ARTISTS TO WATCH 2025

As the PRESTIGE team geared up for Hong Kong's annual art-athon, we also set ourselves the task of identifying the emerging talents from 10 East Asian countries, who should all be registering on your cultural radar this year. The following 20 virtuosi made our final cut.

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MICHELE CHU
HONG KONG

Multi-disciplinary artist Michele Chu uses various materials to investigate subjects of intimacy, ritual, and human connection, and the ways in which the body responds to public tension or private introspection. Her Inti Gym installation at Tai Kwun in 2023 encouraged visitors to sit on either side of a division and read questions to each other from a prompt as a way of starting conversation, and getting to know each other by revealing more of themselves in a form of “intimacy training”.

In residence in London as part of the Delfina Foundation’s Performance as Process programme in 2023, she further explored notions of loss and grief through the medium of food and multisensory performance. Her 2023 debut solo exhibition, You, Trickling, at PHD Group in Hong Kong, which dealt with confronting loss, was widely acknowledged. An ensemble of tunnels and passageways, the space enclosed the visitor in umbilical recollections of birth, menstruation, excretion, and death in pieces imbued with intimacy and vulnerability. It’s a ritualistic masterpiece of a meditative journey that cleanses, soothes, and unsettles by turns. Again showing with PHD at Art Basel Hong Kong 2025, she promises an interactive installation that mimics a domestic kitchen to explore themes of cooking and mourning.

LI HEI DI
CHINA

Li Hei Di is living the moment. The Shenyang-born, London-based artist first came to our attention at London’s Pippy Holdsworth gallery in a solo show, with work that straddles a line somewhere between figuration, abstraction, and the biomorphic. Influences from the worlds of film, literature, and music abound, as works resonate and echo with