WE ARE THE THINGS MONSTERS LOVE
A Solo Exhibition by Alex Huda
In Collaboration with Holok Chen & the Voidpunks
AUG 18 — 30, 2026
Tomorrow Maybe, 4/F Eaton HK
"How do those rejected by society construct their own systems of meaning through myth, ritual, and unconventional intimacy?"
This documentary portraiture project creates a radical intersection between ancient Chinese shamanic traditions and Hong Kong's emerging Voidpunk counterculture. At its heart lies a powerful new mythology where monsters and outcasts find belonging in each other. By reimagining the Nine Deities from Qu Yuan's 3rd-century BCE poem, Jiu Ge (The Nine Songs), as cyberpunk monsters who spurn humanity but embrace the Voidpunks, the work explores how we can transmute the parts of our identities that society deems alien into sources of divine power and unconventional intimacy.
When I arrived in the Hong Kong megalopolis in 2023, a profound sense of isolation and displacement took hold. As a Canadian-born, South Asian photographer, the city's dense infrastructure mirrored my internal loneliness. I lived as a quiet observer on the margins until the summer of 2024, when I crossed paths with Voidpunk—a radical counterculture of LGBTQ+ individuals, neurodivergent minds, and creative outcasts who reclaim the stigma of being "othered" by forging non-human identities known as Voidsonas. It was here that I met Holok Chen, the Oracle of this community, and the trajectory of my practice shifted forever.
What began as a traditional documentary project quickly dissolved into a living ceremony for society's unchosen. The Voidpunks recognized the "Void" within me and invited me to step out from behind the lens. To confront my own vulnerabilities, I shed my everyday skin, was painted, and created self-portraits of my own Voidsona. In doing so, I found a sanctuary of self-love.
The portraits in this exhibition are not passive observations; they are co-authored acts of sovereignty where every collaborator held full agency over their representation— actively writing their own sacred space within the urban matrix. To honor the cinematic weight of Hong Kong's landscape, the visual language relies on the deliberate, tactile process of analog medium format photography. Alongside these film works, select thermal imagery visualizes the radiant, unseen "divine energy" flowing through the Voidpunks.
We Are the Things Monsters Love invites us to reconsider what it means to be human in a world that demands rigid conformity. Choosing to become a "monster" is not an act of despair; it is a radical reclamation of power. We invite you to step into this sanctuary, look past the masks, and witness a profound truth: that love and belonging are not prizes to be granted by the outside world, but energies to be cultivated from within.