As the year’s major exhibition openings gradually concluded, 2024 neared its end. Looking back on the year, the global economy may have been in retreat, but the art world was anything but quiet: major fairs and galleries around the world strained to draw in more collectors, enthusiasts, and professionals. From Hong Kong in March and Taipei in April to Beijing, Basel, Seoul, London, and Paris, then back to Shanghai in November and on to Miami at year’s end, we remained, throughout, on the scene, watching one fair after another unfold in moods that were tense, relaxed, conservative, or intent on breaking the mold.
In the final week of 2024, it is worth revisiting the high points of the year’s major international art fairs. The first major art event after the Lunar New Year was Art Basel Hong Kong, held from March 28 to March 30, 2024. The fair brought together 242 galleries from 40 countries and territories, an increase of 65 over 2023.
The Hong Kong fair is often treated as an early indicator of the year’s buying appetite and shifts in collectors’ tastes, a strategic stronghold in the Asian art world. It was not hard to see, on the floor, that after the buying frenzy that followed the lifting of travel restrictions in 2023, collectors had, amid changing economic conditions, moved into a steadier mode, becoming more rational and more cautious. In the fair’s traditional Galleries sector, major exhibitors pulled out all the stops, bringing in many works by twentieth-century masters as well as estates they had recently taken on, and by strategy managed respectable sales in an overall slowing market.
The works included pieces by Morandi, David Hockney, Picasso, Joan Miro, Rebecca Horn, Zao Wou-Ki, and Chu Teh-Chun, among others. In the Encounters section, there was an unprecedented number of applications: 33 galleries participated, and the organizers selected 16 works from more than one hundred submissions. Especially eye-catching were MAK2’s replicated “mini Basel,” Haegue Yang’s Contingent Spheres, and Wong Ping’s Friendship First.
The Kabinett section also drew participation from 33 galleries, the highest number in its history. Many Chinese collectors at the fair showed particular interest in Discoveries, the section devoted to emerging artists, saying that the work there was varied, bold, and genuinely stirring. During Hong Kong Art Week, in tandem with Art Basel Hong Kong, major blue-chip galleries and auction houses also staged breakout exhibitions: Wolfgang Tillmans at David Zwirner, Andy Warhol at Gagosian, Liu Ye at Christie’s, Yan Pei-Ming at MDC, Louise Giovanelli at White Cube, Izumi Kato at Perrotin, and the Supper Club, which stayed open until two in the morning.
The excitement set off by Art Basel spread through the city. Institutions such as M+, the Palace Museum, and Tai Kwun, along with younger, more experimental art clusters in Wong Chuk Hang and street-level spaces like Para Site, all arranged exhibitions and events of their own to join Basel time. As the first art capital to emerge in Asia, Hong Kong offered clear evidence that, in its eleventh year in 2024, Art Basel Hong Kong’s network and influence were still expanding.
On May 9, 2024, at the VIP dinner for the fifth edition of Taipei Dangdai, we saw leading collectors from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the mainland, and Southeast Asia. It was the fair’s fifth time at the Nangang Exhibition Center, where 78 galleries from 19 countries and territories presented markedly different styles of work from May 10 to 12. Compared with Art Basel Hong Kong just over a month earlier, Taipei Dangdai moved at a more leisurely, easy pace.
Most collectors seemed to come in a spirit of learning rather than buying for the sake of buying. At Taipei Dangdai, there were more works by postwar Japanese artists, along with pieces by internationally recognized names such as Antony Gormley, Michaël Borremans, Yayoi Kusama, Gerhard Richter, and Wolfgang Tillmans. In the space of the Hong Foundation, the commissioned installation Credit Makes You Free, by the Taiwanese artist Cheng Hsien-Yu, reflected how lively the local ecosystem for younger artists is. These artists are especially drawn to using video, installation, and experimental technologies to discuss the relationship between technology and human beings, and their work differs sharply in form from the easel painting favored by many younger artists on the mainland.
One example was Cheng Hsien-Yu’s commissioned installation I Swipe, Therefore I Am at the Hong Foundation booth. The work created a space resembling an ATM, where viewers could use their own credit cards to conduct a transaction. It drew considerable attention on-site.
Beyond the fair, several of Taipei’s major institutions also opened important annual exhibitions, including a large William Kentridge show at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, with black-and-white prints, film, animation, and other visual works that have received little attention locally.
A week before the fair, the Fubon Art Museum, now the largest private museum in Taiwan, announced its opening. Its 10,000-square-meter building was designed over 10 years by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, who also designed the Beyeler Foundation, and the top-floor galleries use entirely natural light. In the plaza outside stood Jaume Plensa’s Light and Love, 2024.
The opening exhibitions paired Impressionist paintings with Rodin sculptures and included a presentation from the Fubon Art Museum collection, with works by Zao Wou-Ki, Sanyu, and Richard Lin, among others. One gallery remained resolutely mysterious, with no photography allowed. Overall, Taipei Dangdai and the art-week ecology around it are still in a phase of growth, and because its culture differs from Hong Kong’s, the fair feels closer to ordinary life, and more relaxed.
Many people in the art world remarked that during the Hong Kong fairs one could scarcely find time for a hot meal, whereas in Taipei one could leave the fair and happily eat a full late-night supper at a night market. Right after Taipei Dangdai came Beijing Contemporary, held from May 23 to 26. At the same time, JINGART was staged at the SKP-S art mall, and Gallery Weekend Beijing opened to the public in the 798 district.
It was also the first major art gathering of the year in mainland China, with more than 140 exhibitions across Beijing’s various districts to choose from. Not only the city’s art old guard but art-world figures from across the country poured in and settled into Beijing time. JINGART, held on the fourth floor of Beijing’s famous luxury-and-streetwear mall SKP-S, was compact and polished.
Among the 30 exhibitors from 7 countries and territories were not only paintings and sculptures by contemporary artists but also calligraphy, designer toys, jewelry, and fashion brands. Beijing Contemporary, at the National Agricultural Exhibition Center, was closer in layout to a conventional art fair: orderly white booths, squared off and divided among 122 participating institutions from 14 countries, with the aisles more spacious than last year. Blank Gallery won the Beijing Contemporary 2024 Best Booth Award, and the actor Huang Bo appeared at the fair with his 2022 work Breaker behind him.
Some gallerists said that overall sales were up by about 20 to 30 percent from last year, which, under the circumstances, counted as heartening growth. The fair also invited the actor Huang Bo, who has worked across disciplines in recent years, to give a live-streamed tour for visitors, and it presented five of his works for the first time; for a while, the crowd shouting “Brother Bo” was packed so tightly it could barely move. Gallery Weekend Beijing, meanwhile, entered its eighth year, bringing together nearly 40 domestic and international galleries and nonprofit institutions for more than 40 exhibitions, the most talked-about of which was Hiroshi Sugimoto at UCCA, the grande dame among the city’s institutions.
It is worth noting that Gallery Weekend’s publicity ambassador was Zhu Zhu, both an actor and a seasoned collector, who led audiences through galleries and museums. By now, the late-May art gathering in Beijing has plainly become a fixture of the Chinese art world. Then, from June 10 to 16, 2024, the Swiss town of Basel, the unquestioned center of the contemporary-art universe, welcomed the largest number of Asian collectors it had seen in years.
As the home fair of Art Basel, the largest art fair in the world, its run is the longest of them all; counting the VIP days, it stretches to more than a week. Beyond its duration, one of Basel’s singular attractions is Unlimited, a section not found at the other Art Basel editions, with roughly 70 large-scale works spanning painting, sculpture, film, performance, and more.
To look closely at each work, one by one, would take at least three hours. Each piece is enormous in scale, often filling a room or an entire long wall. Alex Da Corte’s Hell Hole and Imi Knoebel’s dass die Geschichte zusammenbleibt exemplified the tone of the section: these works differ markedly from what appears in the main fair, being larger, more advanced in form, and, one might say, beyond the scale a private collector could reasonably acquire. They seem, rather, destined for museums.
For a commercial fair to spend so much money, energy, and time on a section like this moved many professionals and enthusiasts deeply. Back in the main fair, Art Basel 2024 brought together 286 galleries from around the world, 22 of them first-time participants. The works galleries bring to Basel, Switzerland, are invariably among their best.
Many long-established European galleries showed not only contemporary art but also classic works passed down through generations of family ownership. People, setting, works of art, and curatorial attention all formed an ecosystem, each element producing the others, a closed loop of mutual reinforcement. During the fair, the exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation was widely regarded by collectors, professionals, and enthusiasts as the number-one destination in Basel. On the lawn outside stood Philippe Parreno’s giant site-responsive ecological work Voices, the first time in the foundation’s history that a work combining technology, digital media, and moving image had been shown on so large a scale, a sign, perhaps, of a future direction.
The installation strategy broke with convention, placing monumental contemporary installations beside works by twentieth-century masters without any sense of discord. In the painting galleries, Mondrian shown alongside Josef Albers and Roni Horn felt unexpectedly fresh. Outside the fair and museums, the annual Basel Social Club took place this year on a vast farm, where visitors had to make a careful country walk to find artworks scattered across the grounds.
Elsewhere in the city, in hotels, shops, and shopping centers, there were also performances by emerging artists and displays of large-scale installations. Basel’s artistic temperament resembles the weather there in mid-June: 17 to 22 degrees Celsius, pleasantly warm and never overdone, with an old-world elegance. Its taste is both classical and open to new developments, scholarly in its rigor and touched by the faintly offhand hauteur of old European money. It remains the ceiling against which all art fairs are measured.
After the summer, the first art carnival of the second half of the year was the third edition of Frieze Seoul, held from September 4 to September 7, 2024. As Frieze’s only Asian outpost, this year’s fair was the largest, best managed, and richest in side events and atmosphere since its founding, and for the first time it truly felt bustling. On the floor we repeatedly ran into familiar Chinese collectors, gallerists, and artists.
The fair brought together 117 galleries from 30 countries. It is worth noting that the number of video and new-media works in Seoul far exceeded what one usually sees at other Frieze fairs, touching on subjects ranging from nature and social migration to future technology and even questions of life itself. In the Focus section, which is reserved for young galleries founded no more than 12 years ago, two of the featured young artists were from China.
One was Evelyn Taocheng Wang, from Chengdu, and the other was Lu Yang, the Shanghai artist who has already become something of a favorite in the international art world. Several younger Korean artists also stood out. There was Jun Sojung’s video work Syncope (2023), and the sculptor Hwang Sueyon’s sand sculpture.
In the main section, too, participating galleries brought major works from their programs, and on the first VIP day many booth walls had already sold out. The highest price was for a Georg Baselitz work brought by Thaddaeus Ropac, which sold for 1.1 million dollars. Among the works drawing the most attention from viewers were Annika Yi’s translucent sculpture and a rare sculpture by Nicolas Party.
Large solo exhibitions by both artists were also crowd favorites during Frieze Week. Nicolas Party, now described as the most expensive artist of his generation born in the nineteen-eighties, had a show at the Ho-Am Museum of Art that required a 1.5-hour drive from central Seoul, yet plenty of people were willing to make the trip. Annika Yi, one of the most in-demand experimental women artists working internationally today, inspired visitors to say of her major exhibition at the Leeum Museum of Art, “It is worth coming to Seoul for this alone.”
Following the tradition of Frieze London, major Korean institutions and galleries coordinated with Art Week by mounting important solo and group shows. At the Amorepacific Museum of Art, the celebrated Nordic duo Elmgreen & Dragset presented Space, their largest exhibition in Asia to date, with new installations including a 140-square-meter detached house, an empty public swimming pool, and a restaurant.
At the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, there was a group exhibition of more than sixty women artists; the Seoul Museum of Art presented the group show The World’s End, Endless Division; and major exhibitions were also on view at the Ilmin Museum of Art, the Seonjae Art Center, and the SONGEUN Art Center. In addition, Kiaf SEOUL and the Gwangju and Busan Biennales all took place at the same time as Frieze Seoul. The intensity of Seoul Art Week in September made the city’s distinct contemporary-art climate unmistakable: the Korean government’s support for contemporary art, Korean contemporary artists’ affinity for technology and experimental moving image, and the rise of Korean women artists have all helped Seoul gradually become a new artistic landmark in Asia.
From October 9 to 13, 2024, the twenty-first edition of Frieze London arrived on schedule. What was different this time was the entirely new fair layout and curatorial approach. More than 160 galleries from 43 countries took part in Frieze London, while Frieze Masters included 130 galleries from 26 countries. In the English garden between the two tents, daylight and greenery framed 25 sculptures, or groups of works, by 22 artists in Frieze Sculpture.
In the new layout, Focus, the section for emerging galleries and artists, was placed in the most central area just inside the entrance. The individual character of artists was given greater emphasis, making it easier for younger artists to be seen. Traditional blue-chip galleries, by contrast, were set deeper into the fair. Another major change was that large international galleries also seemed more inclined to tell the story of a single artist, presenting an entire booth as a solo exhibition.
Billy Childish, for example, was painting in person at the Lehmann Maupin booth, and the scene was so unusual that the stand became nearly impassable. At Gagosian, too, the booth was devoted to a single artist, Carol Bove, whose nine monumental steel sculptures created a colored forest.
Lisson Gallery, meanwhile, presented new glass works, bronze sculptures, and tempera paintings by the Japanese woman artist Leiko Ikemura. This year also saw the addition of a new themed section, Smoke, which foregrounded works in ceramic. Unlike the conventional understanding of ceramics as an East Asian tradition, Smoke was more concerned with cultural dispersal and Indigenous histories.
Frieze Masters likewise adopted a new layout this year. Organized around canonical figures in art history, it felt quieter than Frieze London, with a darker palette. Alongside familiar paintings by masters such as Picasso, Degas, and Matisse, there were Rodin sculptures, ancient Roman sculpture, medieval chant books, and Egyptian mummies.
During Frieze Week in London, the institutional exhibitions across the city amounted to perhaps the richest museum program surrounding any art fair in the world. Above all there was the major Van Gogh exhibition, which presented 61 works made in the area around Arles, in the south of France, during the two years from 1888 to 1890.
Alongside his iconic Yellow House, The Bedroom, Chair, Sunflowers, and Irises, the exhibition included Van Gogh still lifes that are seldom seen, as well as paintings that combine Japanese flowers with the sower motif. Another major show was Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery.
Using Bacon’s treatment of portraiture as its point of entry, that exhibition linked together the artist’s life in full: friends, lovers, the self, and the shifts in his style at each stage, all bound closely to the pain and passion of his lived experience. Tate Modern, long a close collaborator with Frieze, presented this year a commissioned work by the Korean woman artist Mire Lee.
Her Open Wound reimagined Tate Modern as an industrial womb, turning the Turbine Hall into a living factory, with countless pink skins suspended from the ceiling on metal chains. Another Korean woman artist who drew intense attention during Frieze Week was Haegue Yang, whose Leap Year at the Hayward Gallery was the largest solo exhibition of her work ever staged in Europe.
All four floors of the Hayward were filled with works from across Yang’s career, including her most representative pieces: paper-cut collages, large venetian-blind installations, woven plants and fruits, and various old Korean objects. For a fair that has already run for 21 years, many viewers came away disappointed, feeling that London’s taste remained conservative, short on surprise, and lacking memorable work. At Frieze Sculpture there was also Yoshitomo Nara’s Ennui Head, 2020.
Yet the art world has changed enormously over the past two decades. In recent years, Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, the need for additional visas to attend Frieze London, and the end of tax-free shopping for travelers have all worked against the fair as external pressures. Frieze, for its part, has plainly been trying to change. One can see this in the organizers’ broad effort to break apart the old structure: they are eager to shake off inherited habits, and they hope that by foregrounding emerging artists they can revitalize London as a whole. What its next decade will look like remains to be seen.
From October 18 to 20, 2024, Art Basel Paris was held for the first time in the newly restored Grand Palais, the city’s hundred-year-old exhibition hall. It was the first time we had felt sunlight so extravagantly piercing inside an art-fair venue. We saw a great many familiar Chinese collectors there, and the shared reaction was simple: “This venue is too beautiful. Paris has won big.” The fair brought together 195 top galleries from 42 countries and territories, nearly a quarter more than last year.
This year also introduced a new sector, Oh La La!, as well as Premise, featuring works made before 1900; and the public program expanded from 5 projects to 10. In venue, works, scale, and citywide excitement, the fair reached a historical high. The layout largely followed previous viewing logic, with the central area near the entrance occupied by major global galleries such as Gagosian, Lisson, Gladstone, Hauser & Wirth, White Cube, Galleria Continua, Perrotin, Pace, Zwirner, Almine Rech, and Spruth Magers.
Collectors said the work on view was more substantial than they had expected: Julie Mehretu, described here as the most expensive woman artist of the post-1970 generation still living; very rare sculpture by Tracey Emin; Robert Rauschenberg; and Bourgeois’s giant spider, among others. The most popular booth on-site belonged to Pace, curated by the artist Paulina Olowska, whose deep-purple walls stood out sharply among the surrounding white booths.
Outside the halls, public art was installed just across the street, along Avenue Winston Churchill, within walking distance: Yayoi Kusama’s giant pumpkin, Jean Prouve’s little house, John Chamberlain’s bright green abstract sculpture, and more.
During the same period, major institutions including the Louvre, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the Pinault Collection, and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain all opened important exhibitions. At the Centre Pompidou, in addition to a major show marking the 100th anniversary of Surrealism, there was also a group exhibition of a new generation of Chinese artists. Other concurrent exhibitions included Forever Pop, Tom Wesselmann and . . . at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Arte Povera at the Bourse de Commerce, and Vision of China at the Centre Pompidou, all in 2024.
For a fair branch only in its third year, Art Basel Paris exceeded many professionals’ expectations. The quality of the work was high; the venue, housed within a historic building, was unlike that of any other fair; and beyond that there were the collaborations with foundations, the partnerships with fashion brands, and the city’s own irresistible qualities: food, beauty, atmosphere. It was hard not to wonder whether Paris might become a second Swiss Basel,
perhaps even stand on equal footing with it. How would gallerists adjust their strategies? That would have to wait until next year. In November, Shanghai Art Season is always the busiest stretch of the year in the Chinese art world. This year, as usual, West Bund and ART021 took place simultaneously from November 8 to 10. In its eleventh year, the West Bund Art & Design fair reached its largest scale ever, expanding to five halls.
Hauser & Wirth, Pace, ShanghART, and White Cube, all among the world’s ten leading blue-chip galleries, have continued to participate since the fair’s founding. Across 30,000 square meters of riverfront space, visitors could see more than 170 representative galleries, institutions, and exhibitors from 24 countries and territories.
There was an abundance of top-tier masterworks: Louise Bourgeois, Philip Guston, a monumental blue painting by Georg Baselitz, Georges Mathieu, who had just had his largest retrospective to date at the Long Museum, Kohei Nawa’s antlers, and artists well known to Chinese audiences, including Zhang Enli, Antony Gormley, Tracey Emin, Alex Katz, Anish Kapoor, and Maurizio Cattelan. Beyond the masters, the fair welcomed 32 first-time galleries, accounting for 25 percent of all participating galleries, bringing fresher blood into the mix.
ART021, held at the Shanghai Exhibition Center, marked its twelfth year in 2024, with 131 galleries from 43 cities across 20 countries and territories. Compared with the more international profile of West Bund, ART021, where local galleries made up more than 50 percent of participants, was clearly more focused on the development of contemporary Chinese art, and the works attracting the most attention on-site were often by younger artists. Alongside the easel painting that has long dominated Shanghai’s fairs, sculpture, video, conceptual art, and fiber art were gradually becoming more common.
Many collectors said they were especially taken with Beijing Commune’s booth, praising both the range of the works and the clarity of the installation concept. Another much-discussed booth, which quickly sold out, belonged to the young British gallery Saatchi Yates. Its artists included both younger figures from Western contexts and ethnically Chinese artists raised overseas, producing a distinctive perspective. Outside the fairgrounds, the exhibition that drew the most attention was the artist Yin Xiuzhen’s Sky Piercing at the Power Station of Art in 2024.
During the same period, Shanghai had more than 200 exhibitions on view, and throughout Art Week there were dinners and parties every night. Many people remarked that although it was difficult to say the market was recovering, everyone was genuinely trying to make the atmosphere more animated. Yet a more rational market may not be a bad thing for many younger artists and gallerists: artists may have more room to settle into making work, and gallerists more time to think. After the tide has washed through the sand, what will remain?
The last major art fair of 2024 arrived in Miami, with its beaches, sunlight, and neon, a city especially alluring in winter. From December 6 to December 8, Art Basel Miami Beach brought together top collectors looking for a little art pleasure before leaving for Christmas vacation. This was the fair’s twenty-second year, with 286 galleries from 38 countries participating.
On-site, there were plenty of instantly recognizable heavyweights: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jared Leto, the singer Jewel, the D.J. Martin Garrix, the Las Vegas impresario Steve Wynn, the financier Leon Black, and others. The most expensive work in the fair was a black-and-white Picasso painting from 1969, priced at 30 million dollars, shown alongside a work by Harumi Klossowska de Rola from 2022.
High-priced sales on the first day included a David Hammons at 4.75 million dollars, a Yayoi Kusama at 3.5 million dollars, a Keith Haring painting at 2 million dollars, and a work by Susan Jackson at 1.5 million dollars. It was also possible to observe that Indigenous art and Latin American art were more visible than in previous years. Even though important works by major artists did sell, some gallery staff still felt the atmosphere was not as hot as they had expected, and an Andy Warhol sculpture had not sold on the first day.
Worth noting was that de Sarthe, from Hong Kong, participated for the first time, bringing works by Chinese abstract painters across several generations, from Su Xiaobai, born in 1949, to the 1987-born Zhu Peihong and the post-1990 artist Jiang Shangyue. In the Meridians section, devoted to monumental installations, the Chinese artist Zhu Jinshi’s giant xuan-paper sculpture tower also drew intense attention.
As the final stop among the important art fairs of 2024, Art Basel Miami Beach could not be said to fully represent a market rebound, but it did show that good work need not worry about selling. That was also the core value running through fairs around the world all year long: strong works remain scarce, and a cooler market is the best touchstone for the value of works and artists alike. As for next year, that can wait until after Christmas and the New Year.