
Exhibition preview·Global
Anne Imhof opens first major Asia solo at Tai Kwun with ballet performance
Anne Imhof's House of Swans at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (Sep 25, 2026–Jan 3, 2027) is her first major Asia solo, centering a new ballet-inflected performance with Hong Kong Ballet, new paintings, bronze works, and a site-responsive display of reels from the Clear Water Bay Film Studio.
Anne Imhof's first major institutional solo exhibition in Asia has opened at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong. Titled House of Swans, the show runs from September 25, 2026, to January 3, 2027, and brings together new paintings, sculptures, films, and installations with music. During the run, the artist will stage a new performance, House of Swans (2026), in collaboration with Hong Kong Ballet; a full seventy-minute version was performed for the opening. Born in Giessen, Germany, in 1978, Imhof works across performance, choreography, painting, drawing, music, installation, sculpture, and film. She won the Golden Lion for national participation at the 2017 Venice Biennale with FAUST for the German Pavilion and has shown at Tate Modern, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Stedelijk Museum. In Hong Kong, footage of her large-scale 2025 performance-installation DOOM: House of Hope, first staged at New York's Park Avenue Armory, is shown alongside new works, setting the presence of the performer's body against what remains after it leaves: in several new paintings, the marks of Imhof's own scratching across the surface record a bodily gesture. The swan and ballet references of the title surface directly in the paintings. The Queen of the Swans (2026), a 250-by-320-centimeter canvas, shows a swan on a dark ground with the words "I AM THE QUEEN OF THE SWANS," while Giselle 1 (2026) takes the 1841 Paris premiere of Giselle as its source, reading the ballet's mad scene — the moment Giselle loses her grip on reality — as an overlap of breakdown and transformation. A bronze relief, Untitled (2025), fixes two embracing figures in place. A work responding to Hong Kong presents old film reels recovered from the Clear Water Bay Film Studio, built in the 1950s as the Great Wall Movie Enterprises' production base, shown as abandoned material alongside the video work Citizen (2025).

