Garden Whisperers: Attuning to Ecologies of Coexistence

HART HAUS is pleased to present Garden Whisperers: Attuning to Ecologies of Coexistence, an award-winning exhibition project from the Curatorship Incubation Programme. Curated by Mankit Lai, the group exhibition features works by Chen Dandizi, Melody Qingmei Li, Florence Yuk-ki Lee, Liao Jiaming, Green Mok, Tang Kwok Hin, Shawn Pakhin Tang, Timur Si-Qin, Tong Wenmin, Benjamin Ryser, Dorothy Wong Ka Chung, Chung Wong, and Woo Hannah.

Garden Whisperers transforms HART HAUS into a night garden. Neither wholly natural nor entirely human-made, the garden is a site rooted in the entanglement of socio-cultural and ecological forces, growing and evolving through the ongoing interactions between humans, more-than-human beings, and their shared environments. Taking the garden as a metaphor, the exhibition invites visitors to wander through the nocturnal landscape and attune to the subtle relationships that sustain coexistence.

Often imagined as a highly developed “concrete jungle,” Hong Kong emerges instead as a unique metropolis where verdant mountains, coastlines, and rich ecologies meet dense urbanism. Taking this city as its point of departure, the exhibition brings together 13 artists working across Asia whose practices explore often overlooked dimensions of coexistence, extending and reimagining the entangled conditions of city and nature. Together, their works weave a tapestry of life’s quiet whispers, inviting audiences to attend to the multiple dialogues embedded within symbiotic existence—adaptation, negotiation, conflict, collaboration, and care—while sensing the ever-moving pulse of life that course between urban and natural worlds.

At a time of urgent ecological challenges, the exhibition invites audiences to reconsider the fundamental relationship between city and nature. Subtitled Attuning to Ecologies of Coexistence, it proposes a post-urban vision that moves beyond human-centred perspectives, foregrounding our surroundings as living ecologies co-constituted by people, animals, plants, technologies, and cultures, and revealing how diverse forms of life continuously shape, influence, and depend upon one another.

Spanning HART HAUS’s two gallery spaces and terrace garden, Garden Whisperers invites visitors to listen closely to the many “whisperers” who dwell alongside us. Here, the garden is not merely a metaphor but a place for the ongoing practice of attention, care, and coexistence—one that opens imaginative possibilities for a more sustainable future within an ever-evolving post-urban ecology.