Knotting Space is a cycle-based curatorial platform in Hong Kong. The first cycle will debut from 23 March to 18 April 2026 at 7/F H Queen’s in Central. Through curated pairings across a diverse scale of practices, each cycle turns the space into a meeting ground for collectors, galleries, institutions, and non-profit organisations.
Knotting Space is conceived as a long-term project that bridges commercial and charitable projects—a model where audiences are exposed to a wider discourse in the local art ecosystem from emerging to established voices. The debut exhibition, KNOT I: The Drawing Room and HUA International presents Soft Reality, Hard Dreams, will be launched by the Director and Curator of Knotting Space, Jims Lam, an independent curator based in Hong Kong who also serves as the curator of the 2026 edition of Pavilion Hong Kong at H Queen’s. With Knotting Space, Lam develops the programmes through deliberate pairings that connect cross-cultural perspectives and cross-regional geographies. He brings together exhibitors with distinct yet compatible approaches so new readings can emerge through proximity.
“Across the cultural landscape, infrastructures are shifting, and more collective ways of working are becoming essential,” says Jims Lam. “Knotting Space responds to this moment by offering a stable, professional platform for collaboration that can move quickly, stay focused, and build continuity.”
The inauguration cycle of a total of four cycles in 2026, KNOT I: The Drawing Room and HUA International titled Soft Reality, Hard Dreams, brings together new and latest works by Vivian Caccuri (b.1986, Brazil), Jinbin Chen (b.1994, China), Mark Justiniani (b.1966, the Philippines), Matina Partosa (b.2000, the Philippines), and Shi Yi (b.1993, China).
Soft Reality, Hard Dreams moves between dream and reality, using sensation and perception to reconfigure how temporal narratives come into view. The exhibition proposes the dream as an alternative dimension shaped by collective experience and personal imagination, approached not as fantasy or an optical trick, but as a method for thinking through tension.
From The Drawing Room, Mark Justiniani is a defining figure in the Philippines’ contemporary art, renowned for his immersive works that mobilise light, mirrors, and spatial illusion. Following Justiniani's representation of the Philippines at the 58th Venice Biennale with Island Weather, he extends this inquiry through The Philippine Wine Dance. Drawing from Filipino folk dance traditions, the works reframe micro-history and ritual as spatial experience. Matina Partosa comes from a younger Manila-based generation of painters with works attentive to the city’s atmospheres, using light, shadow, and reflection to heighten how the everyday is seen and felt.
HUA International presents Vivian Caccuri. Based in Rio de Janeiro, Caccuri is an artist and musicologist who has developed sound-led installations and performances for over a decade, with work shown in major international contexts including the Bienal de São Paulo and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, as well as institutions such as the New Museum. Jinbin Chen lives and works between Oslo and Beijing, where his painting expands notions of intimacy, often centring on unspoken desire. Trained in Venice, Shi Yi draws on Renaissance and Baroque devotional imagery and translates it into a contemporary Chinese visual language, sharpening the exhibition’s cross-cultural register.
Marking Knotting Space’s first cycle, the exhibition sets a focused cross-regional presentation. Soft Reality, Hard Dreams presents a set of conditions rather than a single storyline, holding the tension between dream and reality to explore how shared experience is shaped by attention and sensation.
