Starting last week, large numbers of art-world figures began arriving in Hong Kong, making careful preparations for the annual Art Basel Hong Kong. On March 26, before the noon opening of the first VIP day, a long line had already formed outside the fair. The enthusiasm seemed to signal the return of buying. We spoke with Angelle Siyang-Le, the director of the Hong Kong fair, and with three collectors from different generations: the veteran Hong Kong collector Adrian Chiu, whose family has collected across three generations and who formerly chaired the M+ International Council; Che Xuanqiao, founder of the Macalline Art Center; and Liu Ziyu, co-founder of Stilllife and co-chair of the young patrons council at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, about what was new at the 2025 fair.

Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. Anyone familiar with the fairgrounds in Hong Kong knows that the exhibition is spread across Levels 1 and 3. The blue-chip galleries are usually concentrated on Level 1, while Level 3 tends to include more emerging galleries, along with galleries working in the secondary market and specializing in modern art. Like many people this year, we began on Level 3. As soon as we entered the hall, we encountered Lu Yang’s Encounters project: a silver-glinting “pop-up shop” with a giant screen.

Lu Yang, DOKU The Creator, 2025, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. “We don’t deliberately champion any one medium or trend, but AI and digital art are clearly making a strong showing,” Angelle Siyang-Le told us. Lu Yang’s new work, she said, was created in collaboration with AI. Taking the form of a Japanese pop-up shop, the artist introduces an independent AI artist named DOKU, who makes artworks of its own; those works are then sold in blind-box form inside the shop.

Yun Chen, Woven Concrete, 2025, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. This year, the Encounters section includes fourteen commissioned large-scale installations. Another work drawing considerable attention is Yun Chen’s large woven tapestry Woven Concrete. The piece consists of twenty-four wearable garments and blankets, and its woven “threads” are in fact book boxes and magazines. At the fair, the artist and dancers also wear the tapestry, bringing its history and stories into motion.

Alison Nguyen, Prosthetic Memory, 2025, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. Alison Nguyen’s Prosthetic Memory presents an industrial space resembling a warehouse and a car wash, combining film, sculpture, and installation. Davy Linggar and Andra Matin, =/=, 2025, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. One especially affecting work is by the architect Davy Linggar, who reconstructs the living and working space of his artist friend Andra Matin.

“The two of them are close friends,” Siyang-Le told us. “The artist used his own home as a point of departure, continually giving the architect different drawings that point to every aspect of his life. The architect, in turn, observed the artist’s routines and habits, then used architectural space to reconstruct the artist’s home and studio.” White Cube booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. David Zwirner booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. In the main Galleries section, there are 240 participating galleries from forty-two countries and territories.

As for the fair’s popularity, many galleries reported that first-day sales were genuinely strong. At some mid-size galleries, as early as around four in the afternoon, two-thirds of the booth had already sold out. Walking through the fair, we saw many galleries opening champagne. Hauser & Wirth booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. The blue-chip galleries, meanwhile, seemed as untroubled as ever. At Hauser & Wirth, a work by Louise Bourgeois sold for $2 million to an Asian collector.

At White Cube, the most expensive work was a sculpture by Antony Gormley, priced at roughly 5 million renminbi. Gladstone booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. Pace Gallery booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. The highest-priced work sold at Gladstone was by Anicka Yi, whose exhibition had just opened at UCCA in Beijing, at $225,000. Pace’s top sale was $450,000.

Perrotin’s highest price was $350,000. Thaddaeus Ropac once again brought Georg Baselitz, and a work sold for $1.2 million. Gagosian booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. Beijing Commune booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. Mazzoleni booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. Korea’s Kukje Gallery also nearly sold out its booth; its highest price was about $600,000 for a work by Park Seo-Bo, a leading figure in Korean avant-garde art.

Salvo has been exceptionally popular at fairs in recent years. The heat around him has cooled somewhat this year, but at a seasoned secondary-market gallery like Mazzoleni, three of the four works sold were by Salvo. At Ink Studio, a leading gallery for new ink art, the highest price went to a work by Bingyi, at $75,000. Overall, the pace of buying seemed faster, but prices on the whole had come down somewhat: works under $100,000, and even under $50,000, are appearing with increasing frequency at top-tier galleries.

In speaking with three collectors from different generations, we found that each had made acquisitions this time, whether by artists they had followed for years or by artists newly discovered. Some were restrained; others were telling themselves they could not possibly buy more. What follows are their own accounts. My first time at Art Basel Hong Kong was, I think, seven or eight years ago. I remember wearing high heels and walking all day until my feet were in terrible pain. That time I bought a very small painting and carried it straight out of the fair.

This time, the crowd management felt very good, and everyone seemed to be in high spirits. It may also be the most carefully I have ever looked. Rosemarie Trockel, Training 2, 2012. John Baldessari, Two Relationships Early (Warm)/Late (Cool) with One, 1984. At Sprüth Magers, I came across a wall I especially loved, with works by Rosemarie Trockel and John Baldessari. He is an extraordinarily important master in art history, and he is also scheduled to have an exhibition at UCCA next year.

His work includes collage, fear, and bears, but in another piece the bear becomes very lovable. Thea Djordjadze, all building as making, 2021. Thea Djordjadze, Untitled, 2021. At their booth I also bought two works by Thea Djordjadze, who was a student of Rosemarie Trockel.

The gallery’s legendary founder, Magers, sat there in the booth with her white hair, and I ended up speaking with her directly. Her story with the artist is also fascinating. She felt that Rosemarie Trockel was making excellent work, but that no gallery represented her, so she opened a gallery; the two of them remained close friends for life. I asked her which of the two Thea Djordjadze works she thought was better, and she said they came from completely different angles. Since I bought both, she gave me a very good discount.

SCAI THE BATHHOUSE booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. One artist I especially liked this time was Wade Guyton at SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, where the gallery devoted a solo presentation to him. His method is interesting: he never really paints, but uses a printer he has had for ten years. It produces all kinds of errors, which he never corrects. At bottom, the work is about the relationship between imperfect images and reality.

Vajiko Chachkhiani, Beneath the Sky, 2021. Galerie Jocelyn Wolff booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. My favorite large installation at the fair was Vajiko Chachkhiani’s Beneath the Sky, which uses a fishing boat to break the surface of what appears to be calm water; it has to do with the history of mass human migration. My favorite booth was Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, whose installation and presentation felt quite different from those of the other galleries.

Emma McIntyre, Among my swan, exhibition view, David Zwirner Hong Kong, 2025. I did receive a work by a younger artist from David Zwirner this time, though not from the booth; it was by Emma McIntyre at the gallery’s Hong Kong space. I arrived a few days early and went to H Queen’s in Central, where a gallery called gdm was showing Tsang Kin-Wah, a veteran Hong Kong artist.

There is a pillar in the middle of the gallery, and the floor is covered with pebbles; on the pillar you can see traces of the artist’s burn marks. Tsang Kin-Wah, T REE O GO D EVIL, gdm exhibition view, 2025. In Central there was also Sotheby’s exhibition Corpus: Three Thousand Years of the Human Body, staged in a space they spent heavily to have designed by a Dutch designer. Many of the works were on loan from collectors, and even the music was part of the curatorial conception. I would strongly recommend that exhibition as well.

This is actually only my second time at Art Basel Hong Kong; last year was my first. I graduated from college in 2023 and had been studying art history in New York, so I never had time to come to Hong Kong, though I had been to Art Basel in Miami. By comparison, Hong Kong is a smaller city, and the exhibitions and events are densely packed. Because it is in Asia, in a place I know very well, I have always felt Hong Kong offers more different ways to move through it. And this year it feels as if even more friends have come than last year.

At the P.P.O.W booth, works by Martin Wong. The artist Harry Gould Harvey IV at the P.P.O.W booth. I have long been very interested in Martin Wong’s work, and this time P.P.O.W gave him a small solo presentation. Two of the works relate to his mother, Florence, and to the time he spent in San Francisco. He studied there in the seventies and stayed for a long time, later went to New York, and then returned to San Francisco in the final stage of his life.

Because of Martin Wong’s identity as an Asian artist active in New York, he is actually rather uncommon among older artists, and he also depicted the cityscape of New York. At the same gallery, I also liked the work of Harry Gould Harvey IV; we will be exhibiting his work in New York in May. Ho Tzu Nyen, Return to Order, 2022-2023. Cici Wu, Untitled, 2025. Of the installations at the fair this year, my favorite was Ho Tzu Nyen’s brass sculpture.

Among the works I found especially appealing at the fair was one by Cici Wu, who will have an exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai in May. She has a very small work that is somewhere between sculpture and painting, and it is very interesting. Cici Wu is also an Asian artist, born in Beijing, raised in Hong Kong, and now living in New York. Her work uses ink to reinterpret a contemporary context. That is also part of my own collecting philosophy: I am very interested in ink. It is conceptually rich, but it has now become a medium that contemporary art does not pay enough attention to.

Kurimanzutto booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. Last year was my first year of personal collecting, so my pace was very fast; I wanted to buy everything I saw. This year I have slowed down somewhat, and I also think my understanding of what collecting means has changed. Beyond collecting, supporting artists or museums through different projects is also very important, so I want to reserve part of my budget for those things.

There were several booths I really liked this year. At Ink Studio, Ren Light Pan and Li Jin matched my own preference for ink-based work. Kurimanzutto also brought excellent work. It is a Mexican gallery, and it had works by Haegue Yang, the well-known Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, the Thai artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Wang Shui.

Reunion, exhibition view, AYE Project Space, 2025. In the past few days I also helped AYE Project Space organize a group exhibition in Chai Wan, and I visited Blindspot Gallery in Wong Chuk Hang as well as Art Intelligence Global, which built a small cabin of its own and filled it with many well-known older Japanese artists, along with Western artists. That, too, was quite worth seeing.

Today I came in right at noon for the opening, as punctually as if attending class, and stayed until after six in the evening. The first time I came to Art Basel Hong Kong, it was still the fair’s predecessor, Art Hong Kong. Perhaps because I am an “older” collector, when I come to an art fair I am always hoping to see something new, unfamiliar, and genuinely interesting, rather than the same things one sees all the time in auction catalogues or exhibition catalogues.

P21 booth in Discoveries, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. When I look at an Art Basel fair, I usually begin with the newer galleries in the Insights section at the back of Level 3, or the Discoveries section at the very back of Level 1. They tend to bring artists whose “name recognition” may be less overheated, along with works that are more playful or intriguing. Acquavella booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. Many of the galleries on Level 3 are also showing secondary-market works.

With a mindset of learning and hunting, I can see works by artists such as Bacon or Schiele, whom I like very much but cannot afford; later, they may pass into the hands of important collectors and never be seen again. I also saw a great deal of new media, or AI-collaborative work. From the standpoint of artistic creation, a medium may simply be a different mode of expression. Lu Yang, DOKU The Creator, 2025, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. More traditional media such as oil painting and sculpture may have limited emotional force for some younger viewers.

And Lu Yang’s work in Encounters may be an example of how younger collectors of the “programmer” generation find resonance in reflections on the colors, rhythms, and surroundings of their own daily lives. Greene Naftali booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. EMPTY GALLERY booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. A few booths I found especially interesting were Greene Naftali, SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, EMPTY GALLERY, and Take Ninagawa, among others, though I still cannot quite say which work I absolutely had to have.

Something an American collector couple once said was very interesting: if most people stood around watching what you bought, or if you told everyone what you had bought, it would be like opening your bedroom door and letting others see your private intimacies. Bastian booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. Vadehra Art Gallery booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. A gallerist friend said something similar to me: the younger generation of Asian collectors they have encountered recently differs from the previous one. Rather than chasing works by famous artists at high prices, they look carefully and sincerely, and some works may be more moderately priced; in that way, they can cultivate their own eye and independent judgment.

Younger collectors should not listen to the usual art advisers or salespeople telling them that such-and-such foundation has bought something, or such-and-such important collector has acquired it, and then follow the crowd with their ears. Franco Noero booth, Art Basel Hong Kong installation view, 2025. I rarely buy impulsively now, because a lawyer’s capital and income are limited. When I see an artist I like, I first want to understand more about the artist’s other works and the roots of the practice before making a final decision.

Lately I have also been thinking about how to find a proper home or museum for works to be collected and shown in. My collection is not especially fashionable or commercial; you could say that I am more interested in giving artworks a good destination. Wang Haoran’s short drama and the reconstructed domestic film set from a former home at Oi! Warehouse. If you are coming to Hong Kong from elsewhere in Asia, you might try paying closer attention to Hong Kong artists and artists from Southeast Asia. Among galleries, I found Kiang Malingue’s exhibition of Ho Tzu Nyen and Wang Haoran’s exhibition Love From Hong Kong at Oi! to be especially interesting.

Wang’s work takes its inspiration from scenes in Hong Kong soap operas, and you can sense the flavor of old Hong Kong in the seventies and eighties. Alicja Kwade, exhibition view of Pittoresque, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2025. Photograph by Jimmy Ho. Image courtesy of the artist and Tai Kwun Contemporary. During Hong Kong Art Week there are also many museum exhibitions of various kinds. I am also one of the supporters of M+, so I would especially recommend that people see M+’s Picasso and the dialogue with Asian artists.

The two exhibitions at Tai Kwun by the women artists Alicja Kwade and Hu Xiaoyuan, each in a different dialogue with the site, also have considerable resonance. And if you are interested in more traditional modern art, you can also see the Cézanne and Renoir exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, with works on loan from France, as well as the Hong Kong Palace Museum’s display of food vessels, from bronzes to ceramics. Corpus: Three Thousand Years of the Human Body, exhibition view, 2025. Sotheby’s Corpus: Three Thousand Years of the Human Body is also well worth visiting. The installation is characteristically all black, so older collectors should watch the stairs. It is a fusion of ancient Chinese and Western civilizations with contemporary art, rather like Hong Kong, China, today.