2026.3.16—6.30

HEM

6 Yixing Road, Beijiao New Town, Shunde, Foshan, Guangdong, China

From March 16, 2026, He Art Museum (HEM), in collaboration with KADIST, presents the group exhibition Threads of Kinship, bringing over 40 modern and contemporary artists whose works engage with the lived histories of collectivity through material practices of care, autonomy, and chosen kinship across generations and geographies. Building on its first iteration at KADIST Paris (October 2025–January 2026), this second iteration deepens the curatorial dialogue between HEM and KADIST. The newly added works deepen an exploration of the local legacy of Guangdong’s Self-Comb Sisters and engage with the Lingnan cultural context.

Structured around four interwoven curatorial strands the exhibition considers: the formation of female collectives and alternative kinship structures through the power of textiles and questions of body and belonging; how diasporic movement, and extractive and economic systems shape both artistic production and lived experience; the historical and contemporary entanglements between coding, weaving, and technological knowledge; and it looks toward speculative futures and mythologies that reimagine how communities might endure and transform.

Drawing from the collections of KADIST and HEM, alongside select loans, the exhibition brings together contemporary artists whose works engage migration, inheritance, labor, and cultural memory. Pacita Abad’s early Masks series reflects on diasporic movement and textile traditions, Tarik Kiswanson’s Passing considers intergenerational transmission across borders, Yee I-Lann rethinks sovereignty and labor through weaving and archives, and a newly commissioned work by Jaffa Lam collaborates with factory workers and housewives in Hong Kong to foreground women’s often-invisible labor. These works are presented alongside key modernist figures—Pan Yuliang, Chang Dai-chien, Qi Baishi, and Lin Fengmian—whose practices redefined Chinese modernism through processes of reinvention, translation, and cultural inheritance.

The exhibition is curated by Shona Mei Findlay, Yuan Fuca, Marie Martraire (KADIST), and the HEM curatorial team. Threads of Kinship at HEM is supported in part by the Institut français.

He Art Museum x KADIST | Threads of Kinship