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South China Morning Post
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Art Basel Hong Kong 2025 explores new frontiers
Now in its 13th edition, Art Basel Hong Kong returns with 240 exhibitors from 42 countries and territories, including record-breaking participation in the fair's Kabinett sector. There are more than 20 new galleries joining the event at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre this year, with more than half of the participating galleries from around the Asia-Pacific region. Advertisement The event is expanding beyond its traditional showcase of galleries and artwork in a number of ways. The winner of the inaugural MGM Discoveries Art Prize, which aims to shine a spotlight on the talent of emerging artists from around the globe, will be announced on March 28 at the MGM Lounge inside the fair. Local institution Para Site is curating the film section for the first time, and new cultural partners include Tomorrow Maybe, Hass Lab and Design Trust. Angelle Siyang-Le, Art Basel Hong Kong's director aim to speed up the expansion of the fair. Photo: Handout 'During what we call the 'closet years' of the pandemic, we lost our sense of connectivity. Now we are rebuilding and we want to accelerate it, connecting beyond what we used to know as the art world,' says fair director Angelle Siyang-Le on the Art Basel website. 'We're building bridges with the worlds of the performing arts, fashion, music, architecture and design. We are growing beyond being an art fair to be at the centre of a cultural ecosystem in Asia.' The Encounters sector is arguably the most eye-catching part of this year's event. Dedicated to presenting large-scale sculptures, installations and performance works by leading artists from around the world, of the fair's 18 works in this section, more than half have been created specifically for Art Basel Hong Kong. These presentations of work 'transcend the traditional art fair booth' and are organised into four categories. Works in the Passage section foreground themes of cultural resonance, resilience and storytelling; Alteration examines the subversion of abstraction and materiality; The Return focuses on mythology, spirituality and 'the cyclical nature of existence'; and Charge looks at the intersection of the digital and physical realms. Advertisement This last platform is of particular interest to Alexie Glass-Kantor , who is in her last year as curator at Art Basel Hong Kong. Highlighted pieces include new works by Tokyo-based Chinese artist Lu Yang – who has designed a pop-up store selling artwork by Doku, a digital avatar – and Frank Wang Yefeng, who has recreated an abstracted garden inspired by nomadism and a trip to the Gobi Desert.
South China Morning Post
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Catch ghosts and cyborgs at this year's Art Basel Hong Kong screenings
Art Basel showcases art in many forms, from sculpture, painting, mixed media and photography, to performance, video and installation. And while many of these art forms have existed for centuries, film and video are still relatively new. Advertisement Korean-American artist Nam June Paik is credited with producing the world's first video artwork in 1965, the year he used a Sony Portapak (a portable, videotape analogue recorder) to film Pope Paul VI processing through New York. The footage was later shown at a cafe in Greenwich Village. 'I want to shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso , as colourfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock, and as lyrically as Jasper Johns,' Paik wrote. Today, filmmaking artists are doing just that as digital innovations and technology push the genre even further. Art Basel Hong Kong's Film sector continues to be a highlight of the fair, especially since it is freely accessible to the public and curated for the first time by local independent art institution Para Site. 'It's been remarkable to see how Art Basel has evolved almost symbiotically with Hong Kong to develop and innovate new formats to support and showcase different types of art,' says Billy Tang, executive director and curator of Para Site. 'What's unique about moving image is its power to instantaneously connect various communities, geographies and languages through its ubiquitous nature and versatility as a medium.' Billy Tang. Photo: Para Site Titled 'In Space, It's Always Night', the Film programme features seven screenings and the works of 30 artists. The series was partly inspired by themes in Isadora Neves Marques' Vampires in Space (2022), which follows a family of vampires as they travel to an Earthlike exoplanet.
South China Morning Post
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Beyond Art Basel Hong Kong: free events at M+, Tai Kwun, HKCEC and Eaton HK
March is Arts Month in Hong Kong, the city drawing in the global art crowd with its most important art fairs of the year. But as we all know, art is not confined to just gallery walls and exhibition halls. From Art Basel Hong Kong's public programme to satellite installations across the city, there are plenty of other art-related events that are, best of all, freely accessible to the public. Here are just a few of the highlights. Art Basel public programme Going well beyond the show floor, Art Basel Hong Kong includes a curated schedule of film screenings, panel discussions, experimental presentations and off-site installations that are open to all, as well as the highly visible M+ digital facade that lights up the city by night. Advertisement Curated for the first time by local independent art institution Para Site – and presented in collaboration with cultural video channel Nowness Asia, as well as Videotage, a non-profit organisation dedicated to video art – this year's Art Basel Hong Kong Film programme features seven screenings and the works of 30 artists. Screenings take place throughout the week at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC). Themes include ecological interdependence, resilience amid societal constraints, human desire, and the technology shaping our interconnected lives. For lively debates on the key topics shaping the art world today, don't miss Art Basel Hong Kong's flagship talks programme, Conversations. Curated by Stephanie Bailey, series highlights include how arts patronage is evolving in Southeast Asia, the role of tech and AI in the art world, and an exclusive talk with Ho Tzu Nyen, the artist behind this year's M+ Facade commission. All talks will be conducted in English, Cantonese and Mandarin, with simultaneous translation available. On the move? Drop by Exchange Circle at Art Basel Hong Kong, located at HKCEC's Level 1 Concourse, for short and experimental presentations including artist talks, discussions, lectures, signings and workshops. Or take a break from shopping at Pacific Place at the off-site Encounters installation – a blend of sculpture and performance art inspired by metamorphosis called Lanternfly Ballet, by Zurich-based artist Monster Chetwynd. M+ and Tai Kwun M+ museum of visual arts will highlight film during Art Month. Photo: M+ Over in West Kowloon, the M+ Facade will showcase Night Charades by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen every night from Saturday, March 22, for three months. Co-commissioned by Art Basel and M+, the work pays tribute to the golden age of Hong Kong cinema and will be continuously edited in real time by an AI algorithm. In addition, M+ will screen five of Ho's most seminal films during the month of March.
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Art Basel Hong Kong's Film Program Blends Facts, Fiction and Fantasy
The phrase 'attention economy' has gained currency in an ever more distracted world. An art fair like Art Basel Hong Kong next week offers thousands of ways to spend attention, usually in short bursts as visitors make the rounds and land their eyes on a work of interest briefly, over and over. The film section at the fair requires slowing down, given that the medium is, in art world parlance, time-based, a term used for any work that has duration as a dimension. Art Basel — established in 1970 in Switzerland — first offered a film section in 1999 when the organization had just one fair. Hong Kong has had a film section since its second edition, in 2014. In the past decade, more than 300 films have been shown there, including those by well-known makers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lou Ye, Cheng Ran, Lu Yang, Marina Abramovic, John Akomfrah, William Kentridge and Takashi Murakami. 'The film sector is very well received in our Hong Kong show,' said Angelle Siyang-Le, the fair's director. 'The younger generation responds to the material well, and they're more open to the moving image.' Most screenings take place in an auditorium inside the fair's venue, the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, that has around 100 seats, and the program usually draws a 'full house,' Siyang-Le said. This year's program, 'In Space, It's Always Night,' will feature seven screenings and the work of 30 filmmakers, mostly short films. It is free and open to the public; limited editions of the films are for sale on a case-by-case basis. It was curated by Billy Tang, the executive director of Para Site, the Hong Kong contemporary art center that was founded in 1996, and some of Tang's Para Site colleagues. They also worked with outside curators. 'Our hope is that this project becomes almost like a film festival in its scope and ambition,' Tang said. Each day's screening lineup will have a different theme. There is one feature-length work in the program: the 75-minute 'Vampires in Space,' by Isadora Neves Marques. That film, Tang said, 'sets the tone for the overall program.' 'Vampires in Space' was part of Portugal's pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Originally it was a three-channel installation, meaning that different scenes were shown simultaneously. At the Art Basel screening, it will be shown as one continuous feature for the first time. It is being presented by the Umberto Di Marino gallery of Naples, Italy. As vampire movies go, Marques's film is highly atypical. There is no blood and no horror — it's a moody, philosophical journey. The characters mostly just talk, musing on their human past and their uncertain future, given that they live forever, as they hurtle in a spaceship toward an unknown destination. 'It's a dysfunctional family movie,' Marques said. 'It's true of my other films, too.' She added, 'Science fiction and fantasy runs through my work.' The Portuguese filmmaker, who once lived in New York, shot the film in Lisbon during an early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. She moved to Hong Kong last year. Tang said that the film's unusual storytelling, mixing sci-fi and social commentary, 'echoes with the best forms of culture emerging in Hong Kong — a refusal to be shoehorned and categorized.' 'Vampires' is one of several films in the program looking at queer identity, and identity in general. Marques said of the film, 'Several of the characters are trans, and I'm a trans woman.' One of the film's ideas, she said, is that 'you're more than the identity that you're supposed to perform.' One of the works in the program that has a queer theme, the 24-minute 'Corpo Fechado: The Devil's Work' (2018), takes inspiration from a true story dating from the 18th century, uncovered in a Portuguese archive by the filmmaker Carlos Motta. 'I found the story of an enslaved man, who was kidnapped in West Africa and sent to Brazil,' said Motta, who is Colombian and now lives in New York. The African man, José Francisco Pereira, developed a practice creating amulets to protect his fellow laborers, mixing African and Christian traditions. 'Authorities labeled him a witch, and he was tried for witchcraft,' Motta said. 'In the trial, he said he had sex with the devil in the form of a white man. They said he was not only a witch, he was a sodomite; he was tried for both.' In Motta's film, presented by the Paris gallery Mor Charpentier, Pereira gets agency over his own story as the narrator — and Motta thinks the tale is relevant right now. 'In many places in the world, sodomy continues to be punishable by death,' said Motta, who currently has a retrospective of his work on view at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in Spain. 'So it's an opportunity to reflect on that.' A dreamier, more abstracted take on history comes from Cao Shu, of Hangzhou, China, in his 15-minute work 'Phantom Sugar' (2023), presented by ShanghART of Shanghai. It features smoothly gliding drone footage of a now-defunct sugar factory in Guangdong, China, originally built in 1935 and now a cultural heritage site. The title, Cao said, refers to fluctuating sugar prices. He did extensive research for the film, including interviewing around 30 people who used to work at the factory, but he calls it 'science fiction.' No people appear in the film; instead, digitally created ants are shown carrying leaves through the abandoned facility. 'It touches on the memory of socialism in 20th-century China,' Cao said. 'The factory is like a creature, and the people inside it have memories.' The film also touches on the increasing use of vertical farming controlled by artificial intelligence, contrasted with the past represented by the factory. Cao said he liked the tension of presenting a nuanced look at socialism and capitalism at a highly commercial event like an art fair: 'It's a very interesting clash.'
