Garden of Six Seasons

To explore the traditions of image-making and object-making through the communities long relegated to the sidelines of modern and contemporary cultural production, a group show – Garden of Six Seasons — is being presented by Para Site, Hong Kong’s leading contemporary art centre and one of the oldest and most active independent art institutions in Asia.

The exhibition (May 16 – August 30, 2020) is curated by Cosmin Costinas, Executive Director, Para Site and Artistic Director of the upcoming Kathmandu Triennale KT 2077. Identity, cultural hegemonies and the politics of material examined through the work of 40 international artists, serve as the starting point for the thematic moorings of the Kathmandu Triennale 2077, set to take place from December 4, 2020 – January 9, 2021.

The exhibition explores vocabularies of cultural expression that articulate myriad ways of reading the world, from the cosmic to the bodily level. The title of the show borrows from an English-style garden built by the Nepalese King a hundred years ago in Kathmandu. Gardens represent one of the more complex subjects of cultural investigation and, as the curator remarks, “the many steps in the country’s largely unacknowledged process of colonisation.” The title also evokes the six seasons traditionally observed in the Kathmandu Valley, which were sources of abundance, wealth and political power for the rulers of Nepal, until climate change rendered the distinction between seasons obsolete.