WOW is one of many cultural creations inspired by the resurgence of witchcraft, which in turn was spurred by the revival of interest in astrological, spiritual and wellness practices. From tarot cards and birth chart readings to spiritual response therapy and crystals, recent years have seen a range of previously niche and subcultural practices become part of mainstream culture.

Conceived before the social unrest of 2019 and the pandemic, then put together mainly remotely over numerous emails, Zoom calls and WhatsApp messages, the show was formulated during a particularly challenging time for Hong Kong. “People have long been looking to the stars or other greater forces for guidance,” says Ali Wong. “It’s only natural for them to try to counterbalance the uncertainty of the outside world with a greater understanding of their inner world and emotions. This is especially true in the face of things such as broken home-ownership dreams, unemployment, runaway inflation, political turmoil, climate change and the ever-present pandemic.”

Many blame capitalism as the root cause of many issues we face today, indicating a need for change. If we take logic, rationalism, materialism and tangibility as defining characteristics of capitalism, magic is essentially the opposite. At WOW, the artists implore us to rethink the ways in which we need to change, whether it’s through caring for nature or understanding spiritual awareness and our own histories of it, as well as challenging the idea of productivity in a capitalist system. The solution, perhaps, is to become a witch, or someone who finds alternative ways to rebuild failed, broken systems.

For example, Ysabelle Cheung created a haven that emphasises the need to re-centre and empower oneself through rest, meditation and healing. Witch House Residency (2022) is built like a child’s fort, inside which visitors can read, write or take a nap; the only requirement is that they sign the guest book before leaving. Tsang notes that writers and other creatives need space to think, and sometimes do nothing, to create. “This idea of being non-productive is important, especially these days, when we’re overproducing everything from content to material goods.”

Sam Yi Yao Chao promotes honouring nature as an act of healing by seamlessly merging natural materials including plants and twigs with manmade substances to form Sway Gently, A Bayan’s Breeze (2022), a wearable, sculptural piece inspired by workers’ gloves. Meanwhile, acclaimed Beijing-based video artist Wang Tuo created a four-part series on shamanism in China, focusing on the enduring legacy of traditional superstitions and religious beliefs that still persist despite efforts to eradicate them. “It’s just another way of saying, ‘I’ve had enough of this; I’m going to carve out my own world’, under the cloak of witchcraft or magic,” says Tsang of the impact that a belief in magic can have.  

Earlier this summer, similar to WOW but in the starkly different setting of the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences, the exhibition Scientific Witchery was staged by Para Site and curated by Kobe Ko of art group Post Human Narratives. The bustling opening of the exhibition could perhaps be attributed to the marked increase in interest for all things magical, fantastical and celestial.

“We’re all really into [manga] Sailor Moon and all kinds of magical girls,” says Ko. The exhibition’s name is taken from the lyrics of a fantasy anime track, and alludes to the ambiguous relationship between science, magic and witchcraft. The show features works almost exclusively by female artists. Among them is Hou-lam Tsui’s Magic Soap (2022), which features heart-shaped wands made of soap, an embodiment of feminine magic in the domestic sphere. The imagery is similar to that in Sailor Moon and other Japanese manga and anime, and draws on fantasy subcultures to comment on the status of witches in contemporary society. “Our generation grew up seeing Japanese animations,” Ko explains. “We absorb a lot of different identities from that.”

Usually, Ko says, there is perceived to be a direct conflict between magic and science, with one being abstract and the other rational. But she notes that traditionally in many Asian cultures, the same person who performs spiritual rituals also carries out medical procedures. “In western medicine, they interpret illness separately in terms of the mind and body, but with something like TCM [traditional Chinese medicine], they cure you as a whole, not just the specific part that’s hurting or ill. We’re trying to rethink and reimagine what could be considered science and witchcraft.”

Historically and around the world, many artists have gravitated towards mysticism and the occult. The art world at large is seeing a revival of interest in showcasing works which grapple with otherworldly themes and those by artists whose perspectives have been historically ignored and underrepresented.

The main exhibition for this year’s Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani, chief curator of the High Line Art programme in New York, was inspired by Leonora Carrington’s story Milk of Dreams. A little-known but important surrealist artist, Carrington wrote an imaginative narrative and illustrated it with vivid drawings of mythical hybrid creatures that inhabit a surrealist setting of the author’s creation—a world filled with possibilities. Alemani built this reimagining of what the world could be into the show, again offering a revival of the feminine divine.

For the first time in its 127-year history, the biennale’s main exhibition, which is staged in addition to 80 national pavilions, features a majority of women, gender-non-conforming people, and people of colour. The show was further divided into small subsections: one, The Witch’s Cradle, was dedicated to showcasing women artists who worked with occult traditions. 

Although not part of the main exhibition, Angela Su represented Hong Kong and showcased a film at the Hong Kong Pavilion that coincidentally corresponds with Carrington’s book. Here she posits levitation as a medium through which change can occur as a means of dealing with the consequences of a chaotic world.

Magic and mysticism were in the air in Venice: coinciding with the biennale was the show Magic and Surrealism: Enchanted Modernity, which took Grazina Subelyte, associate curator at the Penny Guggenheim Collection in Venice, five years to put together. “Surreal has perhaps been the most used word to describe the state of the world over the past three years,” she says.

The surrealism movement was founded and developed during the period from the First to the Second World War, another time of great turmoil and change; Subelyte draws comparisons to today’s world, citing the pandemic, climate change and the Ukraine war as examples of upheaval. “We’re looking for answers in different places. When logic and rationality fail us, we start looking for alternative ways to understand the world and universe. Maybe by tapping into mysticism, tarot and astrology, that’s what we’re doing now.”

Max Ernst was one of several artists from the movement who fled Europe during the war and moved to New York, and reflected that trauma in their work. Included in the Guggenheim exhibition, Ernst’s painting Europe after the Rain II (1940-1942) eerily foreshadows what could very well be the apocalypse. Painted during the Second World War, it features a bird-man creature peering at a female figure surveying a grotesque landscape.

Surrealism rejected rationality and pursued other channels such as dreams, the unconscious and the irrational, as well as magic, myths, alchemy and the occult. Derived from the Latin word occulere, the word “occult” defined things which were hidden or concealed from the human eye—another reason why human imagination was so significant for the surrealists. “To them, our own imagination was already a certain kind of magic,” says Subelyte. “It reveals what is invisible. It also highlights their belief of the omnipotence of thought: that ideas and desires can be strong enough to change reality around us.”

The show also included paintings inspired by the Marseilles Tarot Deck, a popular 17th-century deck, which the surrealists reinvented by replacing the original iconography with noted figures and symbols important to the movement, including Charles Baudelaire, Hélène Smith and Sigmund Freud.

But, as with the biennale, it’s Carrington who is the protagonist of this exhibition. Eight of Carrington’s stunning rare pieces are on view, including Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen (1975), which depicts three witches—including the artist’s own witch alter ego—in a kitchen, preparing to cook; the painting compares cooking with magic and alchemy, as food undergoes an almost magical transformation in becoming a dish, and the domestic space becomes a source of power.

Previously married to both Carrington and Guggenheim, Ernst’s relationship with the former also has a strong presence in the show. In his striking Attirement of the Bride (1940), he depicts Carrington as a witch and an enchantress, while Carrington depicts Ernst as an alchemist and shamanic figure in her Portrait of Max Ernst (c 1939).

Surrealists often viewed themselves as visionaries or witches, elevating the artist’s role in society. The correlation between magic and art is that both have the ability to heal through the power of transformation, an enduring quality finding resonance both then and now. The turn to mysticism was “born out of a need to understand yourself and your role in the world”, says Subelyte, describing the existential angst universally fuelling most artists’ practices. “It’s a way to tap into our imagination and thoughts to change our reality for the better.”

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