Hong Kong artist dismayed as works stolen hours before exhibition due to open

Hong Kong police are investigating the suspected theft of five styrofoam sculptures created by local artist Keith Lam Yan-kit. The sculptures were discovered missing from Hong Kong City Hall in Central hours before the opening of a major new exhibition.

At just after 2.30pm on Friday afternoon, officers received a report from the Microwave International New Media Arts Festival 2026 about the missing art pieces, which are part of an eight-piece work. The case has been classified as theft and assigned to the Central district crime investigation team.

An officer from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) at the scene said a carton containing five of the eight pieces intended for the exhibition was understood to have been delivered to the venue earlier. The carton subsequently disappeared, and police would coordinate with City Hall management to review CCTV footage as they tried to trace the missing items.

According to a police source, the five artworks were last seen on Wednesday afternoon, when exhibition staff moved them into the venue ahead of installation. Their disappearance was discovered on Friday as staff prepared to put the pieces on display.

The source said that after installation work from 9am and 8pm, City Hall staff closed the exhibition hall’s entrances and exits – the only areas covered by CCTV cameras.

The stolen artworks were insured for their production fee of HK$160,000 (US$20,500), including the original machine used to create them. Lam, currently an artist-in-residence at the National Asian Culture Center in South Korea, was profoundly dismayed by the incident.

“I am really sad. It’s such an important work. I started the series in 2013. It was after a few years when I felt a bit lost artistically and I found my direction again with this work,” he said.

“Because I used real-time online data to make these blocks, they cannot ever be remade. Microwave is an extremely important festival for me and that makes me doubly sad.”

The work – One Day Social Sculpture – could be seen partially installed in one of the rooms at the venue. Eight shelves are hanging on a wall, each with a date from 2013 to 2014 underneath it. The three unstolen pieces of the work are resting on the shelves. The jagged styrofoam pieces were made by a machine using real-time social media data to carve them into blocks.

Lam said the idea came from the famous conceptual artist Joseph Beuys’ quote – “Everyone is an artist” – and was based around the notion of creating sculptures from society.

Lam said that he could see no political motive behind the incident, adding that stealing five out of the eight pieces would not make much of a financial return on the black market.

The sculptures were to be featured in the festival’s main exhibition, The Science of Immateriality, which opens on Saturday and runs until November 8.

Curated by Joel Kwong, the exhibition explored the intersection of technology, data, and intangible realities, examining how digital concepts manifest in physical spaces.

The Microwave Festival, which marks its 30th anniversary this year, focuses on bringing forward-looking, technology-driven media art to Hong Kong and on challenging audiences to reflect on contemporary societal themes.