Hong Kong artist Packy Lai gilds a salted fish at HK$1 million to ask what we still worship

There is a line almost everyone in Hong Kong can quote. If a person has no dreams, what makes them any different from a salted fish? Stephen Chow gave it to the city in Shaolin Soccer, and it still works as a public scolding for anyone who stops striving. It is hard to stand in front of Packy Lai’s new centrepiece without hearing it: a salted fish she spent a month covering in gold leaf, inch by inch, now resting on a red velvet cushion with a price of HK$1 million. It anchors OMG, her solo exhibition at JPS Gallery.

The Chinese title, 《退神殿》, borrows the Taoist rite of deconsecration, in which a deity’s spirit is ceremonially withdrawn from a statue so the object can be retired. Lai turns the rite on the secular gods of her generation: the stable job, the flat, the marriage on schedule, the “better version” of oneself. In the gallery’s announcement she puts it bluntly: the gods we worship may no longer live in religion, but in what society has installed within us. The fish comes with a handwritten Salted Fish Breeding Manual that instructs a collector, in deadpan earnest, how to keep it appreciating in value. Once gilded and priced, is it still a fish, or already a god?

Blurred white Chinese calligraphy scraped across a black and red canvas — Packy Lai, Record of the Altar of the Immortal Magu (detail), 2026, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and JPS Gallery

The more personal gesture is on the walls. Lai spent a decade as a professional calligrapher after leaving a career in marketing, and here she trades ink and paper for acrylic to copy canonical works by Wang Xizhi and Yan Zhenqing, among them the Preface to the Orchid Pavilion and the Record of the Altar of the Immortal Magu. Then she scrapes and blurs her own strokes until the characters dissolve. The copying is homage; the erasure is a farewell to the perfectionism that, she says, let others set the measure of her worth. In a discipline built on faithful copying, that is pointed.

The temple metaphor runs through six installations. A small chapel gathers around a hanging crucifix dedicated to perfection, wealth and beauty. A series on silk rewrites contemporary romance as Buddhist sutras sorted by greed, anger and delusion: the situationship, the permanent victim, the endless swipe and match of dating apps. An AI chanting machine recites these false scriptures in a cold, synthetic voice. And the Deconsecration Divination Sticks invert the temple fortune ritual: instead of asking the gods for more, the visitor draws to learn what they might let go of.

A gold divination cylinder with a bamboo stick poking out, lying on red and white cloth — Packy Lai, Deconsecration Divination Sticks, 2026, mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and JPS Gallery

OMG marks Lai’s move from commercial calligraphy toward a conceptual, cross-media practice, and the interactive pieces are new ground for an artist known for works on paper. JPS Gallery, founded in Hong Kong in 2014 and since expanded to Tokyo and Incheon, has built its programme on playful, pop-inflected work, a natural home for the show’s dark comedy.

OMG runs from October 9 to November 7, 2026, at JPS Gallery, G/F, 88–90 Staunton Street, Central, Hong Kong. The opening reception is on Thursday, October 8, from 5 to 8 pm, with the artist present.

The exhibition’s closing proposition is modest and hard at once. A midlife awakening, Lai suggests, is not discovering who you were meant to become. It is admitting that you do not have to be who anyone expected.

Tags: Hong Kong, JPS Gallery, installations, Stephen Chow, calligraphy, Packy Lai