Covid-19 has confined many of us to our homes for much of this year. It can wear you down. City-dwellers as far apart as New York, London and Paris are rethinking whether they really want to live in cramped city spaces or move to the countryside for more space and cleaner air. For those of us living in Hong Kong, one of the world’s most densely populated cities, space is a luxury that many cannot afford. Recent political uncertainties have also led many to reflect on the idea of home and where that home might be. In his latest project, “Home and Nonhome” artist Leung Chi-wo explores the physical and emotional side of our most intimate environment.

We have introduced the Japanese post-war radical art collective Gutai to you on earlier episodes of The Works. Takesada Matsutani was a key member of the “second generation” of the collective, the Gutai Art Association, from the early 1960s into the 1970s. For 60 years, he has been using unique techniques and materials that include pouring vinyl glue and inflating it by blowing air into it. Matsutani was initially inspired to create his signature circular and blob-like forms by blood samples he had seen through a microscope in the laboratory of a friend in the 1960s. His first Hong Kong exhibition at Hauser and Wirth features a new series of mixed-media paintings, works on paper and a site-specific installation.

In the 1930s and 1940s, a new form of music flourished in Hong Kong and Guangdong. It was known as “spirit music”, and combined Western and jazz styles, and instruments such as the xylophone, violin, saxophone and drums, with Chinese instruments like the erhu. Musically, as the genre developed in the 1920s, it incorporated both tunes from Cantonese opera and newly written pieces. The lively and upbeat music became popular in teahouses, dance halls and nightclubs. It is not such a well-known style of music today, but there are still scholars and musicians who play it, as Billy Lee, from our sister programme 藝坊星期天 has been finding out.