After 10 long months of meticulous probing and painstaking scrutiny of the bowels of the HKSAR art funding shenanigans, 3rd Wave presents you with HEArtifact, a graduation group show by a specially commissioned research committee who took upon their shoulders the colossal undertaking of fact-checking the Hong Kong art world: an exposition featuring verified facts with quantitative data analysis, dark web scuba diving, declassified document references, and eyewitness testimony that some visitors may find deeply disturbing. Together with CIPStephen, SIPSuli, PIMaillori, DIFurqan and COIFeaston, this exhibition brings together cross-referenced financial records, empirical evidence distilled from strata of statistical claims with official government disclosures, Freedom of Information Act releases, and many hush-hush whistleblower accounts. However, certain funding programmes referenced operate under classifications beyond public scrutiny, and specific capabilities described remain inevitably and officially denied by the agencies in question. Our collaborators and participants have chosen to present the resulting materials without the sanitizing filter of institutional caution. Viewer discretion is advised - not for factual-graphical content, but for the psychological impact of recognizing one’s own position within the engineered labyrinth described. What you see on display could well be nothing short of a genuine conspiracy.

 

Seldom does a study's conflict of interest itself have a conflict of interest, and in such magnitude, coincidentally coinciding with even more coincidences, so this time the toothpaste is fully out of the tube. 3rd Wave invites you to simply follow the breadcrumbs to uncover an epic story of cui bono, see for yourself the kingpin and the diddlers who wantonly squander mega-truck loads of public funding right under your very nose, year after year. HEArtifact tells a story that not only do we have an ongoing egregious abuse of trust by a cult with vested interests, but possibly a military-grade gerrymandering of taxpayers’ money being misappropriated across the entire spectrum of cultural and creative industries, into what Adorno and Horkheimer would have termed the culture industry, orchestrated to ensure that only certain kinds of art are encouraged, whereas challenging ideas, alternative educational programmes, diverse expressions, independent spirits are but prime targets for budget cuts, receiving instead censorship and ideological restrictions.

 

HEArtifact did it so you don’t have to: there’s no need to be a statistician, econometrician or data scientist – now’s your chance to see through the sea of invoices and figures in their unadulterated and glorious grandiosity. The purpose of this fact-checking programme is to lay out a desperate hope for all to recognise the symptoms and signs, in order to reset and leverage this unhinged public resource spending programme – to better distribute art funding, to provide adequate support to nurture local artists so that true creativity can flourish, thus improving quality of life for all Hong Kong citizens, bringing home stellar-quality programmes and events that can help increase critical awareness of arts that inspire, and ultimately facilitate opportunities to set the stage for meaningful collaboration on an international level.

 

This is where we start pulling back the curtain. Come see how the dollar spins; behold the matrix of interwoven networks, marvel at the gallery interior walls coated with gold! Join us at the sing-along karaoke booth where you can proudly claim your 5 ½ minutes of fame, before spinning the wheel of the fortunate to see how fortune smiles upon all others except you, and don’t miss the tower’s inferno after opening the door of mystery. Something B.A.D. is awaiting you in a hermetically sealed top-secret Faraday cage!  (Turn page over for more information)

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World premiere of B.A.D. – The Bullshit Art Detector™

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“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than {the need} to produce it.”    - Brandolini’s Principle

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The voluntary merger of International Art English (artspeak) and contemporary art has been providing the art world with infinite amounts of bullshit since its inception at the dawn of the postmodern era, which is still going strong. Whilst the notion of make-believe is a prerequisite for art to function, the art world is nevertheless awash with bullshit so deep that we’re drowning in it.

 

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As any 3 card-trick hustler knows, legerdemain depends for its success on fooling all the audience all the time; any member of the crowd who could point out that the entire operation is a con must be silenced at once. But that was yesterday. For the sake of your sanity, 3rd Wave has undertaken a survey of not only the literature of essential characteristics of bullshit as part of our R&D on B.A.D., but also how it has transmogrified and infected contemporary art practices via the use of and abuse of International Art English, and ultimately was reborn into something now commonly known as artspeak.

 

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In light of this, 3rd Wave, the Xevarion Institute and Ponoor Experiments Inc. embark on a collective crusade to bring you the world’s first Bullshit Art Detector (B.A.D.) ™. We are delighted to announce that after a full year of hard labour, we have now a fully automated syntactical analysis app that can help eliminate the brain fog for all art lovers by revealing the sorcery of artspeak and all its fallacies, where B.A.D. can successfully break down the cowflop that is being weaponised to mislead even the best of us.

 

 

 

art = make believe ↔ palter

 

click counts × likes → bullshit

 

Use B.A.D. to push back the sorcery of artspeak

 

 

 

Hark! An amazing new app that separates art from bullshit that the art world doesn’t want you to know is finally here! B.A.D. will make bullshit artists cry, and your friends can’t stop talking about it, so come to Catalyst to check out the prototype of B.A.D. now. The Bullshit Art Detector will make its debut in HEArtifact exhibition from November 2026, and you’re invited to field test the system before its general release as an Android app in 2027. Simply upload the image of the artwork in question, input an extract from a press release / artist statement / critical commentary with regard to its creative premises, and B.A.D. will be able to analyse the image using our own uniquely trained algorithm to distinguish, unpack and refute all the quantitative baloney at your fingertips.

 

 

 

Bullshits don't make art, but some art smells of bullshit.