Shanghai Masque: John Hejduk’s Work marks the first exhibition of John Hejduk’s work in Asia. Co-curated by Yung Ho Chang, GE Ming, and Weiling He, the exhibition was hosted at the Power Station of Art (PSA) in Shanghai. Spanning 8,000 square feet, it brought together 76 drawings and 7 models from the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), alongside six large-scale reconstructions produced by students and community volunteers, a projection installation, and a film. The exhibition drew significant public and scholarly engagement, attracting 58,476 visitors and 23,805 participants across five panel discussions.
Claiming himself a realist, Hejduk stands as a singular figure of idealism in late twentieth-century architecture. At a moment when architectural production increasingly aligned with economic and institutional demands, he sustained a practice grounded in speculative inquiry. Working across drawing, painting, poetry, text, installation, and built form, Hejduk expanded architecture beyond construction into a field of thought. His work, often unbuilt, proposes architecture as a medium for reflection, narrative, and imagination. The exhibition takes its title from the “masque,” a performative form combining theater, dance, and stagecraft popular among the English nobility in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A masque is at once a performance, setting, and disguise. This layered condition resonates with Hejduk’s work, which oscillates between apparent formal clarity and persistent ambiguity, where what appears transparent often conceals, and what seems obscure invites interpretation.
Shanghai Masque situates Hejduk’s work within both historical and contemporary contexts. On one hand, it traces a progression in his thinking from early formal investigations to later narrative and symbolic complexity. On the other hand, it foregrounds the persistent opacity that defines his work, in which meaning is never fully revealed. In this space between revelation and concealment, the exhibition proposes architecture as an autonomous domain of inquiry, operating through approximation, imagination, and critical distance. At a time when architecture is increasingly constrained by external forces, revisiting Hejduk’s work invites a reconsideration of its disciplinary core. His practice suggests the possibility of an architecture that, like pure mathematics, sustains its own internal logic while remaining open to interpretation. Within this realm of approximations, Shanghai Masque calls for a renewed engagement with architecture as a speculative and independent mode of thought.
For audiences in Asia, the exhibition not only introduces Hejduk’s work but also prompts reflection on parallel traditions of ambiguity, symbolism, and figurative poetics. Rather than a one-directional transmission, it opens a space for cross-cultural interpretation, in which Hejduk’s masques resonate with and are re-read through existing cultural frameworks. In this exchange, the exhibition extends beyond presentation to become a site of dialogue, inviting new interpretations and potential continuations of the architectural imagination he set in motion.