Beyond the headline acts of Art Basel and Art Central, March in Hong Kong comes with a rich fringe of exhibitions worth seeking out – among them “ArtisTree Selects: Imagination Investments” at Taikoo Place.
This is Spanish artist Coco Capitán’s first solo show in Hong Kong, running from today until 26 April and unfolding across multiple sites in Taikoo Place. Conceived as a three-part journey, it leads you from “Naïvy” at ArtisTree, through the text installation “I Read While I Walk” along the elevated walkways, and up to the interactive “Memory Adoption Bureau” on the 67th floor of One Island East, transforming the business district into a route mapped by memory and longing.
Capitán is known for pairing analogue photography with her distinctive handwritten texts, moving fluidly between the worlds of art, photography and fashion; her wry, quietly solitary lines circle themes of youth, movement and belonging. In “Naïvy”, she returns to her enduring fascination with the sea, using more than 50 photographs and paintings to look back on coming of age and the fragility of freedom, while inviting visitors to become “lost memory collectors” – a narrative thread that carries through the rest of the show.
Step outside the gallery and you’ll find her signature “golden” one-liners scattered along a half‑kilometre stretch of Taikoo Place’s covered walkways, like unannounced wayfinding signs that gently rewrite the daily commute into a series of private asides.
The phrases you now look up to read are therefore more than stylistic “mistakes”: they stage a live experiment in turning difficulty into something poetic. Her scrawled texts, already familiar from collaborations with Gucci and other fashion houses, now cut through Hong Kong’s everyday commuter routes, placing someone who once “couldn’t write properly” at the heart of the office district and nudging you to rethink what counts as “neat” – and what might qualify as a language of your own.
The journey ends high above the city in the “Memory Adoption Bureau”: an office floor reimagined as a bureau for lost memories, where visitors choose a single photograph from an archive of thousands to “adopt” and take home, carrying a stranger’s past back into their own life in a quiet, intimate exchange played out against the skyline.
Admission is free; opening hours run from 12pm to 8pm on weekdays and from 11am on weekends and public holidays, making it easy to slip this carefully curated detour into the working day or a slow weekend wander – and to invest, quite literally, in your imagination along the way.
