This Cutting-Edge Hong Kong Art Gallery Was Once a Private Club
Art does not exist in a vacuum, PHD Group cofounder Willem Molesworth told Observer. "We embrace that."
Now in its second year, PHD Group in Hong Kong has an interesting story—one that interacts with the city’s recent history, connecting and reviving memories, while celebrating with its programming the inherent dynamic multiculturalism that has always characterized this important hub in Asia. Observer visited the gallery, which is on the top floor of a commercial building in Wan Chai not too far from the convention center where Art Basel Hong Kong takes place, on a hot day in early July. There, we met with Willem Molesworth, who founded the gallery with his wife, Ysabelle Cheung, in 2021. Cheung’s family is originally from Hong Kong, while Molesworth is from the U.S., and the multiculturalism of the duo runs deep.
“Ysabelle has a diasporic background as she was born and raised in London,” Molesworth, who has lived in Hong Kong for almost eight years, told Observer. “In a sense, we are both immigrants to the city and chose to be here. Hong Kong is a place of movement and transience; perhaps we are both intrigued by the idea of creating a community or setting down roots within that transience.” To be American is to question and challenge what that means, he added. “I have family roots in Italy and I am also Jewish. I grew up in New York City, surrounded by various cultures. My sensibilities are certainly shaped by these experiences, and perhaps inversely, the best way to understand how our backgrounds intersect is to look at the gallery.”
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The PHD Group program focuses on art and artists from East Asia, with the bulk of the artists on the gallery’s roster hailing from Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea. “We are constantly in pursuit of art that speaks to stories about who and what we are today,” Molesworth said. “We also have a deep appreciation for the exquisite. The artwork we present brings together moments of contemplation with beauty.”
The space is the embodiment of this dedication to beauty and is especially interesting when you consider the relationship between the space’s present and its past. For thirty years, the gallery was a private clubhouse that catered to the needs of three Hong Kong businesspeople in the 1970s. Once used for parties and hosting guests, it was essentially abandoned. “We took possession of the space when it was in total entropy,” explained Molesworth. “With the help of our good friends at BEAU Architects, we adapted it into an art gallery, utilizing a surgical approach that preserved the fundamental aspects of the space. Through this approach, we embrace the history of the space and allow it to shape and contribute to our exhibitions.”
Molesworth guided us to a small room—the former kitchen of the clubhouse. Here, the gallerists display some objects they saved from the gallery’s previous life in what they treat as a third space that “allows for a natural gathering and digesting of our exhibitions. These objects connect to Hong Kong’s history and contextualize contemporary art within that larger context.” Art does not exist in a vacuum, Molesworth told us. “We embrace that.”
When we visited, the gallery was showing a thoughtfully curated solo exhibition of the work of local artist Chan Ting, who took over the space with a series of alien sculptural presences that interacted with the gallery’s walls. The artist’s practice consists of collecting and appropriating found objects and furniture pieces full of memories, filling their gaps and cracks with an uncanny green substance with a slimy appearance that calls to mind some buildings in Hong Kong—places with a stratification of historical memories—but also seems to suggest decay and something rooting and infected.
Molesworth and Cheung first encountered Ting’s work and practice in a nonprofit space where she used to run with a few artist friends called Negative Space. There, Ting had installed a work low to the ground and visitors had to crouch a little to see it. “It felt intimate and private,” Molesworth said. “At that moment, we didn’t have a specific sense that the work represented Hong Kong. To us, Chan Ting’s work exemplifies the wider contemporary conditions of society today: how we deal with passages of time and how we process trauma. There is a sensitivity to the practice that reveals the subconscious layers of our realities; this is related to her work as a hypnotherapist and sound healer.”
Despite this sensation of “corrosion,” “invasion” or ” infection,” these layers of green, to Ting, actually represent a space of healing and growth. All the works result from an attentive and labor-intensive conservation of these discarded containers and other objects, empty and in disrepair. Filling their voids, adding layers of construction plaster and pigment, and then gradually drilling, sanding and polishing, the artist revives them, suggesting this necessary care process aimed at preserving those vessels of memories from oblivion. “There are cracks everywhere in this city and across other cities. Chan Ting thinks of the green as filling in the emptiness and void. Perhaps these things share a similarity in that they grow and expand quietly, and it’s just a matter of our perception,” Molesworth observed.
Asked if in the last few years, following the protests, they have seen a lot of changes in the city and its cultural art scene, Molesworth admitted that there are some changes, but he is also very hopeful that resilience will let Hong Kong maintain its unique position as an art hub for the region.
Molesworth and Cheung, along with Alex Chan of The Shophouse, also founded Supper Club, which took place during the recent Art Basel Hong Kong art week. Conceived as an alternative fair model, it gathered works presented by twenty-two galleries worldwide in the Fringe Club, with extended nighttime hours and rich programming to encourage conversation and exchange in a more casual atmosphere than a traditional fair. “Supper Club aimed to be a new event for Hong Kong and the international art scene, he said. “While important for many reasons, we felt that the traditional model of fairs needed something as a counterbalance. We must point out that Supper Club is not strictly an art fair but a hybrid between a fair and an exhibition. We hosted various panel talks, performances, and other events. We wanted to create space for experimentation.”
Experimentation also animates the gallery’s program, and spaces like the PHD Group are essential for keeping the Hong Kong art ecosystem vibrant and alive. Molesworth and Cheung are among those fostering conversations and important reflections on the city’s recent history and its identity as a dynamic place of exchange. “It is a wonderful creative journey, and our plans consist of staying on this path,” the gallerist said. “We have a few other ideas too; we only hope we can get around to them.” We expect they’ll do much to exercise the potential of cultural hybridization and multiculturalism between the West and the East.