The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) has received a landmark donation from an anonymous Hong Kong-based collector of 131 works by 78 artists, dubbed the Art Continuum Hong Kong (ACHK). The gift represents the largest contribution of Hong Kong art in the gallery’s history. Three decades in the making, the ACHK collection chronicles social, political and cultural change spanning the breadth of Hong Kong’s modern and contemporary art history. It comprises painting, sculpture, printmaking, film, installation and lens-based media by artists from middle of the 20th century until today.
“The Vancouver Art Gallery has been presenting artists and art from China and Japan since its founding in 1931, though these early exhibitions did not yet translate into active collecting,” Diana Freundl, the gallery’s senior curator, tells The Art Newspaper. “The [ACHK] collection is diverse in media and spans artworks from the 1950s to the present. Taken as a whole, it strengthens our ability to present an expanded art history, one shaped by intersecting modernisms such as Quebec Abstraction and the New Ink Movement in Taiwan and Hong Kong and it deepens our engagement with Asian and Asian Diaspora practices within an international framework.”
South Ho Siu Nam, The Umbrella Salad XIV, 2014 Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, From the Art Continuum Hong Kong Collection, Image: Courtesy of the Artist and Blindspot Gallery
The donation speaks to the strong connections between Vancouver and Hong Kong. While it began with a 1980s-era exodus of Hong Kongers seeking real estate refuge in bucolic Vancouver, forever changing it from a sleepy coastal city into an international one, the relationship has expanded into the cultural domain.
The gift includes works by internationally recognised Hong Kong artists including Luis Chan, Irene Chou, Tsang Kin Wah, Wesley Tongson, Sin Wai Kin and Wucius Wong, as well as works by Hong Kong-born, Vancouver-based artists including Howie Tsui and Lam Tung Pang.
The VAG will present an exhibition of art from the ACHK donation and its permanent collection in 2027 to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the transfer of Hong Kong sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China.
Sin Wai Kin, Irreconcilable Differences, 2020 (video still) Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, From the Art Continuum Hong Kong Collection, Image: Courtesy of the Artist and Blindspot Gallery
The gift is a significant boon to the VAG’s fledgling Centre for Global Asias, launched in November 2024 on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the gallery’s Institute of Asian Art. That occasion was marked by a name change and C$1.6m ($1.1m) in donations earmarked for the “amplification of Asian Art” at the gallery.
Sirish Rao, the gallery’s interim co-chief executive and the director of its Centre for Global Asias, added in a statement: “Vancouver is the most Asian city outside of Asia, and speaking of the ‘local’ in Vancouver implies the global. This collection allows us to better understand and contextualise culture, migration and exchange, and tell stories that resonate intimately with both our local and international communities.”
Yeong Tong Lung, Porcelain Dog, 2020 Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, From the Art Continuum Hong Kong Collection, Photo: Courtesy of the Artist and Blindspot Gallery
The renamed Centre for Global Asias was partly inspired by the author Pico Iyer’s notion that “everywhere is so made up of everywhere else” and “home is not just the place where you happen to be born. It’s the place where you become yourself.”
At the November 2024 launch event for the Centre for Global Asias, Rao addressed a crowd of pan-Asian patrons, artists and diplomats, saying: “We recognise the many Asias that exist, within the geography of Asia itself and in the global diaspora.” He added: “There are Asias yet to be imagined and yet to come. The Centre for Global Asias will be a home for a pluralism of ideas, perspectives and artistic disciplines.”
This amplification of the Asian experience into a cosmopolitan, transnational one reflects Vancouver’s roughly half-Asian population—including 28% Chinese, 7 % South Asian, 6% Filipino and 2% Iranian. The gallery’s traditional programming focus and funding base has typically been Chinese but that is expanding with a wider embrace of South and West Asian art.