Since opening in Hong Kong in 2007, Blue Lotus Gallery has built a programme around photography, photobooks and artists whose work offers different perspectives on the city and the wider Asian region. Now, the gallery is expanding its programme to Europe with the opening of Blue Lotus Art Projects Ghent, its new permanent space in Belgium.
Fan Ho’s work forms a natural starting point for Blue Lotus Art Projects Ghent. As the exclusive representative of his estate, Blue Lotus Gallery has played a central role in bringing his iconic photographs of Hong Kong to new audiences through exhibitions, publications and collaborations. The opening comes at a significant moment for his work, with a major exhibition currently on view at Palazzo Falletti di Barolo in Turin, and several of his photographs featured in Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography at Tate Modern in London. Later this month, Blue Lotus Gallery will also present a new exhibition and book, Hong Kong Symphony, in Hong Kong, while further exhibitions are taking place at Fotografiska Shanghai and Shenzhen.
Fan Ho’s photographs of Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s are renowned for their dramatic use of light and shadow, precise compositions, and deeply personal view of the city. His images have become an enduring record of a place that has changed enormously, capturing everyday life with a poetic sensibility that continues to resonate with audiences around the world.
Hong Kong remains central to Blue Lotus Gallery’s programme, with the work of other photographers offering different perspectives on the city and its changing identity. Ian Lambot is renowned for his extensive documentation of Kowloon Walled City, the densely populated enclave that was demolished in 1993. His photographs preserve a record of a place that has since disappeared, documenting its extraordinary architecture and the lives shaped within it.
Wing Shya’s work offers a different view of Hong Kong, shaped in part by his experience working in cinema. Best known for his collaborations with filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, Shya captures moments of intimacy, longing and isolation, often with the heightened atmosphere and suspended sense of time associated with the films they worked on together. His photographs bring a distinctly personal and cinematic perspective to contemporary Hong Kong photography.
Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze has worked with Blue Lotus Gallery since the beginning of his photographic career. During his sixteen years in Hong Kong, he developed projects exploring the city’s architecture, rooftops, street life and the unexpected presence of nature within its dense urban landscape. His series Vertical Horizon, Concrete Stories and City Poetry reveal different layers of a city often defined by its skyline. Having recently returned to his native Paris, Jacquet-Lagrèze brings a perspective shaped by more than a decade and a half of living and photographing in Hong Kong.
Japan has also become an important part of Blue Lotus Gallery’s programme, with the work of Japanese photographers Yasuhiro Ogawa and Koji Onaka offering contrasting approaches to observing the world. Ogawa’s photographs are often dreamlike and contemplative, drawing attention to misty landscapes, solitary figures and moments of stillness. Onaka, meanwhile, finds poetry in everyday encounters, photographing quiet streets, small towns and overlooked corners of Japan with warmth, spontaneity and subtle humour. Both photographers approach their subjects with an attentiveness that allows ordinary places and fleeting moments to take on a more personal significance.
The presentation also includes work by Ulana Switucha, a Canadian-born photographer based in Hong Kong whose practice has been shaped by more than three decades of working across Asia. Japan has been a particular focus of her work, informed by a longstanding connection to the country’s landscapes and spiritual traditions. In her Torii series and photobook, she photographs the sacred gateways found across Japan, from coastal shores to remote, snow-covered landscapes. Through restrained compositions, soft light and an emphasis on negative space, Switucha transforms these familiar structures into quiet studies of form, stillness and the relationship between humanity and nature.
Together, the artists reflect the breadth of photography represented by Blue Lotus, spanning different generations, approaches, and relationships with the places they photograph. Alongside photographic works, the Ghent space will present books and printed matter, extending the gallery’s interest in photobook culture and the ways in which photography can be experienced beyond the exhibition space.
With Blue Lotus Art Projects Ghent, the gallery brings its work into a new setting while continuing its longstanding presence in Hong Kong. The project creates an opportunity to introduce European audiences to photographers and perspectives that have shaped Blue Lotus’s programme over the years, while opening up new conversations around Asian photography, books and visual culture.
Blue Lotus Art Projects, Ghent
The Old Province Govt Building
Entrance: Francois Laurentplein 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Dates: 14 October 2026 – 21 February 2027
Opening hours: Friday and Saturday, 11am - 5pm