hin und her — Duo exhibition by HSU Wai Lun and SO Lai Ping

Participating Artists
HSU Wai Lun & SO Lai Ping

Opening hours of the Goethe-Gallery and Black Box Studio:
10:00 AM - 7:00 PM (Mon - Fri)
9:30 AM - 6:30 PM (Sat)
Closed on Sundays and Public Holidays


We follow fashions, deliberately, in and in,
it seems going back and back into the past as well.
— Leung Ping-kwan, ‘In Fabric Alley’.

Time is out of joint. What lingers like a spectre is not only the past, but also the futures that the past once promised.

You come across an old photograph and feel a sorrow you cannot explain. Is it nostalgia? But you weren't even born then. Perhaps it is something else: a feeling you never had the chance to know. Perhaps what haunts you is the excitement in those faces. Perhaps it is the futures that   were once imagined and never arrived.

In German, “hin und her” is the motion of thought that cannot be concluded. In Chinese, “來來回回” describes something that cannot settle, cannot stop. Two languages arrive at the same place. Time no longer moves forward, it only swings, like a pendulum without a clock face.

We live in a time that has lost its sense of time. This exhibition moves back and forth through the time of Hong Kong, tracing the slow cancellation of time. No beginning, no end. The past, present, and future: coming and going, hin und her.

Fireworks over Victoria Harbour, dragons in the square, group portraits at the gala, races at the racecourse......

We swing back and forth across Hong Kong’s different timelines: between the old and the new, traces of thought, and archival images, revisiting the condition of time in this city.

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Accompanying Programme
Sharing talk: Round and Round
18.7.2026 (Sat), 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM | Goethe-Gallery
Guest Moderator: Elaine LIN
Speakers: HSU Wai Lun and SO Lai Ping
Conducted in Cantonese. 
Free admission. Priority is given to online registrants.

The two artists will discuss the journey behind the exhibition “hin und her”, sharing how “time in Hong Kong” served as the starting point for conceiving the show as a whole. They will also talk about the ideas and processes shaping their new works, and how these ideas connect and unfold across the exhibition.

“The Bell of New Year's Eve · Wartime Hong Kong” will also launch at the talk, publishing one of the exhibition’s works for the first time. The work traces a 1941 New Year’s Eve broadcast when NHK replaced the traditional “Joya no Kane” bell with sounds of the attack on Hong Kong. “Joya no Kane” is a New Year’s Eve ritual in which a bell is struck 108 times to dispel the 108 worldly afflictions in Buddhist teaching.

Register now!

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About Artists

The artist duo HSU Wai Lun and SO Lai Ping began their collaboration in 2013, dedicated to artists' books and paper-based works. Through their artistic-research practice, they explore the narrative and structure of artist-made books. Their works have been exhibited and presented in various institutions and museums across Europe, Asia, and the USA, including Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Germany), Soulangh Artist Village (Taiwan), b minor (USA), and 9K Galerie (Germany), among others.

HSU Wai Lun is a visual artist whose practice centers on artistic research, archival imagery, sound art, and artists' books. His practice is concerned with how colonial frameworks, such as archives, chronologies and hierarchies, shape our understanding of time, history, and nativeness. His work explores how categorisation in archives becomes a mechanism of power, particularly through the processes of preservation and construction. He holds an MA in Artistic Research from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague and a BA in Visual Arts from the Academy of Visual Arts HKBU.

SO Lai Ping is a visual artist, editorial designer, and educator who sees the book as an art form. Her practice centers on artists’ books, writing systems, and sound art, exploring how visual scripts convey text and abstract thought, and how sound and visual imagery can mutually activate one another. She holds an MA in Gutenberg Intermedia from the Hochschule Mainz in Germany, and a BA in Visual Arts from the Academy of Visual Arts HKBU. She is a 2025 Asian Cultural Council Hong Kong Fellow.