From October 2026 and throughout 2027, Para Site is programming around the city as we work towards a new home in Hong Kong. Stay tuned on our website and social media for information about our programme events!
Hong Kong is our site
Our nomadic programme across 2027 gives us room to try things out in different places, nurture collaborations, and rethink how we gather. What we present along the way will help shape the space we build: one that we arrive at with a deeper understanding of what it needs to make possible.
Recently, Para Site is Live convened our community near and far for a radio broadcast asking what an institution carries as it changes. Those conversations inform four principles guiding our next chapter:
Good things take time
We understand Para Site’s role as a custodian of conditions: creating the circumstances in which artists, ideas, and conversations can develop fluidly, over time, and across disciplines. With three decades of work as our foundation, Para Site is now taking time to consider what an institution is understood to do in the specific conditions of Hong Kong. There is more for us to learn about who finds a place in Para Site, and who has yet to find one. By working closely with artists, creatives, and thinkers, we are questioning the assumption that institutional health can just be expressed through expansion. We are seeking methods that give ideas space to mature, continuing to support experimentation, and attending to the social ecologies that allow such work to happen.
Memory is a method
Para Site was founded as a platform that embraced experimental practices not easily adopted into the commercial and institutional structures of the time. The organisation has since been shaped by successive teams, artists and curators, and by everyone who has given it time and trust. From Kennedy Town to Sheung Wan to Quarry Bay, Para Site’s journey has unfolded across many homes, responding to the needs of the moment. This history guides how we meet the ambitions of artists, creatives, curators, and participants today.
Context and process
Hong Kong’s cultural ecology and its global exchanges are Para Site’s engine. It’s a site of continual transition, and the place from which Para Site thinks and works. An artist may need time to pursue an uncertain idea or resources to make work that has no obvious setting. A public may form around a performance or a shared question. These possibilities require an institution to pay attention and to make room – or even redesign the room itself.
Beyond a site
A fixed space is one way an institution meets the world; an exhibition is one way art and creativity becomes public. Through our nomadic period across 2027, Para Site connects to the roots of its name—beside or beyond a ‘site’—to test assumptions about how we operate through reciprocal relationships with those who make these encounters possible. Working across different places, we’re learning from what works and considering what can change. These experiences are helping to build the brief for our relocation: a new anchor point for Para Site in Hong Kong shaped by artistic practices and public encounters, with long-term sustainability on our horizon.
While we programme around the city, we are based at our interim office in Kennedy Town. All of our activities are free of charge, and we look forward to sharing our 2027 programme later this year.
