DeTour 2025 Transforms Hong Kong’s PMQ With Installations That Reveal the Hidden Meaning of Everyday Objects

deTour 2025 Hong Kong, titled The Shape of Yearning, arrives from 28 November to 7 December 2025, turning PMQ into a ten-day creative laboratory of exhibitions, installations, workshops, tours, and performances. Curated by designer Adonian Chan and organized by PMQ, with sponsorship from the Cultural and Creative Industries Development Agency (CCIDA), this edition invites visitors to reflect on desire, interpretation, and the emotional charge embedded in everyday objects.

Featuring 17 installations and exhibitions across PMQ’s Courtyard & Marketplace and the Qube, the festival gathers designers from Hong Kong, Mainland China, and abroad—including a major international commission by Switzerland’s Encor Studio.

deTour 2025 Hong Kong - Interpreting Daily Life Through Design

Founded as a platform for creative exchange, deTour has grown into one of Hong Kong’s leading design festivals, showcasing forward-thinking ideas from emerging and established designers. PMQ—revitalised in 2014 and now home to over 100 creative studios—remains the festival’s anchor venue and a symbolic hub for cross-disciplinary innovation.

The 2025 theme explores how desire shapes our interactions with the world. Guided by the festival’s Design Trichotomy, visitors are encouraged to read objects through:

1. Aesthetics and materiality

2. Sociocultural and historical context

3. Speculative, emotional, and value-driven narratives

Curator Adonian Chan suggests that design is omnipresent, yet the deeper meanings embedded in familiar objects often go unnoticed. deTour 2025 challenges visitors to ask what we long for—and how objects reflect or suppress those desires.

Immersive Installations Explore Memory, Identity, and Perception

A major highlight is the Hong Kong debut of Encor Studio, the Swiss collective known for kinetic sculptures and sound-based environments. Their commissioned work, ALCOVE IN SITU, reimagines the Qube as a responsive, ambient landscape composed of light, electrochromic films, and resonant sound compositions. The installation dissolves boundaries between viewer and object, exploring memory, presence, absence, and sensory perception.

Four feature exhibitions respond to The Shape of Yearning through material experimentations and conceptual depth:

• TOUN 亠 (Renee Neoh & Samuel Choi) presents Home Ecology – The Philo Modular System, an aluminium home ecosystem designed for flexible, compact urban living.

• Shunta Sakamoto introduces Instrument.Play.Graphics, a modular graphic synthesiser blending gesture, sound, and visual composition into a multisensory graphic design environment.

• Lucia Massari reinterprets Venetian glass traditions in primavera, a series of sculptural lamps inspired by Arcimboldo’s floral portraits.

• Nopqrst unveils Trueform, a series of graphics and aluminium sculptures that fossilise glue traces left by urban posters, expanding into an AR environment where digital and physical traces coexist.

12 Open-Call Projects Expand the Narrative

From more than 200 submissions, 12 selected works highlight the festival’s spirit of experimentation. These include robotics, 3D printing, collaborative identity studies, and new material proposals:

• GROOVIDO – A Battle of Beasts: ceramic-printed bricks reinterpret traditional Chinese board games.

• Architecture and All | AAA – Becoming: Aerated Identities: inflatable PVC mask installations exploring the performance of identity.

• Embracefloral × Arfalization – BloomDentity: 3D-printed vases created using MBTI personality data to express evolving selfhood.

Workshops, tours, and public programs broaden the visitor experience with more than 10 workshops and 40 sessions across art-tech, craft, sound, and wellness. Highlights include an AI design workshop linked to AAA’s installation and a visual diary workshop reflecting on the creative processes of influential designers.

Guided tours provide contextual insight, while Creative Voices talks and live performances—including appearances by Encor Studio and an edition of designer Hector Chan’s Design Club—animate PMQ throughout the festival.

The festival continues its commitment to nurturing creativity in young audiences through deTour Kids, presented with birdintree, offering hands-on parent-child design activities that support early creative development.

Written by Otávio Santiago, a multidisciplinary designer exploring the intersection of emotion, form, and technology. His practice spans graphic, motion, and 3D design, bridging digital and physical experiences.