Europe has not felt this lively in quite some time. In Basel, the Swiss town often described as the center of the modern-and-contemporary-art universe, Art Basel once again swept through the city from June 10 to 16. Collectors, museum directors, gallerists, media people, and art lovers alike took the fair as their center of gravity and set out on art itineraries lasting anywhere from one to two weeks.
Basel’s artistic temperament resembles its weather: 17 to 22 degrees Celsius, pleasantly warm without showiness, with a trace of old-fashioned elegance. As the only Chinese media outlet officially invited by Basel, we witnessed at close range this year’s fair and the citywide revelry around it. Outside the entrance to Art Basel at Messe Basel, public art marked the 2024 fair grounds. This year’s edition brought together 286 galleries from around the world, including 22 first-time exhibitors.
Though Art Basel now has outposts in Hong Kong, Paris, and Miami, Basel, as the fair’s birthplace, retains its own distinct character. In the Unlimited sector, which opened to VIPs first on the afternoon of the 10th, there were around seventy large-scale installations spanning painting, sculpture, video, performance, and more.
Unlimited is vast: to look carefully at each work, one by one, would take at least three hours. Every piece is oversized as well, with a single work capable of filling a room or an entire long wall. Some works responded to a world marked by conflict; others considered human growth, circumstance, and environment; still others wrote nature into the work in order to think through the passage of time and its meaning. At the 2024 Art Basel Unlimited exhibition, we saw people laughing, frowning, thinking, zoning out, even gasping or letting out strange cries as they were moved by what they saw.
Yet those reactions remained restrained, turned inward. That, too, felt like Basel itself: a city that embraces everyone fervently through art while preserving an unhurried calm and a quiet courtesy. What follows are conversations with three Chinese collectors from different generations about what they saw and felt. The weather in Basel these past few days has been excellent, very comfortable. One especially interesting thing was that, a few days ago, there seemed to be flooding on the German side, which caused the water level to rise sharply.
A great many people from the art world had planned to stay on a hotel boat on the Rhine, but the water was too high and the hotel became unusable. Quite a few gallerist friends of mine were scrambling to find places to stay. Hotels in Basel are always especially tight at this time, so they had to make do with one hotel for a night and another place the next. Fortunately, the floodwaters eventually receded, and they were able to return to the boat hotel. I started coming to Basel, Switzerland, in 2007, and I have come every year since; during the years when I could not travel abroad, I simply stayed in Europe. All told, I have been here sixteen times.
Every visit leaves a strong impression: Basel in Switzerland really is still the highest-level art fair. From a collecting perspective especially, I may see a gallery’s artist at many different fairs, but the best works always turn up here. David Claerbout’s "Birdcage" and Imi Knoebel’s "dass die Geschichte zusammenbleibt," both seen at the 2024 Art Basel Unlimited exhibition, made that plain. For me, in fact, an art fair is a bit like an amusement park for adults. We come here happy.
At this fair, after seeing Unlimited, I felt the pleasure that comes from seeing strong work. This year the section’s circulation was well designed, so the viewing experience was very clear. Mark Manders’s work this year showed how our brains adapt to misleading information. The artist even demonstrated a book for me: you place it on the floor and step on it once, and the words inside change color; step on it again, and the words disappear. Mark Manders’s "Room with All Existing Words," shown at the 2024 Art Basel Unlimited exhibition, and Alex Da Corte’s "Hell Hole," also there in 2024, stood out. The works this year were all very large; many of the paintings were extraordinarily long, and some stretched to twenty meters.
There were also large LED screens, including work by the Chinese artist Lu Yang. Another piece used holography to create an entire scene, which was a genuine surprise. The little green house you could see the moment you walked in made a deep impression. It was Alex Da Corte’s "Hell Hole": a life-size wooden cabin whose exterior was fitted with seven windows lit by neon flames.
Inside the cabin, a man sat at a table covered with strange little objects. The central figure of the installation was an aged version of the artist himself; digestion and consumption are themes the artist returns to repeatedly. The work considers the social spectacle of consumption and presents a dark, empty portrait of loneliness: a home burning fiercely in a quiet yet suffocating fire. There was also Anna Uddenberg’s "Primuen Economy," shown at the 2024 Art Basel Unlimited exhibition. The work carries a slightly pornographic charge, but when a project like this is shown in a museum setting, viewers do not feel it that way at all; instead it seems almost formal. The effect is very subtle.
In the main sector, where booth installation standards are exacting, the experience can be quite distinctive. One particularly characteristic booth this year was the collaboration between ShanghART and Xu Zhen, which felt like a miniature fair in itself. Because I come every year, what I feel more than anything is a sense of shifting movement. The works on view represent certain current tendencies, and the fair is also a place to see friends from all over the world.
I bought some works this time. For example, I collected a work by the Swiss artist Deborah-Joyce Holman, an artist I plan to keep following. Tank Shanghai’s next exhibition will be her solo show. Sometimes we joke that “you can’t come away empty-handed”: if you’ve come, you ought to buy something.
At the same time, I still hope for a surprising discovery. In the past, when I came to the fair, I would practically run the whole way, always trying to squeeze forward to secure a work. So for me, this format may offer a little less of the surprise that comes from discovering something on my own. Every time I am in Basel, I stay four days. This time, as soon as I arrived, I went first to Basel Social Club, which this year was set on a huge farm where you had to walk quite a long way to find artworks scattered across the fields.
Fondation Beyeler is, of course, a mandatory stop every year. If I could recommend only one exhibition, this would definitely be it. Its exhibitions are the embodiment of quality. I was especially glad to see so many artists in the show whose work I love and collect, including Adrian Villar Rojas and Cyprien Gaillard.
They have both also exhibited at Tank Shanghai, and I am good friends with them as well. Every year, Fondation Beyeler’s dinner is astonishing too: all the major figures of the global art world are there. When we sat in the shuttle back that night, eight or ten museum directors from around the world were squeezed together. The feeling was extraordinary. On this trip to Europe, I first went to Matthew Barney’s exhibition in London, then to the opening of Anne Imhof’s exhibition at a museum in Austria. She is an extremely avant-garde German woman artist, and I hope to organize an exhibition for her at Tank in the future.
After that, I attended the opening of Qiu Xiaofei’s new exhibition in Belgium. As a friend who has known him for twenty years, I was truly happy for him. He even said that I was his first collector. Before coming to Basel, I also went to Zurich Art Weekend. In fact, the recent Beijing Gallery Weekend originally began in collaboration with Zurich Art Weekend. After Basel, I still have the Venice Biennale on my itinerary, and then Paris.
It has been a full art journey, and I hope to see even more. If there is any regret, it would simply be having missed a good exhibition. This is my first time back in Basel since the years when I could not travel abroad; I had been here twice before. Every time I come, I feel a kind of emotion. The people, the environment, the works, and the care taken with curatorial detail are all so strong. They form an ecology, each element producing the others; it is not that any single part is strong on its own.
Although Art Basel is a contemporary art fair, it has something of a classical taste, and together with the classic old galleries it is especially pleasing to the eye. Last night I went first to the opening of Unlimited and liked it very much. The relationships among the various projects on display felt both simple and internally connected. Ryan Gander’s "School of Languages," Allan McCollum’s "The World: A Moment In Time," Jenny Holzer’s "Survival," and Lu Yang’s "DOKU The Flow," all shown at the 2024 Art Basel Unlimited exhibition, were among the works encountered there.
There were several works in it that I liked very much. First was the Chinese artist Lu Yang’s video work: wherever it needed to be beautiful, it was beautiful; wherever it needed visual force, it had visual force; wherever it needed ideas, it had ideas. Another thing that left a deep impression was Allan McCollum’s wall covered with names. It was like a field of generic faces, displayed very simply, yet it made many people stand before it searching for their own names. There were also stools arranged in a circle, like epitaphs, each bearing an ordinary sentence, and they were unexpectedly affecting.
Walking through the main sector, my feeling was simple: there were too many good works. But I now have two states of mind. First, I only need to look at good work, whether classical or contemporary. I am not afraid of missing things; it is enough if something draws you in. Second, I also want to filter for works I could actually collect. Today I was really reflecting on the fact that collecting requires overcoming vanity. By vanity I mean this: you know a work is good, it is famous, and the price is already at its peak.
Do you buy it now? Compared with knowing it ten years ago and not buying it then, do you wait until today to buy it? Or do you rely on a discovering eye and follow your own taste as you wish? Of course, everyone has a different path, and the meaning is different for each person. What matters is the satisfaction and joy that art collecting brings you. Take Bourgeois, for instance: her work has been fully recognized by anyone who collects contemporary art, and everyone agrees that she is good.
If you then spend a great deal of money to buy her work, as opposed to spending the same amount collecting an artist who is not so widely famous in universal terms, which would you choose? At the fair, I also saw an Egon Schiele drawing I liked very much. I like Schiele a great deal. He understood how to draw people; he had insight, could see the essence of human nature, and could bring it onto the picture plane. I did not buy many large works either, partly to keep an eye on my purse, and partly because tariffs and shipping are genuinely troublesome. It is still better to buy works that are easier to bring back.
There was also a work at the David Zwirner booth, by George Baselitz, and it was extremely expensive: ten million euros. That made me feel all the more that Europe’s classic old galleries and major international galleries really can be a feast for the eyes. They are a way of learning and of feeling. I looked at that ten-million-euro price three times. Each time I looked, it felt as if I had earned ten thousand euros. Ha ha.
For me, an art fair is not a place to discover new artists, because I pay very close attention to galleries in ordinary times. The works I collect are those that, after taking everything into account, I feel I would never regret buying, no matter when or where. On this trip, I also went to Fondation Beyeler, which everyone makes a point of visiting. There was a large sculptural installation there with a washing machine at the bottom and branches thrusting upward from it, a work about environmental protection, and I thought it was especially cool.
This trip was not just Basel. A few days earlier, I spent six days in Italy seeing the Venice Biennale, and then I went to Zurich in Switzerland. Along the way I saw so much excellent public art in urban spaces that I could not help taking a great many photographs. In fact, I have my own public-art company, and I have been doing that work for many years. It began just after graduation, when I traveled with friends in Europe and the United States and saw many remarkable artworks in public space.
Public art helps shape a city’s culture and image. It allows ordinary people living nearby to sense that city’s history, development, and temperament, and for artists, I imagine, that must be deeply rewarding as well. The last time I came to Basel, Switzerland, was in 2016, and compared with today, it felt as if there were more people then. This time actually feels better. There are still many people, but there is a kind of quiet within the bustle, without any sense of restlessness. It is especially comfortable.
I started walking the fair first thing this morning and stayed at it for perhaps five or six hours straight, and I did see works I really loved. Tomás Saraceno is an artist I have followed for a long time. This time I had not looked at a PDF in advance; I saw his work on-site, liked it very much, and am preparing to acquire it. I also saw three or four works by Antony Gormley, and one of them was a work from 2005, the kind of thing you rarely see at fairs now. I liked it very much.
There was also a new work by Anish Kapoor, one of them a matte yellow piece, which was quite distinctive. One booth that left a strong impression belonged to Fondation Beyeler. It contained only a single Matisse, and beside it a large photograph of Matisse sitting in his studio, with the very work on view behind him. A booth with just one work, yet it was more than substantial enough. They were clearly also building anticipation for the Matisse exhibition opening at the foundation in September.
Before coming to Basel, I had actually gone to Belgium, where I had just seen a Josef Albers exhibition, so encountering that juxtaposition here felt especially striking. I also visited the castle home of the owner of the Widwood gallery in Belgium, and it was astonishing. They say the castle was built in the eleventh century, which is to say that it has already stood for a thousand years. The artworks hanging inside can only be appreciated slowly, because their value is beyond estimation.
After Belgium, I visited Yan Pei-Ming’s studio in France. He was preparing for next year’s exhibition at Hong Kong’s M+, so the studio was full of unfinished works. Basel was the final stop on my European trip, and what I felt most strongly this time was the city’s stillness. Walking down the street, even with people coming and going, there was hardly any noise. It was like being in a library, and it felt wonderfully comfortable.
Some of the photographs were provided by Art Basel.