Trade. Supply chains. Tariffs. Terms that used to be confined to political and economic debates are increasingly surfacing in everyday conversations. Will things disappear from supermarket shelves? Why is this product made in China? Haven’t we de-coupled? When will shipping times return to normal?
Some of these terms also anchor Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe, the second chapter of Stay Connected: Art and China Since 2008 at Tai Kwun Contemporary. Featuring over 70 artworks from 40 artists, Supplying the Globe shifts the focus from how the digital world shapes our lives, identities and relationships to the physical and material worlds, focusing on the ports, cables, warehouses and bodies that enable goods and information to flow so seamlessly across the world. Ying Kwok curated the exhibition in collaboration with Pi Li, Tai Kwun’s former head of art.
Stepping into the first exhibition hall, visitors are confronted with the physical afterlives of infrastructure and waste. Long Pan’s metallic leaves (“Leaves,” 2022) are strikingly beautiful, their lustre derived from plants that have absorbed high concentrations of industrial metal waste. In Andrew Luk’s “Distilled of Fire Leaves” (2017), charred and melted air-conditioner covers and car exhaust pipes are suspected in air, as if caught in mid collapse. In providing comfort, air conditioners are emitting heat into already warming cities. Comfort always comes at a cost.
To the left, the main hall opens into a warmer, more inviting space. That shift in feeling between the two halls is deliberate, according to Kwok. While the first hall, largely emptied of human presence, looks at the environmental consequences of our relentless drive to produce, the main hall turns that lens back onto the labourers, bringing into the view the bodies and lives behind the things we consume.
At its far end, different forms of labour are presented like a hall of fame. The figure of the artist-as-social activist is not new, but few pursue it with the persistence of Luke Ching. Here, photographs document Ching working as a security guard in various art institutions. It was a way of drawing attention to the toll on the security guards who must stand all day.
Next to Ching’s work, a Foxconn uniform is on display alongside an employment contract, punch card and resignation letter (“Consumption,” 2012). It belongs to Li Liao, who worked at a Foxconn factory for 45 days — the exact number of days he needed to work to afford an iPad.
Exhibition view of Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe
Local meets global
Like the first part of the exhibition, China provides a fascinating microcosm of what’s happening on a global level. The country’s rapid development has created stark social inequalities; as a result, the impact of globalisation is also felt unevenly across society, which in turn shapes individual responses.
But if the question was whether this exhibition is just about China, the answer is ambiguous. While many of the artists were born in, or continue to live and work in, China, the show also points outward, ultimately using art to render visible not only the flows and layered structures but also sacrifices and longings that underpin everyday life in the 21st century.
Hosting the exhibition in Hong Kong adds another layer of significance. After all, the city is one of the world’s busiest trading ports. But geopolitics wasn’t on Kwok’s mind when the show was first conceived 18 months ago. “It really got more interesting as time went on, with all the talks of disruptions, trade negotiations,” she says.
Supplying the Globe seeks to tell that story through a different lens. Away from the attention-grabbing news headlines about tariffs and trade wars, the exhibition takes a look at the hidden currents bubbling beneath. “Geopolitics, the pandemic, shipping disruptions, inflation, labour disputes,” says Kwok, rattling off some of the major news themes at the moment. “But who bears the cost? Whose time is valued more, whose is valued less? What gets discarded?” Indeed, a huge part of the exhibition examines the relationship between artist and labourer, a topic Kwok has ruminated on for two decades.
“WANTED, UNWANTED AND WANTED AGAIN: THE ALCHEMY” project
Who benefits?
In one work, UK-based art collective Foreign Investments invites visitors to bring unwanted household items, which it then transforms through gold gilding, highlighting how value is shaped by context and history. Kwok first collaborated with the collective on this project in 2010, when she was curator at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art in Manchester. At that time, participants were asked to bring objects that were made in China, as an exploration of China’s rise as the manufacturing capital of the world.
For the Tai Kwun iteration, titled “WANTED, UNWANTED, AND WANTED AGAIN: THE ALCHEMY PROJECT” (2026) the focus shifts to the soaring price of gold. A map detailing where gold can be mined and next to it, a gold price chart. In Manchester, the gilders were compensated at local minimum wages. “But minimum wages in Hong Kong are too low! So we’re paying what we pay our docents,” says Kwok. By shifting attention from finished products to the social processes that produce them, the piece asks, “Who contributes? Who benefits?” says Kwok. Foreign Investments’ participatory piece creates a space of shared accountability — to the earth and to labour.
Opposite this, Shi Qing’s “Artists steal workers’ bodies, meanwhile, workers scramble aesthetics against artists” (2013) interrogates the line between artistic production and industrial labour. As China’s factories churn out goods for global consumption, and its artists produce work for galleries and institutions around the world, what defines an artist and what defines a labourer?
Ultimately, the exhibition resonates most deeply when it intertwines the vast machinery of global trade with intimate, human experiences, revealing how individual lives are entangled in compromises, even as goods move seamlessly across the world. In Li Shuang’s “I Want to Sleep More but by Your Side” (2019–2020), an online romance unfolds between a mother in Paris during the gilets jaunes protest movement and a young man working at a safety vest factory in Yiwu, China. Longing and loneliness permeate the film, offering a nuanced reflection on how, despite a world where goods traverse the globe, human connections remain fragile, bound by distance and other circumstances.
In the heartrending “The Last Letter” (2020), Li Binyuan reads aloud the final letter from his father, a security guard in Dongguan, who passed away when Li was still a child. With the help of local security guards in Dongguan, he learns to read the letter line by line in Cantonese, transforming memory and grief into a poignant act of remembrance.
In Zheng Yuan’s “Dream Delivery” (2018), an exhausted delivery driver falls asleep on a park bench and dreams of visiting iconic monuments, including the Giza Pyramids. Though he traverses Beijing for work, he can only travel for himself in sleep, exposing the hollow promise that hard work can deliver personal freedom.
“We are all living in that reality,” notes Kwok as she discusses these works and more. It’s a reality where we are endlessly caught between sprawling global systems and private desires and disappointments. We are endlessly connected online, yet the desire to hold a real person remains achingly human. We all know the exhaustion that makes sleep the only place for escape, our dreams the only space for movement. And it is that shared condition that gives the exhibition its conceptual and emotional anchor.
Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe runs until 31 May 2026. Click here for more information.