Culture(s) of Copy
Goethe-Gallery, Hong Kong Film Archive, June 22-August 14
A prime example of curatorial excellence, this exhibition – co-presented by the Goethe-Institut Hongkong and Edith Russ Site for Media Art in Oldenburg, Germany, as a follow-up to 2008’s History Will Repeat Itself – turned a diverse (and almost completely irrelevant) range of artworks into a surprisingly coherent and endlessly evocative survey on the end of singularity. Featuring intriguing works by an international roster of artists (such as Candice Breitz, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast and Wong Hoy Cheong), the show provided an illuminating look at the postmodern condition in a globalised and highly digitalised world: where reality is simulated, truth is ever untraceable, and sincerity becomes the butt of all the best jokes.
 

Runner-up: Moving Sideways
Tang Contemporary Art, March 11-April 3.
Standing out in a year full of strong projects from MAP OFFICE [Gutierrez + Portefaix], this Josef Ng-curated conceptual architecture collective featured a variety of video, drawings, installation, and a striking sculpture of mirror aquariums (housing hundreds of flowery crabs), offering a pitch-perfect take on the politics of motion through urban and natural space.
 

Honourable Mentions

Buildings Entered
Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, May 28-June 27.
Installed under glass vitrines amidst the decaying walls of the heritage site, Charles LaBelle’s titular project – involving sketches and photographs of buildings that the artist has personally entered – found its ultimate realization.

Cataract 
EXPERIMENTA, Gallery EXIT, November 5-December 11.
With his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong, the scholarly Nadim Abbas delivered a theoretically nuanced take on his semiotic and psychological research into the archetypal forms of architecture and art history.

Lofty Integrity
Hong Kong Museum of Art, March 26-October 10.
Wu Guanzhong, the great Chinese artist who combined traditional Chinese ink painting with Western modernist aesthetics, passed away on June 25. This thoughtfully curated exhibition, which showcased over 50 of Wu’s donated works and various personal items, provided a fitting final tribute. 

Readers' Choice: Hope & Glory
ArtisTree, April 8-May 30. Simon Birch’s “conceptual circus” proved irresistible to our readers. Props to the audience-friendly multi-media carnival!