“You too?” For people in the art world, the newly opened Art Basel Hong Kong may be the largest offline reunion of “internet friends” in recent years. Artists, collectors, art-media figures, and auction houses scattered across the country, many of whom had not set foot in a major fair for 3 years because of the pandemic, all came to Hong Kong for the March art season, while the spring light was at its best.
“This year, Hong Kong’s entire art world has come together to play host and welcome art lovers back to the city,” Angelle Siyang-Le told us with a smile. At Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023, the fair is the largest since 2019, yet it had the shortest preparation time: just a little more than two months. Many decisions about works and details, she said, were settled at breakneck speed. What are the highlights of this edition? Over the past 10 years, how have Asian collectors’ tastes changed?
What have been the defining moments in Hong Kong’s art ecology? With those questions in mind, we spoke on the fair floor with Angelle Siyang-Le, the director of Art Basel Hong Kong, and the veteran collector Zhou Shiyao. Before entering Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023, we had already prepared ourselves to walk our legs off, sneakers included. Before noon, at 12:00, the entrance was already crowded with people waiting to get in. Many were seeing one another offline for the first time in 3 years, greeting and hugging. This Art Basel Hong Kong was livelier than we had expected.
“Over the past few years, many gallerists were unable to come in person. This year, after the pandemic, is the first year in 3 years that they can physically be here, and everyone has brought their best works, their best presentations, and their artists to Hong Kong,” Siyang-Le told us excitedly on-site. With 177 galleries from 32 countries and territories, plus the full return of four special sectors, Encounters, Kabinett, Conversations, and Film, anticipation came mixed with a practical worry: could we possibly see it all in one day?
Lin Lan, Trolley Party, 2023. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. The first things to seize the eye were 13 large-scale installations too imposing to ignore, all part of Encounters, a specially curated sector making its first return since 2019. Trolley Party, by the Hong Kong artist Lin Lan, was commissioned specifically for this fair. Using worn everyday nylon fabric, the artist pieced together a work 14 meters long, forming a vast blue canopy. Six industrial handcarts, converted into chairs, act like supporting joints, suspending the fabric in place.
Lin Lan said that the work grew out of her childhood memories of female textile workers. Mella Jaarsma, The Follower, 2008-2023. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. Wong Ka Ying, Mr. Hugging Under the Eaves, 2021. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. “This large work by Wong Ka Ying is one I especially want to recommend,” Siyang-Le told us. “It was originally meant to premiere in Ukraine, but for various reasons that didn’t happen, so it was placed in Encounters at the fair for its first appearance.”
The work bears an unusually warm title: Mr. Hugging Under the Eaves. Strips of colored fabric of varying lengths suspend green potted plants above visitors’ heads, bringing to mind mistletoe at Christmas: people kiss beneath the mistletoe, and under the “roof” Wong Ka Ying has built, they embrace. Kim Hong-Sok, Hush, 2017-2019. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. Entering the third-floor hall, Kim Hong-Sok’s Hush was impossible to miss.
All kinds of small-animal headpieces sat atop mannequin sculptures: puppy, lamb, donkey, elephant, raccoon. The furry heads wore expressions of conspicuous dejection, laying a veil of melancholy and mystery over their cuteness. Kim Hong-Sok, Hush, 2017-2019. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. “During installation, we discussed many possibilities,” Siyang-Le said. “Should the work stand over there, or be mixed into the audience corridor?”
In the end, the presentation managed both. At one entrance to the hall, we encountered a standing “lamb.” The relationship between the figures and the audience was curiously charged. They stand in for the working people of the contemporary city, and through them the artist addresses, obliquely, the value of labor. Na Buqi, Fountain: Night Garden, 2020. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. Another highlight of the venue was the fountain by the Chinese artist Na Buqi.
The movement of water echoed, in an oddly apt way, the movement of the crowd. Stanislava Pinchuk, The Wine Dark Sea, 2023. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. We also saw a group of 76 marble columns, in different colors and varying heights. This sculptural installation by Stanislava Pinchuk was made especially for the fair. She had once apprenticed to a grave maker, and in the process of creating the work she transformed the solemn, sorrowful feeling of designing tombstones into the energy field of these marble forms.
Works by Hans Hartung. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. Another especially eye-catching special sector was spread across 15 booths: Kabinett, presented by 15 galleries.
“Kabinett means that a gallery carves out a ‘booth within a booth’ inside its space to mount a special exhibition,” Siyang-Le explained. Among the most striking was a group of works by the late artist Hans Hartung, dating from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, a comparatively rare body of work to encounter. Works by Martin Margiela. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. On the fair floor, we were also surprised to find a series of works by Martin Margiela.
After leaving the eponymous fashion house he founded in 2008, he threw himself fully into art. Margiela’s sculptures, made of silicone and plaster, are delicate and ambiguous. His “Dust Painting” works use dust and hair as their primary materials, granting these nonliving substances an invisible force.
The sculptures in the “Torso” series are all fragmentary, hard-to-identify bodies, recalling the broken yet beautiful physiques of ancient Greece. Roni Horn, Untitled (Pensive Missed Meteor), 2012-2014. At the fair, every gallery seemed to have brought out its best pieces. At the Hauser & Wirth booth, there was always a steady ring of viewers around Roni Horn’s translucent green glass sculpture; alongside curiosity about how it was made came associations with green fields beneath blue skies and white clouds.
There were also works by Philip Guston, Nicolas Party, and Mark Bradford. Jadé Fadojutimi, The Wistful Thundering of Unspent Carriageways As Usual, This Seasonal Shower Often Persists, 2023. Gagosian brought the auction-season dark horse of last year, Jadé Fadojutimi, in a dazzling new work from 2023, as well as paintings by the gallery’s youngest-ever signed artist, Anna Weyant, in her characteristic Baroque mode.
Zeng Fanzhi’s meditative Untitled, along with Alex Israel’s signature work, also drew intense attention. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. Yayoi Kusama, Residence of Love, 2016. At David Zwirner’s booth, the styles of two artists could hardly have been more different. Jordan Wolfson’s Red Sculpture “stared” at passersby, its fragmented puppet expressing the artist’s familiar streak of transgression and provocation with unusual force; Kusama’s work, with its pink ground, felt thoroughly springlike.
At Lévy Gorvy’s booth, an over-two-meter-tall new work from 2023 by the NFT artist Beeple, along with the artist’s own appearance, drew countless viewers to a halt. Four screens were set inside a polished metal shell; the images were linked to one another while retaining their independence. Chen Ke, 1946, California Beach, 20 Years Old, 2022. Perrotin, meanwhile, presented works across a range of media. In front of Jean-Marie Appriou’s bronze sculpture, Daniel Arsham’s “weathered monument,” and JR’s work Victory Gesture, it was nearly impossible to squeeze through the crowd.
A substantial portion of the booth was also given over to works by the Chinese artist Chen Ke from her portrait series of famous figures, as well as works by Song Kun, Aya Takano, and Wang Xiyao. Pace’s booth balanced contemporary and modern art, setting twentieth-century figures such as Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Hermann Nitsch, and Robert Rauschenberg in dialogue across space with central contemporary artists including David Hockney, Loie Hollowell, and Kiki Smith, along with Asian artists Song Dong, Qiu Xiaofei, Yin Xiuzhen, Zhang Xiaogang, and Yoshitomo Nara.
Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. Antony Gormley, Hold, 2022. Tobias Rehberger, I Live Here Too, 2023. At Galleria Continua, one could see Gormley’s unique cast-iron sculpture, Anish Kapoor’s signature lacquered disc, and Tobias Rehberger’s 2023 work I Live Here Too. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. It is also worth noting that among the galleries returning to Art Basel Hong Kong after the pandemic, 34 have exhibition spaces in mainland China.
Beijing Commune, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Tang Contemporary Art, Magician Space, ShanghART, Beijing Commune, and others all brought all-star lineups centered on younger Chinese artists: Chen Fei, Fei Yining, Pu Yingwei, Ji Xin, Song Kun, Wang Yuyang, Gao Ludi, Zhang Zipiao, Hu Yinping, Zhang Ruyi, Zhang Ji, Zhao Zhao . . . nearly all of them mid-career or younger artists whose paintings have been hard to acquire in recent years. From Victoria Harbour, looking toward M+ Museum, the Hong Kong Palace Museum, and Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts: “I remember that in 2011, Hong Kong basically had no international galleries.
Then, beginning in 2013, when Basel officially landed here, Hong Kong’s art scene developed especially quickly after that.” Recalling Basel’s arrival in Hong Kong 10 years ago, Siyang-Le sounded a little moved.
“Today, 10 years later, we have M+, we have the Palace Museum, we have Tai Kwun. We have local galleries of our own, and we have international galleries too. The whole atmosphere has changed completely.” H Queen’s building. Phillips’s new Asia headquarters, exhibition space on G floor. As for international galleries, Gagosian, Perrotin, Pace, David Zwirner, White Cube, Tang, Hauser & Wirth, Lévy Gorvy, and others have already clustered in Central, in Pedder Building and H Queen’s.
The major international auction houses have laid out their presence in Hong Kong as well. Sotheby’s, which has been established here for 50 years, Bonhams Hong Kong, Christie’s, which originated in Britain, and Phillips, which opened its new Asia headquarters at the same time as Basel, are all part of the picture. Kiang Malingue’s new exhibition Tiffany Chung: tangled traces, forgotten landscapes, 2023. No. 10 Chancery Lane Gallery exterior. The rise of Asian art and Hong Kong local art has been just as notable. The rosters of artists represented by local galleries such as Kiang Malingue, Galerie du Monde, WOAW Gallery, Pearl Lam Galleries, Hanart TZ Gallery, Alisan Fine Arts, Ora-Ora, and No. 10 Chancery Lane have plainly grown larger and more international.
The Wong Chuk Hang gallery district, meanwhile, has become a gathering place for more than 20 younger, more local and experimental galleries, including Blindspot Gallery, de Sarthe, Mou Projects, and Empty Gallery.
“I especially encourage everyone to visit the newly emerging art districts in the New Territories, Kowloon, and Wong Chuk Hang,” Siyang-Le said with a smile, recommending what she described as essential stops for a Hong Kong art itinerary. CHAT’s new exhibition Clouds and Power, installation view, 2023. Tai Kwun’s new exhibition Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III, installation view. Among nonprofit institutions, in addition to the newly built M+ Museum and the Hong Kong Palace Museum, there are Tai Kwun and The Mills, revitalized from historic buildings, the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the city’s longest-established nonprofit arts institution, and Para Site in Quarry Bay, a noncommercial art institution. All are using art to “renew” the city.
At the same time, there are hybrid spaces like K11 MUSEA, which combine art and commerce with notable ease. Over these 10 years, they have made Hong Kong more vibrant, and because each institution has its own emphasis, there is no risk of visual fatigue.
“The change and development in this artistic atmosphere is astonishing. What I personally admire most is how evenly balanced the entire art ecology has become. Whether galleries or nonprofit institutions, the development is relatively comprehensive and well rounded,” Siyang-Le told us. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. Over the past 10 years, Art Basel Hong Kong itself has undergone no small change. Not only have transaction volume and value risen sharply; the fair’s infrastructure, including the speed and professionalism of installation, and even the completeness of the entire operating system, has improved at a remarkable pace.
Looking back at the first edition, works in roughly the one-hundred-thousand-dollar range were the most popular; now, the prices of sought-after works far exceed that figure. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. At Basel 10 years ago, there was a high degree of repetition among artists represented by participating galleries: works by Zhang Enli, Yoshitomo Nara, Wu Shanzhuan, Fontana, Yayoi Kusama, and others appeared in clusters, and the forms on view were mainly more traditional easel painting and sculpture.
This year, by contrast, galleries have deliberately avoided overlap in their artist lists. At the same time, the presentation of works has become more varied and more novel, and the media more diverse. The proportion of large-scale installations, video works, new-media works, and interactive works has clearly increased. These changes are closely tied to shifting collector tastes and the arrival of a younger generation of collectors. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. In the interview, Siyang-Le said, “Over these 10 years, I think collectors have changed in two main ways.
First, their approach to buying has become more adventurous, and they are willing to boldly try different media. They are no longer confined to traditional painting or sculpture. Collectors are paying attention to things like installation and moving image. Second, collectors are more willing to discover artists from Asia itself, and more willing to support local artists around them, to have more direct connections with artists.” We had barely arrived at the VIP entrance when we ran into the mainland collector Yang Bin, wearing colorful eyeglass frames and greeting people as he moved at a brisk pace into the fair.
On the 23rd, he and his wife were also to host a dinner for an exhibition of their own collection. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. Hong Kong’s local collectors, meanwhile, arrived especially early on their home turf. After sitting in the Collector Lounge for only a little more than 10 minutes, we spotted Adrian Cheng, the founder of K11; Zhou Shiyao, vice chairman of the Hong Kong Arts Centre; and the notably low-key couple Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Carina Lau.
Lam Wai-er, the designer of H Queen’s, Sun Qiyue, the founder of the Jiaoyang Foundation, and Jonathan Liu, co-chair of the independent art institution Para Site, had also arrived early. Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. More surprising still, RM Kim Nam-joon, lead vocalist of the hugely popular Korean group BTS, was also intensely interested in the fair. Born in 1994, he may be only an “entry-level collector,” but in recent years he has become a regular at Basel.
Last year, he even recorded a video blog lasting 35 minutes about his visit to Art Basel in Switzerland. Zhou Shiyao, veteran collector. We also spoke face to face with Zhou Shiyao at the fair about his impressions of this year’s edition.
“This year’s Art Basel Hong Kong is tremendously exciting, because the long pandemic has finally passed. Many gallery partners and collector friends who in recent years could only attend with Satellite Booths have finally flown in themselves and returned to Hong Kong for this major art occasion!” Art Basel Hong Kong officially arrived in 2013, and Zhou had not even missed its predecessor, the Hong Kong International Art Fair (ArtHK) in 2012. He is a devoted art lover.
Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. As we walked and talked with him, he told us that he never plans too much when visiting an art fair; his route is guided largely by mood.
“Compared with the past few years, the number of galleries and collectors attending in person has clearly rebounded. The long line waiting to get in was, aside from the art itself, the thing that struck me most at the fair,” Zhou said with a laugh. Victoria Harbour at night; the M+ facade. When we asked what “good things” he had acquired this year, Zhou said that he needed a few more days to keep looking: “It’s only the first day. This year’s Basel is full of strong works, and I still haven’t decided what new piece to add to the collection.”
Yes, it is only the first day. Over the next few days, Yitiao will continue to follow Art Basel Hong Kong and other art activities in Hong Kong, and we invite those who were unable to make it to Hong Kong this time to return, after 3 years, to Asia’s art capital.