As Hong Kong begins gearing up for its vibrant fall arts season with a rash of openings all over town this September, BLOUIN ARTINFO’s Asia bureau picks out a list of 5 top exhibitions that you shouldn’t miss in Hong Kong this autumn.

“Scholars and Debutantes: A Contrast of Ascetic and Opulent Luxuries” at Liang Yi Museum, opening September 1, 2015

This two-part exhibition explores the highly refined culture of scholarly objects and artifacts that belonged to the unique purview of the literati tradition during the Ming and Qing dynasties. On the ground floor gallery, a selection of brush-pots, ruyi scepters, trays, ink stones, inlaid boxes and table stands made of rare, valuable materials such as zitan and huanghuali wood are on display, chosen in collaboration with the London-based collector Marcus Flacks. In addition to reflecting the lofty social status of the scholar class, these objects also make frequent reference to the teachings of Buddhism and Daoism, including a pronounced taste for austere yet elegant simplicity.

Concurrently, the second floor of the Liang Yi Museum will be turned over to a very different display entitled “A History of Evenings Bags,” showcasing some 250 European vanities from the 20th century drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. Invoking a rich heritage of European ornament, from Victorian aesthetics to the Russian elegance of Faberge and Ballet Russes, through to the aesthetics of European couture houses like Boucheron, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Cartier, this sumptuous collection offers viewers a rare comparative glance at two very different aesthetic traditions, East and West. “This is a valuable opportunity to contextualise scholarly objects and vanities as reflections of the social and design history of the times,” notes Lynn Fung, Director of Liang Yi Museum. “It has been a journey of discovery to organise the two parallel galleries that deeply explore the dialectic relationship between these precious objects, as embodiments of refinement and taste and as symbols of self-identification.”

“Nam June Paik: The Late Style” at Gagosian Gallery, September 17 through November 7, 2015

This first Hong Kong presentation of the late new-media Korean master encompasses a range of video sculptures, paintings, and drawings dating from the last decade of Paik’s life, many of which have never been exhibited before, shown alongside other representative works from the 1960s-80s that serve as an eloquent demonstration of the artist’s obsessive investigations into the role of emerging technologies and their effect on culture. “TV Chair” (1968), for instance, entices the viewer with the self-reflexive impulses encouraged by the closed-circuit video function, while “359 Canal Street” (1991) is a deftly constructed bricolage piece that juxtaposes TV parts mounted onto the wall with a desk containing Paik’s personal correspondence with contemporaries such as Yoko Ono and George Maciunas.

Hugh Scott-Douglas at Simon Lee, September 11 through October 31, 2015

The young British artist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong offers viewers a valuable glimpse into Scott-Douglas untiring explorations of how advancing digital technologies offer novel aesthetic positions that feed into a tradition of conceptual abstraction. In this body of new work, the artist has used a modified digital scanner to create a slow scan of watch gears, particles of dust and other debris, and ambient light as an initial source of material. But through repeated manipulations and intermediate processes, such as compression, export, and printing using industrial ink on aluminum panels, this visual information finds itself progressively obscured, altered, and transfigured into a specter-like trace of its former self. The bleached appearance of these works comes from the overexposure of the objects to a tray of bright LEDs placed over the scanner bed.

Raimund Girke’s “In Between White” at Axel Vervoordt Gallery, September 10 through October 22, 2015

German painter Raimund Girke’s first solo show in Hong Kong puts the focus firmly on the monochrome paintings dating from Girke’s later career, after the artist decided on the color white as the central motif of his practice at the age of 27 — partially motivated by a desire to counter the over-saturation of contemporary visual culture, and to induce his viewers to give themselves over to a heightened state of concentration. As the artist himself stated, “Polychromy prevents colour from making an impact, given the constant competition, whereas the restriction of the colour scale enables one colour to manifest its full intensity. The brightest colour, the most luminous and intense colour, is white. White is the Queen of Colors.” Although many of his contemporaries tended to prize the metaphysical of spiritual dimensions of monochrome white, Girke turned his attention instead to purely physical parameters such as the subtle gradations of rhythm, motion, and vibration that existed within a highly restricted palette. As Girke approached the peak of his career around the time of Documenta 6 in 1977, his compositions took on the appearance of a visual labyrinth whose innocuous surface belied a carefully structured visual field. These later works also featured a far more rigorous construction: by this time Girke had traded in his brush and spatula for an airbrush that created an indistinct, spectral haze.

Liu Wei’s “Silver” at White Cube Hong Kong, September 17 through October 24, 2015

A leading figure of the so-called “Post-Sense Sensibility” generation of artists who first came to prominence in the late 1990s, many of whom were dedicated to moving away from nationalistic or narrative concerns in favor of developed and honing a sophisticated formalist idiom and vocabulary, Liu Wei is known for his hard-edged brand of abstraction, frequently inspired by the unforgiving urban environment of Beijing. “I am caught in the development, construction, and change of the city,” says Liu. ”I confront the scenes I have to face every day — streets, people, animals, plants — on both a mental and aesthetic level.” This exhibition at White Cube is an extension of “Colors,” Liu’s largest institutional one-man exhibition to date, which was held at the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art in Beijing earlier this year. The mirrored surfaces and aluminum panes set at awkward, vertigo-inducing angles in “Puzzle” (2014) are glyph-like objects that seem to recreate the psychological tension and superficially radiant promises of modernity in the superhuman-scaled metropolis of his native Beijing.