The 10th edition of Art Basel Hong Kong will take place from March 23 to March 25, 2023 under the direction of Angelle Siyang-Le, the former regional head of gallery relations
Hong Kong and Art Basel
Art Basel’s acquisition of Art HK and consequently their venture in the Asian context, has been a catalyst for making Hong Kong a pole of interest for global collectors and audiences. After ten years of its foundation, Art Basel Hong Kong returns between March 23 and 25, 2023 with another in-depth overview of both local and international artists.
The annual art fair takes place at the Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC) in Wan Chai, Hong Kong’s commercial area and hub of foreign and Chinese cultural institutions.
Back from Covid: Hong Kong’s return to international art
Following Hong Kong’s ease of Covid-19-related travel restrictions from December 13, Art Basel will welcome back international visitors with its whole scale programme. One hundred and seventy-seven galleries from thirty-two countries and territories are included in this year’s fair, marking the largest edition since 2019.
A global large-scale event at Art Basel Hong Kong
Over two-thirds of participating galleries have exhibition spaces in the region – with thirty-three galleries having exhibition spaces in Hong Kong – reinforcing Art Basel’s commitment to showcasing art from its host city and across Asia and the Asia Pacific. Over two-thirds of the exhibitors hold at least one exhibition space in the Asia-Pacific region, among which Ora-Ora, Empty Gallery, and 10 Chancery Lane Gallery are local enterprises which focus on creating a dialogue between East and West cultures to expand local horizons and participate in the global arts circulation.
The main exhibitors’ sector will be flanked by Insights, a sector of nineteen galleries representing Asia-based artists, and Discoveries, which will focus on twenty-three emerging galleries.
The fair’s programme is also enriched by Hong Kong’s leading museums and cultural institutions such as M+, Tai Kwung Contemporary, and Asia Art Archive among many others, which will run exhibitions of interest to get deeper into the Asian modern and contemporary artistic oeuvre.
Partnering with art-supporting brands: UBS
Global Lead Partner of Art Basel, UBS has a history of supporting contemporary art and artists. The firm has one of the world’s most relevant corporate art collections and seeks to advance the international conversation about the art market through its global lead partnership with Art Basel, and as co-publisher of the ‘Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report’. UBS also supports some of the world’s most relevant arts institutions, events and fairs. UBS provides its clients with insight into the art market, collecting, and legacy planning through its UBS Collectors Circle and UBS Art Advisory.
Art Basel’s Associate Partner is Audemars Piguet, whose contemporary art commissioning program, Audemars Piguet Contemporary works with artists to support and develop an unrealized artwork which explores a new direction in their practice.
The return of Encounters to Art Basel Hong Kong
Curated for the sixth time by Alexie Glass-Kantor – Executive Director of Artspace, Sydney and the curator for the Australian pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale – Encounters will feature thirteen large-scale installations under the theme This present, moment. «After an extended period apart, the opportunity to activate Encounters feels relevant. Every project in this year’s sector considers in some way how we can hold space – how we might be present – individually and collectively in the singularity and precarity of this moment» says Glass-Kantor.
Immersive and original works are at the core of Encounters
Some highlights for this year’s edition are: Blindspot Gallery’s represented artist Trevor Yeung’s Mr. Cuddles Under the Eave (2021), in which the artist continues his practice of personifying botanic ecology and inanimate objects to articulate the complexities of human emotion and relationships; the marble installation The Wine Dark Sea (2022-2023) by Ukrainian artist Stanislava Pinchuk, on migrant journeys and conceptions of hospitality, presented by Yavuz Gallery; masked mannequin sculptures in Solitude of Silences (2017-2019) by Gimhongsok, portraying laborers who compose the majority of modern urban populations and represent an uncertainty over the value of labor, presented by Kukje Gallery.
The Encounters sector transcends the classical art-show stand to bring to the forefront the astonishment of large-scale sculptural art, installations and immersive practices. Unlike the fairs in Basel and Miami Beach, Art Basel Hong Kong attracts a large number of visitors from the general public, which is the reason why curator Alexie Glass-Kantor supports the idea of Encounters as a physical experience where the audience gets close to art and becomes part of it, as a collaborator than an external agent meant to stay distant and be educated from a distance.
Conversations curated by Stephanie Bailey
Stephanie Bailey, writer, editor, and Art Basel Content Advisor and Editor for Asia, is this year’s curator of Conversations, a program for dialogues between prominent art members of the international art world.
The series of talks, panels and discussions, open to all and free to attend, will span between the production, collecting and exhibiting art, and will come across social and economical matters such as solidarity beyond feminism, private and public patronage, and a focus on contemporary African art in Hong Kong. Gallerists, artists, curators, collectors, architects, lawyers, critics, and other cultural players are all included to share their perspectives on such topics.
Conversations will continue ahead of the fair, including talks on humor and critique with meme-makers Jerry Gagosian, Freeze Magazine, and The White Pube; and a report on the futures of crypto economies hosted in collaboration with Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum, moderated by Shumon Basar.
The film programme: Mónica de Miranda, Angela Su, Tromarama, and Shen Xin among others
The film program by and about artists will enrich the fair with eight screenings and twenty-nine video works by artists from across the globe, including Mónica de Miranda, Angela Su, Tromarama, and Shen Xin among others. Multimedia artist and film producer Li Zhenhua was appointed curator of this edition. Moreover, Videotage and Ghost 2565 – two non-profit organizations that focus on video art in the region – will each curate a screening.
The Film program will launch with a special screening of Memoria by Palme-D’or- winning director Apichatpong Weerasethakul at Theatre II, HKCEC on March 22. Set in Colombia, Memoria is Weerasethakul’s first feature made outside Thailand. Starring Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton, the special screening spotlights Weerasethakul’s achievements in his filmmaking career. As part of the short film screenings, Ghost 2565 will present Weerasethakul’s contemporary art practice in the form of a short film on March 25 at Louis Koo Cinema, Hong Kong Arts Centre.
The Film program is free to the public, confirming Art Basel Hong Kong openness to a wider art public, as the Encounters sector suggests.
Kabinett: a focus on Asian art
The sector Kabinett is a showcase of solo and thematic exhibitions with a focus on Asian art. Kabinett draws together emerging artist and mid-career artists who have presented in some of the world’s most relevant art biennials such as Venice, Shanghai, Warsaw, Yinchuan, Genova, Lyon, Honolulu and Chengdu.
Highlights from this year’s Kabinett include Hu Qingyan’s World of Silence, a series of marble works that continue the theme of emptiness that the artist has been exploring in recent years. The artist is presented by Galerie Urs Meile. Furthermore, Galerie du Monde presents the late Hong Kong ink artist Wesley Tongson’s spiritual journey and artistic path featuring the artist’s splash ink and monumental landscape paintings created with his hands, fingers, and nails, where he poured his bold and raw emotions directly on the paper – a form of liberation for Tongson.
Hand Me Your Trust by Pipilotti Rist
Commissioned by M+ and supported by Art Basel and UBS, Hand Me Your Trust is a site-specific moving image work by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist for the M+ facade. The facade is set within the architecture of Hong Kong’s world-famous skyline along Victoria Harbour. The work incorporates Rist’s palettes and freeform camera work, echoing the dynamic shifts of scale of Hong Kong’s urban landscape.
Rist approaches the concept of the hand from a variety of scales, mirroring the dynamics of the city itself from an intimate human scale, to one that is the size of a building. As the hands weave and chart a path around various objects at varying velocities, Rist takes on not only Hong Kong’s design and architecture heritage, but also the individual hands that sculpted, placed, and forged these ubiquitous forms into being. For Rist, her work looks at hands not only as working and creating, but also ornamentally: our hands can be extensions of our emotions, to communicate with other living beings without words.
The work will be shown on M+ Facade daily from 7 to 9pm from March 18 to May 21 and every Saturday and Sunday from 7 to 9pm from 22 May to 17 June 2023.
Art Basel Hong Kong
Art Basel, whose Global Lead Partner is UBS, will take place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC) from March 23 to March 25, 2023, with preview days on March 21 and 22. UBS is Global Lead Partner of Art Basel. Art Basel Hong Kong tenth edition is under the direction of Angelle Siyang-Le.
