La Moustache at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong

Drawing loose inspiration from the existential thriller of the same name, La Moustache presents a searching exploration of that precarious psychic territory in which the accepted borders between sense and nonsense, interior and exterior, the abstract and the concrete, are rendered scintillatingly porous. Assembling a diverse assortment of works both historical and contemporary, Stein adopts the framework of a search or journey— staging an anxious space of semantic transit in which the spectator becomes part navigator, part gumshoe— must read the skies or comb the ground for clues. Punctuated by a series of formal inversions, transmutations, and mirrorings, La Moustache explores the conspiratorial proximity between creative ideation and psychic disintegration, exuberant display and restrained hermeticism, the incommunicable specificity of the local and the flattening abstraction of the global.

Jordan Stein is a curator and writer based in San Francisco. In 2017, he founded Cushion Works, an exhibition space in the Mission District that aims to link past and present through the varied presentation of critical — and often overlooked — artworks, histories, and ideas. He has organized exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Artists Space, Yale Union, San Francisco City Hall, The Glass House, Matthew Marks Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where he formerly served as Curator of Special Projects. He is the author of Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts (Pre-Echo Press, 2024), a New York Times Best Art Book of the Year, Rip Tales: Jay DeFeo’s Estocada & Other Pieces (Soberscove Press, 2021), and most recently, Stephen Kaltenbach: Portrait of My Father (J&L Books, 2025).

Special thanks: Arias Davis, Barry Rosen, Filippo Weck, Leah Levy, Lindsey White, Mary Valledor, NAID (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development) Art Center, Peter Currie, Rio Rocket Valledor, Robert Snowden, Yuta Nakajima