untitled Grates series. Replicated and enlarged from a second-hand window grate the artist found locally, the work references Hong Kong’s Bauhinia symbol and other common floral motifs popular around the Pearl River Delta in 1960-1975. Recalling the weathered neon street signs of Hong Kong, this work changes in color and patina over time to witness the city’s social and cultural transformations.

Zhang Huan, Long Island Buddha, 2010-2011

Zhang Huan is a prominent contemporary Chinese artist known for his visceral and confrontational endurance performances in the 1990s, and later sculptures and paintings that explore themes of memory and spirituality in relation to Buddhist practice. The sculpture was inspired by his trip to Tibet in 2005, where he discovered fragments of Buddhist sculptures that had been damaged during the Cultural Revolution. Rather than a religious image, this monumental Buddha head lying aslant with its rough surface and welded joints reflects on the history of human conflict and the preservation of culture.

Zhan Wang, Artificial Rock No. 121, 2007

Zhan Wang is a contemporary Chinese artist known for his sculptures that reinterpret the traditional Chinese scholar’s rock to explore a range of issues related to China’s shifting value systems and development. Chinese garden rocks have long been revered by ancient scholars as aesthetic and philosophical objects for their strange, dynamic forms. By creating a classical garden rock with industrial stainless steel, the artist prompts us to think about how tradition evolves and sustains in the contemporary world. This sculpture responds aptly to ASHK’s design, as the ASHK architects were inspired by their visits to Suzhou gardens to design a “horizontal garden in a vertical city.”