Kiang Malingue is a contemporary art gallery in Hong Kong, showing emerging and established artists. Previously operating under the name Edouard Malingue Gallery, the gallery was founded by Frenchman Edouard Malingue – hailing from a family well established in the world of art – and Lorraine Kiang, who was previously in charge of the Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art Department at Christie’s in New York.

Kiang Malingue has staged over 100 exhibitions over the past 13 years, in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, where it opened a branch in 2016.

Lundgren+Lindqvist has worked with the gallery since 2014; a relationship which started with the redesign of the gallery’s visual identity. For this first project, the visual identity was built around the concept of a reoccurring stroke divided in three sections, aptly titled ‘the Trisection’. The Trisection was an abstraction of the gallery name’s three words and a representation of the three strokes needed to make a readable E (as in Edouard) or M (for Malingue). The visual identity Lundgren+Lindqvist developed helped the gallery to firmly establish themselves as one of the most interesting venues for contemporary art in Asia.

In 2022, the gallery decided to solidify the partnership between Edouard Malingue and Lorraine Kiang by changing their name to Kiang Malingue. Six years after the previous visual identity was launched, the name change provided an excellent opportunity for evaluation. Not only was the gallery about to change their name – they had also undergone major changes in their program over the course of the past six years. It was decided that a more substantial update of the visual identity would benefit the gallery and reflect these changes.

Having built both trust and recognition with the previous visual identity, we were keen on retaining key features of it in the new identity. However, these would primarily function as a subtle echo, rather than recognizable building blocks.
Abandoning the idea of iconic hero elements, the new visual identity was built around a variable and modular typographic system. To the same effect, a generous colour palette was introduced, allowing the gallery to attune their communication to a specific exhibition or artist. In order to retain a strong sense of identity, within a non-hierarchical visual identity, the system itself was elevated and allowed to take center stage. By means of disposition and scale, the voice of the gallery becomes both clear and recognizable.

As part of the project, Lundgren+Lindqvist designed a highly flexible template for ads and posters and a full set of stationery, including letterheads, business cards, folders and correspondence cards et c.

Years after its initial release, the original Edouard Malingue website is now a large database of artists, works and news relating to the galleries.

The new Kiang Malingue Website builds upon this rich body of content and extends the systematic approach of the new identity defined for the gallery. Making use of the CSS grid layout as well as CSS sticky positioning, a strict grid can be maintained throughout the website, even when switching languages between English in the latin alphabet and Traditional Chinese characters.

With a global audience, yet primarily based in Asia, the gallery needed a robust technical setup that can run in any datacenter, without any risk of being blocked by the Chinese firewall. Continuing to use WordPress as the content management system ensures that the gallery owns and is free to move their data if and when needed. The new website was extended with WooCommerce for selling artworks online.

We continue our work with Kiang Malingue Gallery adding components to the visual identity and expanding the website.

Concept and design by Lundgren+Lindqvist

Philippe Apeloig

“Using Type”