10 Things to See at Art Basel in Hong Kong

A mainstay of the global contemporary art scene and the foremost champion of Asia’s own Art Basel in Hong Kong as it’s innovative. A plethora of international and domestic galleries will present works in the creativity, material and cutting- edge works.

Galerie Nächst St Stephan Bernard Frize

The Austrian gallery has a long a tradition of representing modern art. Its group show for this year’s fair is a perfect example, with artists such as Alice Attie, Herbert Brandl, Imi Knoebel and Günter Umberg— all pivotal figures of today’s visual practice—displaying contemporary pieces spanning mixed-media compositions, sculptures and abstract paintings. Among the exhibits, four works by French painter Bernard Frize are perhaps most captivating in their variety. Frize is known for using a multitude of materials and techniques, each of his creations a layered composition derived from elaborately constructed rules and carefully choreographed acts of painting. The pieces on show are reflective of this practice; from wide brushes to geometric grid patterns, they reference minimalism, abstract expressionism and colour field painting, for a truly eclectic approach to art.

Yamamoto Gendai Nauhiro Ukawa and Nicolas Bufe

Art is the new black for Tokyo gallery Yamamoto Gendai, whose group show Paint It Black, named after a 1960s pop song, features mixed-media artworks that explore the colour and concept of black as the key means of expression and representation. Naohiro Ukawa’s video installation—dj John Cage & 1000 Worldwide Djs—is the presentation’s pièce de résistance. It consists of more than 1,000 videos of international DJS playing at Dommune, the underground studio and streaming channel led by Ukawa. Another must-see is Tokyo transplant Nicolas Buffe’s Wall Drawing, a black-and-white wall-sized illustration that playfully appropriates classical references, pop culture and even anime to create a hybrid world defined by the grotesque.

Esther Schipper Ugo Rondinone

Ugo Rondinone’s work is as mystical as it is rooted in the everyday. Occupying himself with the boundaries between fiction and reality, the Swiss-born mixed-media artist boasts an eclectic portfolio spanning installations, large-scale drawings and psychedelic paintings that combine childlike colours and shapes with technical wizardry. Rondinone’s windows—a recurring motif in his work since the 1990s—play on the combination of familiar and strange. Cast from weathered window frames in aluminium, giving them a distant, ghostlike effect, they become objects to be looked at, rather than framing a view to the outside.

Clearing Calvin Marcus

A first look at TBT, a Calvin Marcus work to be shown by Clearing gallery, might have you think you’re staring at a patch of grass. Such is the immediacy of the painting’s strokes, homage to both the abstract expressionists of 1940s America, and Birds and Wild Grass, a famous 16th-century Japanese folding screen the Los Angeles-based artist saw in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collection. Much of Marcus’s oeuvre weaves pure openness of expression together with meticulous research-based conclusions and methods, deftly employing a wide range of materials and techniques—from drawing to oil painting, ceramics and metalwork—to create an artistic practice that is both inventive and highly referential. TBT does so brilliantly, and through a refreshingly accessible style. Quite the achievement for an artist who is only 28.

König Galerie, in collaboration with 303 Gallery and Kamel Mennour Alicja Kwade

Can an installation help to examine (if not resolve) the subjectivity of space and time? Alicja Kwade believes so. The Berlin-based artist has long been engaged with value systems and the perceptions and physical experiences of time, space and reality, which she explores through large-scale sculptures featuring everyday objects such as clocks, mirrors, copper and lights. Investigating the structural properties of these items, Kwade transforms them via almost alchemical operations to propose new meaning and value. Her Time Zone Sculpture is a case in point. Premiering at Art Basel in Hong Kong, the six-metre-long piece consists of 26 beam elements placed on top of each other and fixed by bolts or welds to act as a bench, probing the way the material world tethers to the extended concept of reality.

Edouard Malingue Gallery Wang Wei

Critic and curator Karen Smith, one of the most eminent experts on Chinese contemporary art, once described the works of Chinese conceptual artist Wang Wei like “successive experiments carried out in the cause of a sustained investigation into space.” Slipping Mural 2 is one of these experiments. The floor-based installation, brought to the Encounters section by the Hong Kong-based Edouard Malingue Gallery, follows the artist’s interest in creating immersive settings that are not so much artworks but vehicles for situating artifice in the context of life. As such, the piece decontextualises the concept of what a mural might be and the spatial boundaries between the work and the viewer, giving way to new layers of meaning.

Gallery Exit Xue Feng

The gallery brings works by Chinese artist Xue Feng, who has made a name for injecting new life into landscape painting through bright nature scenes bulging with vegetation and 3D illusions exploring the gap between reality and imagination, perception and deception. Transform-13 could be described as a florid milieu with a metaphysical twist. A floral and leaf pattern is etched in a startling colour palette across the canvas, creating different layers of space—as if we were looking at a lush woodland. But the door in the middle of the scene turns the perspective upside down: Are we at the edge of a forest, or just in a room where nature forms one of the walls?

Imura Art Gallery Sadaharu Horio

Born in 1939 in Kobe, Sadaharu Horio is often considered the most important Japanese artist of his generation. He is also referred to as one of Japan’s most experimental visionaries of the 20th century, a pioneer in modern Kobe performance art, and the founding member of the 1960s avant-garde Gutai art group. During this year’s fair, Horio has his own solo booth with Imura Art Gallery, and you must stop by to visit. On display are his works titled Atarimae-no-koto 3kg Paintings, made by combining discarded iron pieces that rigorously weigh no more than three kilos. Atarimae-no-koto translates as “a matter of course.” The works represent both Horio’s everyday and his art, two sides of the same coin, all the while expressing the existence of a “matter of course” surrounding us, like air.