Para Site announces a branching of PS Paid Studio Visits focusing on this year’s graduates of fine arts programmes at universities in Hong Kong.

PS Paid Studio Visits was initiated in May 2020 as a modest contribution to pay close attention to local artists during the global pandemic through live online visits, while providing each artist a studio visit fee along with one-month health insurance coverage. Since then, PS Paid Studio Visits has paid over 30 studio visits with Hong Kong artists from a younger generation, moderated by Para Site team members and participants from 2020 Para Site Workshops for Emerging Arts Professionals, with many more planned in the months ahead.

For this parallel iteration, Para Site will welcome more than 20 recent graduates to join the programme, invited following research carried out by Para Site’s curatorial team. Graduate exhibitions from across the city’s art programmes were important moments in Hong Kong’s annual calendar, providing invaluable opportunities for that year’s graduates to share their work with the broader public and the art community. The pandemic and restricted access on university campuses following last year’s protests led to most shows this year being cancelled or made inaccessible to guests from outside the respective university.

We hope to offer through these visits a chance to learn more about the work of these artists emerging from art programmes and schools including, among others, Hong Kong Art School x Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University); Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University; Department of Fine Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong; Department of Creative Arts, The Open University of Hong Kong; and Savannah College of Art and Design.