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Coco Capitán, the polymath artist - writer, photographer, designer, painter, sculptor, videographer, and installation artist - first rose to prominence as a fashion photographer. She initially captured global attention through her collaboration with Gucci, where her handwritten slogans, including the searching question, “What are we going to do with all this future?” cut through fashion’s gloss with something raw and human. “It wasn’t so much a protest but perhaps a reinvention of the way we are used to looking at luxury," says Capitán.
For Capitán’s Hong Kong debut, timed to coincide with Art Basel, she presents Imagination Investments - a three-part, city-spanning installation commissioned by Swire Properties. The work unfolds across Hong Kong like a passing thought: part exhibition, part atmosphere. A meditation on memory, longing, and connection, it slips quietly into the rhythms of the city, asking not to be understood all at once, but felt.
“I’ve always been drawn to places shaped by movement,” Capitán says. “Hong Kong is a city in constant transit. I wanted the work to exist within that ̶ to feel like something you come across, and somehow recognise.”
Born in Spain and based in London, Capitán’s practice spans photography, painting, and text, yet everything begins with writing - four pages each morning, fragments of dreams and passing thoughts that quietly seed what follows. Her phrases - misspelled, crossed out, sometimes reversed - are not stylised but instinctive, shaped by her dyslexia and ADHD. What was once corrected becomes, in her work, a form of authorship: unfiltered, immediate, and entirely her own.
She studied at the Royal College of Art, where her practice broadened beyond the single image. Photography remains a core element, but it is never isolated - always in dialogue with memory, language, and the subconscious. Her pictures feel both candid and composed, circling themes of youth, identity, and the quiet tension between vulnerability and performance.
Running beneath it all is a long-standing obsession with the sea. “I’m not quite sure where it comes from,” she says. “Maybe it’s the sense of adventure. If I’d been born in a different time, I would have loved to be a pirate.” What interests her is not just the romance, but the structure: uniforms, codes, the idea of a self-contained world. In her series Naïvy, she photographed U.S. Navy uniforms - struck by their resemblance to Japanese school dress - treating them less as documentation and more as symbols of belonging. “When you’re sailing for a long time, the whole universe is reduced to that tiny space,” she says. “Without that community, you couldn’t survive. There’s something very poetic in that.” In Hong Kong, a city with a deep maritime history, that fixation finds a natural echo.
Imagination Investments unfolds in three distinct chapters. The first, at ArtisTree, is Naïvy which gathers over 50 works shaped by the ocean - exploring freedom, nostalgia, and the sailor as a figure suspended between escape and belonging. Here, visitors receive invitations to become “lost memory collectors" selecting and adopting forgotten images, turning the act of viewing into something quietly personal.
“I Read While I Walk” threads through the city as a near half-kilometre text installation, embedding Capitán’s handwritten phrases into everyday routes. “It doesn’t require you to enter a gallery" she says. “It meets you as you move.”
The final chapter, “Memory Adoption Bureau” unfolds high above the city as an expansive archive of over 10,000 anonymous photographs collected over a decade. Here, visitors adopt fragments of other lives, becoming custodians of memories that are not theirs, yet feel strangely familiar.
There is a lightness, too - a sense of play. Billboards scattered across the city mimic financial advertising, leaning into Hong Kong’s identity as a global economic hub. The title itself, Imagination Investments, hovers between fiction and fact. “I wanted people to question it” she says.
The subtitle reads: Further than money will ever take you. This is not a critique, but a quiet recalibration. “Money was once imaginary too” she notes. “The real power isn’t in it - It’s in imagination.”
Capitán’s work resists certainty. It lingers in the in-between - the half-formed thought, the fleeting feeling, the sentence that doesn’t quite resolve. Personal without confession, poetic without insistence, it offers no answers, only space.
For Capitán, the image is never simply what is seen. It is what is remembered, misremembered, or imagined into being. Before any photograph, there is always a sentence - loosening the idea, letting it drift, waiting for it to take shape. “Images are more powerful than people realize”.
Imagination Investments runs from March 19 to April 26, 2026, across ArtisTree and Taikoo Place, Hong Kong.