Imagination Investments

 Imagination Investments is the first exhibition in Hong Kong by acclaimed Spanish artist Coco Capitán (born 1992, Seville; lives in London). Presented across three spaces as well as in the streets of Hong Kong, Imagination Investments brings together photographs, paintings on canvas and sails, poems, sculptures, an in situ project, a participatory installation, and public interventions. All the works incorporate elements of Capitán's idiosyncratic handwritten texts, which have received sustained critical attention over the past decade.
Navigating between personal research and commissions for global brands such as Gucci and Dior, as well as major magazines including Vogue US and The New York Times Magazine, Capitán's practice is nourished by intimate references to navigation, childhood, sport, and dreams — often infused with an acute sense of humour tempered by melancholy.

Naïvy

Entitled Naïvy and presented at ArtisTree art center, the first chapter of the exhibition revolves around Naïvy in 50 (Definitive) Photographs (2022), a long-term project imagining a nautical universe populated by "lost sailors," Capitán's quasi alter egos who recur throughout her work. These hand-printed colour photographs are an ode to the fragility of freedom and to the nostalgia of youth. Paired with their handwritten titles, each image forms a concise visual poem.
Facing this body of work is a selection of Capitán's navy-inflected works: vintage sailor blouses embroidered with the artist's characteristic handwriting and stretched over frames (Uniforms for the Naïvy, 2020); a large painting depicting a sailor bathing, accompanied by its corresponding Polaroid studies (Something Deeper Baths Ltd. (In Search For), 2019); blue drawings engaging with popular naval iconography (Naïvy Doodles, 2021); a large diptych employing her signature technique of painting on refurbished and reconfigured sails (BLU357 BLUE3 [Bluest Blue], 2024); as well as drawings on hotel letterhead featuring navy emblems (Flag Alternatives for the Lost Navy, 2019).

I Read While I Walk

The second chapter of the exhibition is I Read While I Walk (2026), a large-scale in situ project presented on the floor of the walkway. It displays a broad selection of Capitán's characteristic handwritten aphorisms and poems.
Resembling personal jottings, these texts were produced at a near-daily rhythm between 2010 and 2025. Collected in Words on Paper, published in 2025 by Chose Commune, they unfold as fragments of thought?oscillating between intimacy and public address, private reflection and shared statement.

Memory Adoption Bureau

Presented at 67/F One Island East, the Hong Kong iteration of Memory Adoption Bureau continues Coco Capitán's ongoing participatory project, inviting visitors to adopt individual memories in the form of vernacular photographs. Conceived in 2020 and first presented at Galerie Jean-Kenta Gauthier in Paris, the project stems from the artist's sustained engagement with vernacular photography. Often regarded as surplus, anonymous, or without value, these intimate images—once preserved within personal or individual contexts—frequently fall outside both private spheres and institutional or collective archives.
By redistributing them one by one, Memory Adoption Bureau proposes a reallocation of responsibility, reframing questions of authorship, ownership and value. Engaging with collective memory, Memory Adoption Bureau suggests that photography preserves time not only through institutional archives but through shared responsibility and continued care. The work stages a movement between the individual and the collective: what escapes private remembrance may still enter shared care.
Visitors are invited to select a "lost memory," complete an adoption passport at the bureau, and assume responsibility for its future.

Imagination Investments — Billboards

Imagination Investments, the title of Coco Capitán's first exhibition in Hong Kong, encapsulates her practice as it moves between personal research and commissioned work for global brands and major magazines. It could equally evoke the name of the artist's own creative enterprise.
Presented on billboards across the Soho and Lan Kwai Fong districts as a wry re-appropriation of advertising language, the project reproduces one of Capitán's paintings in which she adopts the visual codes and aspirational slogans of financial institutions—introducing a unicorn as a licence to dream.