Hong Kong Gen Z artists show rebellious youthful aesthetic at ‘Free Radicals’ exhibition
Recent art graduates Bethany Man, Elizabeth Li and Aidan Ng confront the anxieties of adulthood in the Goethe Gallery exhibition
Artists do not tend to follow templates. But the will to forge new trajectories is all the more pronounced for a new generation of Hong Kong artists coming of age in a time of great change.
Three young artists, who graduated into an era of algorithmic hyper-efficiency and a rapidly realigning world, confront the anxieties of adulthood in a new exhibition entitled “Free Radicals – New expressions from an untethered generation”.
The fledgling practices of Bethany Man Hoi-ying, Elizabeth Li Shan-shan and Aidan Ng Ho-long are not commercially driven and their art has the wild rebelliousness of youth that makes them all the more authentic, says Kim Lam, co-curator of the show and founder of the gallery Parallel Space.
The fact that the artists graduated between 2023 and 2025 – all from the Chinese University of Hong Kong – makes them representative of a new, “untethered” generation, Lam adds.
Lam and fellow co-curator Enid Tsui, the South China Morning Post’s arts editor, named the exhibition after the biochemical term for an unstable type of molecule that is highly reactive and necessary for sparking critical changes – as is art that resonates with society.