Theaster Gates will open 'Surrogate', an exhibition of new works, at Gagosian in Hong Kong on 19 November 2026, where it runs through 27 February 2027. The Chicago-based artist returns to motifs from his own earlier work, lifting them out of their original contexts and remaking them in different materials and arrangements.

The show includes imprints of fire hoses pressed into clay, sections of reclaimed gymnasium flooring, a clay handbag, and three new Tar Paintings, a series Gates began in 2011. The tar is a material with a personal history for the artist: his father worked as a roofer, and Gates has used roofing tar across his practice as both a medium and a reference to labour, shelter and Black urban life.

The title points to the exhibition's central idea. A surrogate stands in for something that is absent, and Gates uses that logic to think about representation itself: how an artwork, an object or a material can act on behalf of a family bond, a community, or a history that has been overlooked. The works do not illustrate those absences so much as perform the act of standing in for them.

The Hong Kong presentation opens alongside a second Gates show in Asia, 'African Still Life' at White Cube Seoul, on view through 18 December. Together the two exhibitions give audiences in the region a chance to see how Gates continues to move between sculpture, ceramics, archives and social practice, treating everyday and inherited objects as carriers of memory and identity.