Ellen Pau: She Moves

Ellen Pau: She Moves is the first US survey exhibition of the work of Ellen Pau, one of Hong Kong’s most influential and pioneering artists. The exhibition showcases Pau’s multifaceted artistic practice, featuring fourteen video works and installations from the late 1980s to the present. Rather than following a linear narrative, these works trace the shifts and turns of an artistic language developed in close dialogue with Hong Kong’s transformations—where personal trajectories and collective histories continually mirror and reflect one another.

Emerging in the 1980s and ’90s, Pau belongs to a generation of artists in Hong Kong whose practices developed amid rapid economic growth and vibrant commercial film and media industries. This period also saw the rise of community-based initiatives in the arts, with artists building their own infrastructures, exemplified by Pau’s co-founding of Videotage, an artist-run collective dedicated to new media art, in 1986. Pau taught herself video art through voracious reading and enrollment in workshops and screening programs organized by Phoenix Cine Club and experimental theater company Zuni Icosahedron, which familiarized her with a wide range of experimental approaches and cultivated her distinctive sensibility as an artist. Aside from her artistic practice, Pau worked as a radiographer at Queen Mary Hospital for nearly forty years. This professional background in medical and scientific imaging has been pivotal to the development of her visual language.

Across the years, the cultural milieu of Hong Kong has been a recurring touchstone for Pau, with the city’s colonial history and present struggles informing what can be understood as the artist’s highly personal modes of expression. Pau addresses the contemporary political context of Hong Kong without falling into nostalgia or offering direct commentary; rather, she alludes to shared experiences through emotion, harnessing the capacity of sound and image to preserve collective memory. Remnants of political ruptures are also visible in Pau’s efforts to connect gender issues with the city’s civil politics, transforming the female body into a battlefield for subjective awareness while raising prescient questions about the truthfulness of machine-produced images. The electronic medium, which the artist rigorously engages, is a source from which Pau communicates a poetic and implicit political commentary.

Ellen Pau: She Moves is curated by Freya Chou, guest curator.

Ellen Pau: She Moves will be accompanied by a new catalog edited by Freya Chou. Chou most recently curated the Taipei Biennial 2023 and was responsible for Pau’s last survey exhibition at Para Site, Hong Kong, in 2018. The publication includes contributions by Chou; New York-based curator and writer Lumi Tan; Lauren Cornell, Artistic Director, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York, USA; Pan Lu, a scholar, curator, and video artist based in Hong Kong; and Jen Liu, an artist based in New York, USA. It also includes Conversation with the Moon, a conversation between Chou and an AI chatbot trained on information about Pau’s work and life. The catalog is published by SculptureCenter, New York, and designed by RGBK, Hong Kong (led by Tomson Chan).

Ellen Pau (b. 1961, Hong Kong) is an artist, curator, and educator who has played a major role in the development and promotion of Hong Kong’s art scene. She co-founded Videotage, an influential Hong Kong media arts organization, in 1986, and founded the related Microwave International New Media Arts Festival in 1996. Her work has been shown in film festivals and exhibitions worldwide, including the first Kwangju Biennale (1995); the second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (1996); the Liverpool Biennial (2003); Taipei Biennial (2023); and Sharjah Biennial (2025). Her work is in the collections of M+, Hong Kong; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hong Kong Museum of Art; and Griffith University, Nathan, Australia.

Freya Chou is a Taiwan-born curator, writer, and editor. Over the course of her career, she has worked with institutions of various scales, ranging from major museums to nonprofits. Her curatorial work, showcasing global contemporary art from the perspective of East Asia, demonstrates a commitment to bringing together diverse publics and foregrounding the rich interconnections between visual, performing, and literary arts. She is co-curator of “New Visions 2027”—the forthcoming Henie Onstad Triennial of Photography and New Media in Oslo. From 2015 to 2019, she worked at Para Site in Hong Kong as the institution’s inaugural Curator of Education and Public Programs. Her notable curatorial projects include “Small World” Taipei Biennial 2023, co-curated with Brian Kuan Wood and Reem Shadid; Curatorial Council member of the 58th Carnegie International (2022); Hong Kong’s participation at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); and the 10th Shanghai Biennial (2014). Her work spans internationally, with curatorial projects at Museo d’Arte Orientale, Turin; M+, Hong Kong; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Ilham Gallery, Kuala Lumpur among others. She has worked with several organizations on research projects and edited and contributed writing to many artist books, magazines, and exhibition catalogs.