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Ian incredible turnaround time, very highoctane,” says Alexie GlassKantor, (pictured) newly ensconced curator of the Encounters section of Art Basel in Hong Kong. She’s referring to the fact that this year’s fair has moved from May to March, a sign of Asia’s increasingly large influence on global art’s power axis and a response to the collectors, buyers, gallerists and aficionados driving it.

Size matters when it comes to Encounters, too. The section, getting its exclusive debut on these pages, will comprise 21 large-scale works (up from 17 last year), some filling more than 100 square metres of exhibition space. “It adds an extra dimension in terms of interacting with contemporary art,” says Glass-kantor. “Encounters is almost like a city within a city, a sort of landscape urbanism, where each of the different artistic approaches takes on its own idiosyncratic form.”

And a distinctly Asia-pacific and Southeast Asian slant. Glass-kantor serves as executive director of Artspace in Sydney, and specialises in Asian-pacific art. As such, she’s worked on numerous international curatorial projects in Singapore, Malaysia, China, South Korea, Indonesia, Europe and the US. “I am looking