Hong Kong at Venice Biennale 2025: "Projecting Future Heritage" Reclaims the Architecture of the Everyday

The Hong Kong exhibition at the 2025 Venice Biennale Architettura, titled Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive, opened on May 10 at Campo della Tana. Responding to the Biennale's theme, "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective", the exhibition repositions Hong Kong’s post-war public infrastructures as powerful expressions of “collective intelligens” and emerging future heritage.

Curated by Ar. Fai AU, Dr. Ying ZHOU, and Ar. Sunnie S.Y. Lau, with advisory input from Eunice Seng and Joan Leung, the exhibition highlights a generation of co-operative housing, multifunctional market-library-sports complexes, and modernist industrial buildings. Designed by figures such as Chung Wah-Nan, Wong & Ouyang, Ng Chun Man and Dennis Lau, P&T, as well as the Public Works Department and local architects, these structures embodied a pragmatic tropical modernism shaped by climate, density, and social need. Though modest in form, they played a crucial role in shaping Hong Kong’s urban identity and global aspirations.

Often undocumented and now increasingly threatened by redevelopment and changing aesthetic preferences, these everyday typologies are disappearing. Yet they hold untapped cultural and architectural value. The exhibition positions them as Hong Kong’s “future heritage”—ordinary yet foundational structures that reflect the city's era of collective innovation and resilience.

Set within Campo della Tana—a former rope-making warehouse opposite the Arsenale—the exhibition draws a deliberate parallel between Venice and Hong Kong, two island cities shaped by maritime trade and built in delicate balance between nature and human ingenuity. The indoor pavilion features archival research, drawings, and visual documentation. In the courtyard, a bamboo scaffolding installation, constructed by Hong Kong “sifus,” transforms the space into a living stage. Celebrating the city’s intangible heritage and circular construction practices, this structure will host seasonal performances aligned with key festivals in the lunar calendar: Tin Hau’s Birthday, Dragon Boat, Hungry Ghost, and Mid-Autumn.

In reanimating the material and cultural legacy of Hong Kong’s civic infrastructure, Projecting Future Heritage invites reflection on how cities remember, evolve, and plan. It suggests that public architectures—often dismissed as utilitarian—can in fact express deep collective intelligence and embody the values of their time. Just as Venice rose from its watery terrain through cooperation and craft, so did Hong Kong emerge from its rocky shores through ingenuity and shared resourcefulness.

The exhibition reminds a global audience that great urban futures are often rooted in everyday pasts. By recontextualizing these overlooked structures, the Hong Kong Pavilion prompts a critical reassessment of what is worth preserving—and how design, memory, and place intersect in shaping the cities to come.

Projecting Future Heritage: A Hong Kong Archive runs from May 10 to November 23, 2025, at Campo della Tana, Venice. Opening hours are 11am to 7pm (May 10 – September 28) and 10am to 6pm (September 29 – November 23), closed on Mondays except May 19, September 30, and November 18.

For further details, visit 2025.vbexhibitions.hk