Applications Due: 19 May 2025, 10am HKT
Workshops Dates: 12–20 July 2025
Workshops Location: Hong Kong

Para Site is pleased to announce the 2025 Workshops for Arts Professionals, alongside an Open House event which will take place on 20 July 2025. 

Now in its eighth edition, the 2025 Workshops for Arts Professionals will be welcoming a group of curators, writers, critics, researchers, and other art workers from Hong Kong and beyond. Through a series of closed-door workshops, roundtable discussions, and field trips, we will be posing important questions, experimenting with concepts and practices, and learning together while reflecting on the evolving challenges in the field of contemporary art—this year, with a highlight on writing, publishing, and discursive practices, while remaining open to broader questions in curation, research, facilitation, and other forms of ‘making public’. 

This year, the programme’s special focus on writing, publishing, and discursive practices engage not only with texts as vehicles for content, but as social and infrastructural forms that shape how audiences and institutions come into being. From negotiating linguistic boundaries to contending with uneven institutional support, the challenges of writing and publishing across Asia are as varied as they are urgent. Facilitators and speakers will be drawn from Para Site’s wider network in Hong Kong and beyond, while the programme will span the practical through the speculative. The intent is to offer a space to collectively reflect on these conditions while experimenting with new possibilities for expression, transmission, and solidarity across contexts. By bringing together practitioners with a shared investment in ‘making public’ in its broadest sense, the workshop aims to open space for sustained, thoughtful exchange, and future collaboration—in Hong Kong and in the broader region of Asia-Pacific.

Participants do not need to have a background in writing or cultural criticism; instead, we welcome diverse practices of ‘making public’—from curating, to facilitating, performing, or other ways of articulating thought in shared spaces. This builds upon the programme’s long-standing commitment to nurturing a peer cohort and cultivating meaningful networks across Hong Kong and the wider Asia-Pacific region. 

Para Site will offer a limited number of scholarships to support the participation of arts professionals with long-term vision from local art ecologies across the Asia-Pacific region.

Application Requirements

• A written response (max. 400 words EACH) to two prompts: 
• Propose a small-scale display or intervention
  • This could take the form of a curated selection of printed matter, an intervention of sound and movement, or other speculative materials that explore the intersection of art and writing/publishing. You may imagine a shelf, wall, vitrine, digital space, or otherwise—any format that engages with publishing in the expanded sense (“making public”). What would you include, and why? How does your proposal reflect your interests, practice, or context?
• Share a lesser-known example from your local context—a project, institution, or collective practice—that uses art, writing, or publishing to foster new ways of thinking, learning, or collaborating.
  • What makes this example significant or instructive? How might others learn from it? We invite you to reflect on the conditions and infrastructures that shape your geography—feel free to wander beyond “contemporary art” as such—and to surface stories or methods that could resonate across regions.
• A description (max. 300 words) alongside relevant documentation of a project or work initiated by the applicant.
• 2–3 Writing samples (could be related to contemporary art, or broader cultural practices)
• A full Curriculum Vitae (not exceeding three pages), including a description of relevant working experience.

Application Process

Please submit all application materials as a single PDF, beginning with a cover page that includes a table of contents and corresponding page numbers.

PDFs should be saved as [Last Name]_[First Name].pdf 

Please send completed applications in English to application@para-site.art by 19 May 2025, 10 am HKT and put ‘2025 Workshops for Arts Professionals’ in the subject line

Applicants will be notified of the results in early June 2025.

Incomplete applications will not be considered

General Information

The workshops will be delivered in English

There is no tuition fee for the program. Selected participants will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation expenses. Para Site will cover local transportation for all of the scheduled site visits

A number of scholarships for accommodation and travel costs are available and will be awarded based on application. If you would like to apply for a scholarship, please also include a reference letter with your application.