Henderson Land x CJ Hendry | AIA Vitality Park, Central Harbourfront | 19–22 March 2026
Free admission | Advance registration required | Asian premiere
Australian hyperrealist CJ Hendry brings her most celebrated installation to Hong Kong for its Asian premiere, presenting a new edition of Flower Market at AIA Vitality Park on the Central Harbourfront across four days that sit at the heart of Art Month 2026. Presented by Henderson Land to mark its 50th anniversary, and organised by Pen & Paper, the work arrives in the city with two site-specific commissions that ground this itinerant installation firmly in its Hong Kong context.
The Work
Flower Market occupies a greenhouse-style pavilion overlooking Victoria Harbour, filling the space with more than 150,000 plush flowers across 26 designs. The installation operates through accumulation and scale: individual units of modest size combine to produce an environment of considerable sensory force, in which colour, texture and repetition work together to produce the perceptual disorientation that has become a hallmark of Hendry’s practice.
The work sits within a broader tradition of installation art concerned with the relationship between natural form and human reproduction — between the organic and the manufactured, the singular and the serial. Hendry’s contribution to that tradition is characterised by the particular material register she employs: plush, with its associations of comfort, childhood and tactile reassurance, introduced into a context that might otherwise demand more conventionally art-world-approved materials. The tension this produces is productive and deliberate.
Hong Kong Commissions
Two works were produced specifically for this presentation and constitute the conceptual anchor of the Hong Kong edition.
Henderson Flower engages with the architectural vocabulary of The Henderson, Henderson Land’s flagship commercial tower in Central, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. The building’s petal-derived structural geometry — already one of the more discussed architectural interventions on the current Hong Kong skyline — finds its soft-sculptural counterpart in Hendry’s commission, producing a dialogue between built form and plush object that operates across registers of scale, material and permanence.
Bauhinia addresses Hong Kong’s emblem flower directly, rendering Bauhinia blakeana in Hendry’s signature oversized plush. The work functions simultaneously as civic homage and as a more searching inquiry into the nature of symbolic representation: what is produced when a politically and culturally loaded symbol is translated into a medium associated with softness, comfort and the suspension of critical distance? In Hong Kong in 2026, the question carries particular weight.
Context
Flower Market arrives during Art Month 2026 at a moment of continued consolidation for Hong Kong’s position within the global contemporary art ecology. The work’s free admission and public harbourfront location place it in deliberate contrast to the fair-adjacent programming that characterises much of Art Month’s official schedule — offering an encounter with contemporary art practice that is, by design, available to the entire city rather than to any particular segment of it.
Hendry’s practice, which has developed from hyperrealistic drawing through to large-scale experiential installation, has been the subject of sustained critical attention as well as significant popular engagement. Flower Market Hong Kong represents her first major institutional-scale project in Asia and is, by some measure, the most prominent non-commercial public art event of Art Month 2026.
Artist
CJ Hendry (b. 1988, Brisbane) lives and works in New York. Her practice encompasses hyperrealistic drawing, soft sculpture and large-scale immersive installation. Previous major projects include Flower Market (Brooklyn, New York), Monochrome (Mojave Desert), and works exhibited internationally across the United States, Europe and Australia. Flower Market Hong Kong is her Asian debut.
Presented By
Henderson Land Development Company Limited, in its 50th anniversary year. Organised by Pen & Paper.
Practical Information
Venue: AIA Vitality Park, 33 Man Kwong Street, Central Harbourfront, Hong Kong
Dates: 19–22 March 2026
Hours: To be confirmed via official event website
Admission: Free. Advance registration mandatory. E-ticket required for entry. One complimentary plush flower per registered visitor. Additional works available for purchase at HK$38.
Access: Hong Kong Station (Exit F) / Central Station (Exit A)
