The first major art event of 2025 is, without question, Art Basel Hong Kong, held in March. Over twelve years, the fair has drawn ever larger audiences to this culturally hybrid city by reinventing itself each year. Alongside the new Discoveries award, large-scale installations, and the largest Curated Spotlight in the fair’s history, this year’s highlights include the galleries making their debuts. Twenty-three galleries from Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Africa will bring their most eye-catching works, including woven tapestries, a large suspended installation made from flutes, and works by the twentieth-century master Andy Warhol alongside examples of new Chinese ink painting.
We spoke with the directors of three galleries from different countries and regions about their first journeys to Art Basel Hong Kong. Igshaan Adams, Desire Lines, exhibition view, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2022. Eight galleries will enter the fair’s main sector for the first time, including three prominent galleries: Blank projects, from Cape Town, South Africa; Bastian, from Berlin, Germany; and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, from New York. More galleries, meanwhile, are embracing one of the fair’s recent trends: presenting exhibitions in the form of a solo or two-person show.
Blank projects was founded by Jonathan Garnham in 2005 as an independent, artist-run space; it became a commercial gallery in 2012. The gallery focuses especially on emerging and established artists from Africa. Before coming to Art Basel Hong Kong, it had already exhibited at the fair’s namesake location in Basel, Switzerland. Igshaan Adams, Kicking Dust, exhibition view, Kunsthaus Zürich, 2022, photograph by Annik Wetli. Igshaan Adams, Kruispaid, 2021. At its booth, the gallery will present a solo exhibition by Igshaan Adams, an artist who has drawn considerable attention in academic circles. The works are large-scale tapestry installations inspired by Indigenous South African dancers. In 2022, Adams exhibited at major institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Kunsthaus Zürich.
Nicelle Beauchene with a work by the artist she represents, Sarah Crowner, at her gallery, 2011. The artist Quentin James McCaffrey with his work. Nicelle Beauchene Gallery was founded in 2008. Its New York space now occupies a historic two-story building on Broome Street, which it shares with another gallery; the two galleries alternate exhibitions.
Founder Nicelle Beauchene named the gallery after herself because owning a gallery of her own had always been her dream. At this year’s booth, the gallery will show work by eight artists: Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Mary Lee Bendolph, Louise Despont, Violeta Maya, Quentin James McCaffrey, Lucy Puls, Eleanor Ray, and David Benjamin Sherry.
Andy Warhol, Late Works, Bastian, Berlin, 2024. Joseph Beuys, Important Sculptures from the 1950s, Bastian, Berlin, 2019. We visited Bastian’s current director, Aeneas Bastian, who took over the family gallery from his parents in 2016. The presentation will bring together sculptures by Joseph Beuys and portraits by Andy Warhol, two transformative masters of the twentieth century.
The pairing makes for an intriguing comparison.
“Andy Warhol’s Self-Portrait is a rare, unique silkscreen on canvas. Warhol transformed himself before the camera with different hairstyles and wigs, creating a stylized public figure, and in that respect he has much in common with Beuys, who wore an artist’s uniform.” When we asked why he had thought to exhibit the two artists together, Bastian told us that they had been very good friends, and that both used seemingly trivial objects from daily life to make art, giving those objects new symbolic meanings.
Andy Warhol, Joseph-Beuys, 1980, courtesy of Aeneas Bastian Fine Art. At Art Basel Hong Kong, Bastian will present this work. “Before they met, each had already produced highly radical work. Warhol chronicled celebrity worship and popular music; he explored the qualities of celebrities and iconic brands while satirizing American consumer culture.
“Beuys was already an environmentalist and political activist, using organic materials such as felt, fur, and animal fat in his work,” Bastian said. Another reason, he added, is that Hong Kong has never hosted a solo exhibition of Beuys. In his view, art collecting and investment have grown strongly across Asia in recent years. In countries including China, South Korea, and Japan, economic development and growing interest in international art have led to increasing demand for Western contemporary art.
“So whenever we exhibit somewhere, it is especially important for us to select works suited to the place. Hong Kong is no exception.” Kayode Ojo, Me and You, 2024. Each edition of Discoveries introduces emerging galleries and new artists capable of stopping visitors in their tracks. The sector offers bold, unbounded ideas, new media, and unexpected ways of presenting work.
This year, ten galleries will make their first appearances in the fair’s Discoveries sector. The featured galleries include Sweetwater, from Berlin; Emalin, from London; PHD Group, a Hong Kong gallery; LambdaLambdaLambda, from Pristina; Park View / Paul Soto, from Los Angeles and New York; and Mo Fang, from Beijing—the only mainland Chinese gallery among this year’s debut exhibitors.
Sung Tieu, 1992, exhibition view, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2025. Sung Tieu, exhibition view, Mudam Luxembourg—Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, 2023. Sweetwater will present a solo exhibition by Kayode Ojo, an artist known for large-scale installations and multimedia work. A monumental hanging sculpture made from flutes will be the centerpiece of the booth.
After Art Basel Hong Kong, Emalin will continue on to Art Basel in Switzerland in June. It, too, will present a solo exhibition, this one of new installations by the Vietnamese artist Sung Tieu, combining minimalist aesthetics, technology, gas canisters, and ancient coins to examine France’s colonial rule in Indochina. Hana Miletić, Contact, exhibition view, Walter Leblanc Foundation, 2024. Michele Chu, Ghost of Raspberry, exhibition view, Living and Crossing, Para Site, Hong Kong, 2024, photograph by Lee Chor-ki. Founded in 2021, the Hong Kong gallery PHD Group will present an interactive installation by Michele Chu that explores cooking and mourning through the model of a domestic kitchen. In December of last year, Chu completed a series of food-related solo exhibitions at Para Site in Hong Kong.
LambdaLambdaLambda will show new handwoven textile works by the Croatian artist Hana Miletić, exploring traces of care, loss, and repair. Na Mira, Billboards, Chloe Nelson Gallery, Vienna, 2023. The gallery’s adviser is a partner at Park View / Paul Soto, from Los Angeles and New York. For the fair, they have brought recent experimental installation and video work by the artist Na Mira, who also teaches at the University of California, Irvine and was selected for the 2022 Whitney Biennial.
The booth will also include work by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, exploring memory, ancestry, and matrilineal shamanic traditions. Zhu Tian, Selling the Worthless, 2014. Zhu Tian, Scan, 2014. We also spoke with Luo Xinyu, founder of Mo Fang, the only mainland Chinese gallery exhibiting this year. She told us that the gallery would bring Zhu Tian’s solo project The Long Defeat, a new body of work examining the spiritual and cultural crises of contemporary life through performance, installation, video, text, and sound.
In January, her two works Selling the Worthless and Scan were acquired for the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in France.
“For the live presentation of Zhu Tian’s work, we will invite professional dancers to perform, reinterpreting the myth of Narcissus in a contemporary context. An artist’s sound work will play on-site, combining electronic music, narration, and operatic elements. One installation, titled SAD, is built from artificial sunlight lamps. Through these themes, it offers viewers a space in which to confront their own image, bringing a new experience to visitors moving through the fair.”
He Zike, The Glitch City, video still, 2024 © He Zike. Notably, Mo Fang will participate not only in Discoveries. The video work The Glitch City by the artist He Zike has also been selected for screening in the Film sector. Born in the 1990s, He was one of the new video artists to attract considerable attention last year. As a Beijing-based gallery focused on the local experimental art ecosystem, Luo Xinyu believes that participating in Art Basel can generate substantial international attention in a short time.
“After last year’s Art Basel Hong Kong announced its list, Ms. Judith Neilson, founder of the White Rabbit Gallery in Australia, and her team visited Mo Fang in person and collected works by the artists Yang Shuangqing and Han Wuzhou. The platform has greatly diversified our collector base, brought in a more mature collecting ecosystem and an international professional audience, and given us an opportunity to enter into dialogue with the global art world.”
Aisha Khalid, solo exhibition view, National Museum of Qatar, 2024. Five other galleries making their debuts will appear in the Asia sector, where the emphasis is more firmly on local identity. Two Hong Kong galleries in particular speak to us: SC Gallery and Angela Li Contemporary. The other featured galleries are Anant Art, from Noida, India, and Neon Parc, from Melbourne, Australia.
Anant Art will devote its booth to more than thirty years of tapestries, prints, and polyptychs by the celebrated Pakistani artist and neo-miniaturist Aisha Khalid. Diena Georgetti, People’s Community, exhibition view, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2023, photograph by Jenny Carter. Chen Yu-Chiang at his solo exhibition Old Landscapes—Electricity, Light, Water, Stone, 2023. Neon Parc will present recent paintings by the prominent Australian artist Diena Georgetti, whose vivid colors and layered, plural style remain central to her practice.
Angela Li Contemporary will bring new ink works by Chen Yu-Chiang. His scientific investigations of natural elements such as rocks, trees, and water offer a new interpretation of traditional Chinese landscape painting; he is also a professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chow Chun-fai, The Chinese Odyssey, 1994, at Nathan Road in 2011, 2023. Chow Chun-fai, The Godfather: Dad Never Talks Business at the Dinner Table, 2018. The youngest gallery among the first-time exhibitors is SC Gallery, a Hong Kong gallery founded in 2022.
When we spoke with its founder, Sharon Cheung, about why the gallery had chosen to bring Chow Chun-fai’s research-based project Interview the Interviewer II to its first fair, she told us that they had carefully considered what kind of story they should tell visitors.
“I thought it should be the most familiar and truthful story—the story of Hong Kong. Many of Chow Chun-fai’s works, including his early Taxi series, City series, and Film series, are steeped in local color. His Film series in particular uses highly accessible cultural elements—a line of dialogue, a scene—to tell stories that resonate with the public, elicit a knowing smile, and reveal the strong social sensibility of his work.
“He is not only an artist but also a public intellectual. So if one were choosing an artist who could represent Hong Kong, he would certainly be among the finest.” Chow Chun-fai, Interview the Interviewer, exhibition view, SC Gallery, 2023. Chow Chun-fai, Unscripted Speech, courtesy of SC Gallery. Before founding the gallery, Cheung worked in journalism for eleven years. During that time, she accumulated much material that had yet to be uncovered or organized. She is also an artist.
The Interview the Interviewer series centers on Chow Chun-fai’s interviews with Cheung about her years as a journalist, drawing on news events and important historical moments that can be understood by audiences in Hong Kong and abroad. She is especially interested in the artist’s response to lived experience, his engagement with society, and his reflections on himself.