RETURNING TO THE PEDDER BUILDING’S entrance this year, I found myself lost in memories from a decade ago: my first visit to Art Basel Hong Kong. Trailing behind fashionably dressed art professionals with their radiant expressions, I queued to enter the neoclassical building, ready to embark on a pilgrimage through the galleries scattered across its different floors. I call it a “pilgrimage” because for ten years this talk-of-the-town art event was my yearly ritual—interrupted only by the pandemic, when travel became nearly impossible. Each year, I would trek between venues across Hong Kong Island until my legs grew so heavy and numb, I practically had to drag them. How to explain this commitment of mine? I could compare it to two months ago, on Beijing’s coldest day in recorded history, when I braved bone-shivering winds to participate in an hour-long chanting service at White Cloud Temple for Chinese New Year. I endured this discomfort in the sole belief that my dedication would bless me with a whole year of good fortune, happiness, and protection against the ill omens associated with my zodiac sign’s conflict with this year’s guardian deity.
I pair Art Basel with divinatory rituals because of their paradoxical similarities. In the former, however, what sustains a participant’s will to overcome their physical and spiritual exhaustion and reach each venue is not as concrete as “a whole year of good fortune, happiness, and protection,” but a far more nebulous and abstract vision. Ten years ago, going down the Pedder Building’s spiral staircase with the crowd, I so firmly believed I was joining a growing “community.” Amid the incessant rotation of lunches, dinner receptions, and parties, new identities seemed to consolidate at such a rapid pace that it didn’t warrant careful consideration of the community’s authenticity or future. So I caution myself against nostalgia.
Gagosian, now the only remaining gallery in the Pedder Building, was showcasing the latest works by Sarah Sze. Memories are inevitably tinted by the present, much like the layered prismatic smithereens in her paintings. Reality asserted itself through the departures of the Pedder Building’s once-prominent tenants, like Lehmann Maupin and Simon Lee. Some galleries have relocated to peripheral areas: Hanart TZ Gallery to Kwai Chung in the New Territories, Ben Brown Fine Arts to Wong Chuk Hang on Hong Kong Island’s southern edge. Following the Pedder Building exodus, H Queen’s in Central became the new gallery hub in 2018; yet last year, it too lost one of its major tenants—Hauser & Wirth, which relocated just five minutes away on foot. Located on the ground floor of a business center, its new space boasts impressive street-facing windows with floor-to-ceiling displays. During Art Basel week, it exhibited sculptures and works on paper by Louise Bourgeois. Kiang Malingue, which used to have a gallery space in Central ten years ago, now occupies a three-floor stand-alone building on a hillside alley in Wan Chai. The gallery presented “Three Stories: Monsters, Opium, Time,” a solo exhibition by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, articulating the recurrence of ancient ghosts in Asia and exploring time as a concept relative to different geo-historical narratives.
“It’s a structural change,” a friend of mine observed. “The overall situation is difficult and people are running out of money,” another friend added. I wasn’t entirely convinced that shifts within the art community qualified as “structural,” nor did I subscribe to clichéd economic determinism. This year’s Art Basel Hong Kong was still bustling and hustling, at least on the surface level. I met many old friends at the party hosted by M+ on the night of March 24, several of whom had relocated from Shanghai or Beijing to Hong Kong, or even to Europe. The Artists’ Night organized by Tai Kwun on the 28th was a full house too; rumor had it the crowd even briefly triggered the fire alarm. Receptions and cocktail parties seemed to happen nonstop, accommodating increasingly swelling numbers of first-time guests—new faces everywhere. “They are all Korean collectors,” a friend told me, as it took real effort for people who just exchanged names to move beyond pleasantries and be on the same wavelength. I had to admit that the “community” I once felt a part of was clearly gone. Wrong place, wrong time—this realization left me with a sense of displacement for the rest of my stay in Hong Kong, like a lens through which my art-viewing experience was filtered.
Serakai Studio, founded by former Tai Kwun head of art Tobias Berger, launched a new annual magazine last year. Titled Cong, it draws attention to the urban culture cultivated in modern Asian metropolises (with a focus on Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Bangkok). Its inaugural article proclaimed “the new predominance of Asian style in global culture.” Yet a closer look at the article’s keywords—Harajuku, YMO, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto—took me straight back to the first decade of the 2000s, as if time had stood still since then. The issue concluded with a roundtable on Central, Hong Kong: The editorial team invited developers, architects, and planners to discuss the area’s history and visions for its future. Perhaps predictably, no trace of my nostalgic art community was to be found in their discussion. But maybe that feeling was nothing more than my own faint longing.
There is, however, no place for faint longing at an art fair. In the official press release, Art Basel Hong Kong director Angelle Siyang-Le emphasized the fair’s “deep commitment to nurturing Asia’s thriving art ecosystem.” This proved more than mere promotional rhetoric, as evidenced by several positive developments this year: Mainland Chinese galleries (for instance, Shanghai-based Antenna Space) secured their largest booths to date, while an increasing number of Southeast Asian galleries debuted in the “Insights” and “Discoveries” sectors. At Bangkok-based CityCity Gallery’s booth, multimedia artist Tanat Teeradakorn installed a gaudy souvenir cart selling products emblazoned with protest slogans and symbols. Videos playing on the cart montaged traditional Thai dance moves with protest songs re-produced by the artist. What could be more fitting for an art fair than such satire—juxtaposing revolution against consumption, resistance against obedience? Elsewhere, in the “Encounters” sector, Christopher K. Ho exhibited a suite of gleaming brass and aluminum sculptures on gray pedestals. Evoking a chorus of magical creatures, “Return to Order” (2022–23) both honored and commemorated modernist ideals while simultaneously deconstructing and reimagining them. In its industrial-style space atop a Causeway Bay building, PHD Group (the Hong Kong gallery representing Ho’s work) showcased an eerie yet playful video and sound installation by Japanese artist Yuriko Sasaoka, which garnered critical acclaim among all the concurrent openings. PHD Group cofounders Willem Molesworth and Ysabelle Cheung collaborated with the Shophouse Gallery’s Alex Chan to establish the satellite fair Supper Club in 2024. This year, Supper Club relocated from Fringe Club to an office building at H Queen’s, offering a more polished space while maintaining last year’s hybrid exhibition format, which presented freestanding artworks in dialogue rather than in independent booths.
Returning to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, this year’s Art Central invited curator Aaditya Sathish to program its performance sector. The theme, “In Search of the Miraculous,” was inspired by the last image of Dutch Conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader before he vanished during an Atlantic crossing: the artist, sitting on a small boat on a borderless sea, fearlessly venturing into the unknown. The artists featured in this year’s performance sector similarly explored the romanticized image of the “lone traveler,” including Xiaoshi Qin, who searched for stories of folk pirates in the Pearl River Estuary, and Charmaine Poh, who wandered the digital vastness as the avatar E-Ching.
My journey, too, continued. Housed in the former Central Police Station Compound, Tai Kwun presented three separate solo exhibitions by female artists Maeve Brennan, Alicja Kwade, and Hu Xiaoyuan. Since Pi Li took on the head-of-art role two years ago, the institution’s programming has undergone a noticeable shift, moving away from solo exhibitions by blue-chip artists (such as Takashi Murakami and Pipilotti Rist) and group shows centered on the most on-trend topics. This change could be seen either as steering the institution’s trajectory toward more historiographical surveys or as another manifestation of current upheavals. An upcoming group exhibition on contemporary Chinese art later this year has garnered significant interest, positioned as it is against an increasingly divided art industry and Hong Kong society.
Against this backdrop, M+’s “Picasso for Asia: A Conversation” seemingly attempted to heal these divisions. By placing Picasso’s original works alongside museum collections and commissioned pieces by Asian artists, the exhibition aspired to create a space for equal dialogue. Despite these good intentions, however, the exhibition chapters focused predominantly on Picasso’s life and artistic process, overshadowing the Asian artists spread throughout and positioning them more as “apprentices” or “fans” than equals. (This was evident in the display of Picasso portraits painted by Zeng Fanzhi and Yan Peiming at the entrance to the show.) On top of that, works that challenge Picasso’s male gaze—such as Pixy Liao’s photography series “Experimental Relationship,” which boldly subverted gender assumptions—were disconnected from the exhibition’s broader context. Commissioned works by Simon Fujiwara and Sin Wai Kin merely reinterpreted Picasso’s masterpieces from stylistic and compositional perspectives—not so much a breakthrough as a reaffirmation of the existing art-historical canon that idolizes Picasso.
Nonetheless, Sin Wai Kin’s concurrent solo exhibition at Blindspot Gallery, in Wong Chuk Hang’s Po Chai Industrial Building, was a wholly exceptional experience. The two video pieces on display, The Fortress and The Time of Our Lives (both 2024), were deliciously fun, featuring the artist’s solo performance across multiple roles based on an immensely philosophical yet cleverly humorous script. As an acute parody of contemporary media production, the films constructed a world where all binary categories (body and soul, self and others, reality and dream, and—most obviously—male and female) melted down and collapsed. Particularly so in The Time of Our Lives, a “sci-fi sitcom” where time escapes the constraints of linear progression so that the “end of the world” indicates not the conclusion but rather the beginning of another narrative as told by the Storyteller character. Suddenly, my persistent feeling of displacement in Hong Kong seemed justified.
Admittedly, apart from this one experience at Blindspot Gallery, my gallery-searching journey through Wong Chuk Hang was full of hurdles. My first intended stop was Current Plans, which many had recommended but I’d never had a chance to visit. Unfortunately, the space was closed in preparation of a performance by Martin Goya Business, an art platform based in Hangzhou, so I then headed to Richard Hawkins’s solo exhibition at Empty Gallery in Tin Wan, a ten-minute drive from Wong Chuk Hang, followed by Chan Wai Lap’s solo at Gallery EXIT and Hong Kong artist Tap Chan’s exhibition at Mou Projects, temporarily housed in a space vacated by Kiang Malingue. I later returned to Wong Chuk Hang, pacing back and forth along an overpass, searching for my next destination. More options appeared on my list: Podium Gallery, which opened last year and was currently hosting the group exhibition “Aftershock”; Australian gallery COMA’s temporary space (featuring a solo exhibition by Mia Middleton), which my friend recommended; and my last stop, Sin Sin Arts (with a solo exhibition by Michelle Fung). But after struggling to locate the gallery using my phone’s navigation, I found that its front door was locked. By then, my feet had long exhausted my last reserves: The more earnestly I sought interesting exhibitions, the more depleted I felt after a fruitless search. My fatigue was almost liberating—when confronted with the locked door, what I sincerely felt was not disappointment but relief.
During my few days in Hong Kong, I kept pondering where this journey would lead. The art industry and its surrounding ecosystem have transformed dramatically in the past decade. All the things that once provided clarity have since lost their validity. The endless walking and searching brought on by this annual pilgrimage stems more from habit than rational purpose. In the end, only exhaustion remains. “How to Be Happy Together?,” the exhibition curated by Zairong Xiang at Para Site, featured As noites de Hong Kong são feitas de neona (Hong Kong Nights Are Made of Neon), a short novel written by Caio Yurgel in Brazilian Portuguese. I was struck by these words, addressed to the story’s protagonist by a young passerby: “You seem to be such an optimistic person with your foul mouth and unrestrained laughter, yet your book reads so hopeless.” Yes, a hint of hopelessness currently exudes from everything, but if we switch perspectives, maybe despair is the beginning of hope. Why not? Follow the guidance from Sin Wai Kin’s sitcom: “There really is an end, which follows a beginning, which follows an end, which follows a beginning, which follows an end, which follows a beginning, which follows an end . . .”
Translated from Mandarin by Jiajing Lily Sun.
