M+’s Myths and Monsters puts Kongkee’s drowning Hong Kong inside Asia’s fantasy canon

Kongkee’s River holds on a single image: a yellow figure, half-submerged in blood-orange water, reading a small black book whose cover says Borrowed Place, Borrowed Time. Around it drift the shop signs and ferries of the Hong Kong the artist grew up with. The words are the title of Richard Hughes’s book on the city, long shorthand for a territory living on someone else’s clock. The Hong Kong animator takes the cliché literally and floods it.

That image is about to enter a larger argument. M+, Hong Kong’s museum of visual culture, is placing River inside Myths and Monsters: The Art of Fantasy in Asia, a survey built in four chapters: ukiyo-e woodblock prints, Indonesian shadow puppetry and Tibetan Buddhist scrolls first, then Surrealism’s passage through Asia and the post-war rise of manga and anime, and finally the anime aesthetics now running through art, design, fashion, games and digital culture worldwide. The museum’s own roll call stretches from Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy, to the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen. Setting Kongkee’s flat, cel-clean line in that lineage is the point: his apocalypse is drawn in the grammar of the comics that formed him.

The news comes from gdm (Galerie du Monde), his Hong Kong and Taipei gallery, in its October round-up.

Geometric painting by Adia Millett with a dense grid of bright triangles in pink, yellow, green and blue — Adia Millett, work from Power Unearthed at gdm Taipei. Image: courtesy the artist and gdm

In Taipei, the gallery’s own walls belong to US artist Adia Millett and Power Unearthed: paintings, textiles and installations about how power moves through the earth, the body and the spirit, centring women, Black communities and marginalised voices. The canvas the gallery circulated is a lattice of triangles in hot pink, saffron, emerald and black, its pattern logic close to quilting. Step back and a pale circle surfaces beneath the grid, something buried pushing through.

The late Hong Kong painter Wesley Tongson, who pushed the medium by using his own body as a brush, is the subject of Singing and Dancing with Brush and Ink at Asia Society Hong Kong. In London, Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying’s A Life of Navigation is at the Hayward Gallery. The still the gallery shared shows a young man sprinting along a supermarket checkout belt as the cashier looks up: shopping as obstacle course.

Video still of a performer in white t-shirt and blue shorts running on a supermarket checkout counter as a cashier watches — Musquiqui Chihying, video still. Image: courtesy the artist and gdm

Farther afield, video artist Alison Nguyen shows Perforation, Ellipse at the Busan Biennale. Hong Kong artist Lam Tung Pang brings Out of This World to Richmond Art Gallery, outside Vancouver. Artist Liu Sheng’s I’ll Catch You Later is at Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou, and the late Thai modernist Tang Chang anchors Giving Life at Dib Bangkok. Chiu Wei-Hsiang’s Toil and Soil, which MCM covered in September, continues at gdm Hong Kong.

Myths and Monsters opens at M+ on 17 October and runs until 4 April 2027 in the museum’s West Gallery. Power Unearthed is on view at gdm Taipei until 7 November. Tongson’s show closes on 11 October, A Life of Navigation on 18 October. Out of This World opens on 24 October, Nguyen’s Busan presentation runs until 1 November, Toil and Soil until the end of October, I’ll Catch You Later until 31 January 2027 and Giving Life until 3 May 2027.

Read as a calendar, it is a listings page. Read through River, it is a map of places being drawn as though they were already myth.

Tags: contemporary art exhibitions, Adia Millett, Galerie du Monde, Kongkee, M+, Musquiqui Chihying