Exploration and Reflection: Blue Lotus Gallery in 2025

© Palani Mohan

As we step into 2026, we take a moment to reflect on a year of exploration at Blue Lotus Gallery. From renowned Hong Kong photographers capturing the city’s past, to contemporary voices revealing its quieter, often overlooked corners, the programme traced a rich spectrum of perspectives on the metropolis and its ever-evolving identity.

Alongside this, the gallery deepened its engagement with Japan, turning attention toward its meditative landscapes, sacred architecture, and enduring spiritual traditions. Through exhibitions and publications by artists such as Michael Kenna, Yasuhiro Ogawa, and Ulana Switucha, we explored the interplay between past and present, nature and culture, and the ways in which photography can illuminate both the everyday and the transcendent

Austin Bell | Shooting Hoops
All 2,549 of Hong Kong’s Basketball Courts

Exhibition & Book Launch
17 January – 23 February 2025

Opening the year, Shooting Hoops set the tone for Blue Lotus Gallery’s 2025 programme with a project that was at once playful, meticulous, and quietly revelatory. American photographer Austin Bell presented the culmination of years spent documenting every single outdoor basketball court in his adopted home of Hong Kong, an extraordinary total of 2,549 sites scattered across the city.

What began as a fascination with the vivid colours and graphic designs of Hong Kong’s courts grew into an ambitious act of urban exploration. From densely packed housing estates to outlying islands, Bell’s project unfolded as a portrait of the city seen from above, where geometry, colour, and repetition revealed patterns often overlooked at street level. Shot largely by drone, the images transformed functional community spaces into bold, abstract compositions, while also mapping Hong Kong’s unique relationship to public space and sport.

Presented alongside the launch of the Shooting Hoops photobook, the exhibition invited viewers to see the city anew, not through its skyline, but through the everyday surfaces that quietly shape daily life.

© Austin Bell

‘Hong Kong Poetry’
Hong Kong’s Soul in Focus

Group Exhibition
22 March – 27 April 2025

Continuing the gallery’s longstanding engagement with Hong Kong, Hong Kong Poetry brought together works by Fan Ho, Palani Mohan, Thomas Gust, and Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze, offering a multifaceted meditation on the city’s visual and emotional rhythms.

Spanning generations and approaches, the exhibition traced Hong Kong’s poetic potential through light, memory, language, and place. Fan Ho’s rare experimental works revisited the city of the 1950s and 60s with striking formal sensitivity, while Palani Mohan explored Hong Kong’s enduring relationship with the sea, capturing moments of quiet human connection amid coastal life. Thomas Gust introduced abstraction and painterly intervention, blending Romantic references with contemporary urban imagery, and Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze’s City Poetry series transformed aging street signage into lyrical reflections on time and language.

Together, the exhibition revealed Hong Kong as both subject and muse, a city where the everyday continually borders on the poetic.

© Palani Mohan

Echoing Above | Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze

Exhibition & Book Launch
17 – 25 May 2025

Echoing Above introduced a reflective pause in the programme, inviting viewers to reconsider Hong Kong by shifting their gaze upward. In this solo exhibition and accompanying monograph, Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze explored the overlooked world above the city’s streets, revealing stories embedded in architecture, nature, and craft.

The exhibition highlighted disappearing traditions such as bamboo scaffolding, constructed by skilled workers known as “spiders,” alongside resilient trees growing from walls and gutters, and the birdlife that continues to inhabit the city’s airspace. Together, these elements formed a portrait of Hong Kong as a place of quiet coexistence between the built and natural worlds.

Both tender and observant, Echoing Above encouraged a slower way of seeing, reminding viewers that even in one of the world’s densest cities, moments of balance, tradition, and resilience persist overhead.

© Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze

Pilgrimage | Michael Kenna & Yasuhiro Ogawa
A Spiritual Journey Through Japan’s Timeless Landscapes

Exhibition
6 June – 13 July 2025

As the programme increasingly turned toward Japan, Pilgrimage brought together two distinct yet complementary perspectives on the country’s spiritual and cultural landscapes. Featuring works by British photographer Michael Kenna and Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ogawa, the exhibition explored pilgrimage not only as physical movement through sacred sites, but as a deeply personal and emotional journey.

Kenna’s photographs, made over more than four decades, offered serene black-and-white meditations on stillness, time, and place, often depicting shrines, pathways, and landscapes shaped by centuries of devotion. In contrast, Ogawa’s work pressed closer to lived experience, revealing memory, impermanence, and atmosphere through rich tones and emotive presence.

Together, their works formed a quiet dialogue between outsider and insider, revealing Japan through two ways of seeing that were distinct, yet deeply aligned.

© Yasuhiro Ogawa

Blue Lotus Revisited
A Retrospective Celebration

Group Exhibition
1 August – 12 October 2025

Mid-year, Blue Lotus Revisited provided an opportunity to reflect on the gallery’s own journey. Bringing together works by Greg Girard, Bianca Tse, Ian Lambot, Birdy Chu, Palani Mohan, Thomas Gust, Keith Macgregor, Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze, Michael Kistler, Yasuhiro Ogawa, and Michael Kenna, the exhibition celebrated some of the most defining exhibitions and artists in the gallery’s history.

Rooted in Blue Lotus Gallery’s commitment to Hong Kong’s visual culture, the exhibition traced recurring themes of identity, memory, and transformation across decades of photographic practice. It was both a celebration of past milestones and a reaffirmation of the gallery’s role as a platform for thoughtful, culturally engaged photography.

Blue Lotus Revisited invited audiences to pause and look back, not with nostalgia, but with clarity and renewed perspective.

© Greg Girard

Torii | Ulana Switucha

Exhibition & Book Launch
15 November – 14 December 2025

Closing the year, Torii marked a culmination of the gallery’s deepening engagement with Japan’s spiritual landscape. Hong Kong–based Canadian photographer Ulana Switucha presented a body of work resulting from over a decade of travel through Japan’s quieter, lesser-known regions, with a focus on its sacred gateways.

Through her long-term dedication to torii, Switucha developed a deep familiarity with the subject. Her images present the gates as quiet sentinels within seas, forests, coastal shores, and snow-covered terrain, emphasising stillness, balance, and harmony between humanity and nature

Characterised by minimalism, soft light, and long exposures, the photographs invited viewers into a contemplative space, where each gate became a prompt for reflection and presence. Presented alongside the launch of the Torii photobook, the exhibition offered a fitting close to the year, one grounded in quiet observation and spiritual resonance.

© Ulana Switucha