Highlights from Art Basel Hong Kong 2024

Art Basel Hong Kong officially opens this week at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. The 2024 edition marks its first full-fledged fair since the pandemic, featuring 242 galleries, including Lehmann Maupin, Pace, Gagosian, and Silverlens, from 40 countries and territories. The Special Administrative Region of China is welcoming thousands of foreign visitors for Hong Kong Art Week for the first time after travel restrictions were lifted a year ago. 

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At Jessica Silverman, San Francisco-based Chelsea Ryoko Wong pays homage to Hong Kong, her father’s hometown, with a painting that immortalizes Jumbo. The iconic floating restaurant could only be accessed by boats from Aberdeen Harbour, and unfortunately fell victim to the pandemic, shuttering in 2020 after 44 years. “My dad would always tell us about floating villages and restaurants on barges,” recalls the artist. “I never believed them but most of his tall tales were true when we finally went to Hong Kong and saw it with our own eyes.” The San Francisco gallery also features the California-born, New York-based artist Loie Hollowell’s captivating abstract work for the Focus section. 

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Flowers—often displayed in tough economic times because they’re easier to sell dominate the fair, too, with floral artworks by David Hockney, Paul Anthony Smith, and Nobuyoshi Araki, among the artists who contributed colorful blooms this year.

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Fairgoers can take a break in the UBS Lounge, which offers visitors a number of dining options, including a Cha Chaan Teng, a traditional Hong Kong diner that serves flakey egg tarts, airy pineapple buns, and Hong Kong-style milk tea. The Peninsula Hong Kong has also set up shop there, with a bar by Felix, its Michelin-starred French restaurant, offering a selection of cocktails like the Potato Soliloquy, Grape Soliloquy, and Succulent Soliloquy that are also available at The Bar at the iconic hotel. 

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The Encounters sector, curated by Executive Director of Artspace Visual Arts Centre in Sydney Alexie Glass-Kantor, features monumental works by artists like the Korean, Berlin-based Haegue Yang, who has produced a larger-than-life version of her installations for the fair, combining three of her works situated on Binakol, a Filipino gridded, wavelike textile, believed by the indigenous Cordilleras to protect against evil spirits. As well, Nepalese artist Tsherin Sherpa has created Stairways to Heaven, a 10-meter-long runner depicting a dragon winding up to the sky.

Women artists have a prominent presence at Art Basel Hong Kong. New York artist Tschabalala Self has several works at Pilar Corrias, such as the dynamic Liaison, a mixed media piece depicting a couple before a checkered vase filled with red anthuriums. At Gagosian, Sarah Sze’s intricate painting combines the figurative with the abstract through a fragmented beach landscape. François Ghebaly is showing Eunnam Hong’s Lies, a seductive oil painting of two women spilling the tea. Silverlens has a painting from the late Filipino artist Pacita Abad’s Immigrant Experience series—a retrospective of her work opens across the world next week at MoMA PS1—that shows a woman who migrated from a rural province of the Philippines to Manila. Lehmann Maupin is exhibiting a lyrical mixed-media piece depicting Indonesian president Sukarno during the 1955 Bandung Conference, the first summit between African and Asian states that aimed to eradicate colonialism and forge economic and cultural alliances by Tammy Nguyen called Release the Immense Forces. At Galerie Natalie Obadia, there’s a winsome black-and-white photograph of a young boy passing a group of laboring prisoners by the late auteur Agnès Varda, taken during her 1957 trip to Kunming, China.