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Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery envelops you in darkness. The lift doors open and, for the few seconds before your eyes adjust, there is nothing but a void — no walls, no doors, no floor.
Stephen Cheng opened the gallery in 2015 in an industrial high-rise block in Aberdeen harbour. It is a “black cube”: an inversion of the white-walled space that has been the default for showing art since the 20th century.
Born in New York, Cheng — the grandson of Hong Kong shipping magnate Yue Kong-Pao — was educated at Eton, and later Harvard where he studied photography and film history (and took classes with Nan Goldin). Darkrooms and cinemas became his favourite haunts. It was in dark spaces where art entered his life “in an irrevocable way”.
Years later, an idea came to him while he was meditating, Cheng says. “I didn’t know it would be a gallery at first. I just knew I had to build a black space. It came from the desire to create a space in Hong Kong that did not exist but that I wished existed.”
The gallery’s novel design is well served by an exhibition programme that favours experimental and immersive art — with spotlights and occasionally candles providing just enough illumination. In 2019, a solo exhibition for artist Sean Raspet featured diffusers that released newly synthesised fragrance molecules into the air and a cube-shaped incubator filled with tubes of pink liquid (containing human retinal cells). Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s 2021 exhibition Olistostrome transformed the gallery into an alien landscape of stones and imposing hand-felted wool sculptures, with pressure sensors underfoot triggering sudden grating noises from hidden speakers.
Over the past 10 years, the gallery’s team — led by senior director Alexander Lau and director Kaitlin Chan — have cultivated a distinctive “Empty aesthetic” defined by atmospheric, captivating artworks that come alive in the shadows. “What I’ve come to understand is that Empty itself has its own taste,” Cheng says. “It is shaped by something internal to itself and the environment in which it has grown.”
The gallery’s penchant for experimentation is rare in Hong Kong, where, as in many cultural capitals, costs are high and art production bends to the pressures of the market. “This machine is geared towards selling art,” Cheng says. “It has no care or understanding of the conditions necessary to produce art, it only exerts pressure for more of it. A lot of the big challenges we face come down to an issue of supply and demand.” He points to a surfeit of artworks circulating on the market. “How can there possibly be so much art? Art is rare. We try to run at a different pace and operate with a different spirit, to stay true to one of our original inspirations, which is the experience of art itself.”
Cheng is candid about the challenges of operating with Empty’s model, and acknowledges that his resources as the scion of a prominent shipping family help keep the gallery running. Having the head of a gallerist and the heart of a patron is his way of squaring the circle. “Patronage is the only way to create relief from the demands of the market,” Cheng says. “When you buy a work of contemporary art, you are not buying an object with resale value, you are supporting the practice of a living artist who inspires you, and the programme that brought this artist to you and gave context to the work. I think patronage starts with this basic understanding.”
In practical terms, this has resulted in a collaborative and hands-on attitude when it comes to realising art projects. Vunkwan Tam, an emerging Hong Kong artist who creates enigmatic constellations of found objects such as body bags and metal fragments — and will be showing with the gallery at Art Basel Hong Kong — describes his relationship with Empty as “like having a cool friend” who understands his practice. “I sometimes feel they’re taking a risk with me, but I feel confident working with them because I know they have an artistic vision beyond just selling.”
This month, in addition to participating in the fair, Empty will open an exhibition of videos and sculptures by American artist Richard Hawkins. The gallery will also show Hunan-born artist Covey Gong’s newly commissioned sculpture “The World” (2025) as part of The Room of Spirit and Time, a recent curatorial endeavour highlighting a single artwork or suite of artworks in a separate room of the gallery.
For senior director Alexander Lau, Empty has always been “a romantic intervention within both the contemporary art world and the city itself”. In turn, the gallery has won a devoted audience with its cerebral works and stimulating parallel programmes, from talks and film screenings to a beloved annual rave.
“Together, as a small team, we imagined what this space could be, the vibe of it, and slowly we materialised it,” Cheng says. “What is Hong Kong, or what is the art world, except what you imagine it to be?”
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