Ahead of the game
Art Basel highlighted Hong Kong’s new status as an international arts hub.
ANDY Warhol’s art series of ‘$’ signs in the booth of Dominique Levy (formerly L&M) at the vernissage of Art Basel Hong Kong was telling on the voracious art market in Hong Kong. It was the same colour of money in another booth featuring Tsang Kin-wah’s vinyl installation ala Tracy Emin with the emblazoned words, ‘Making Art, Making Money.’
While China is the second largest art market in the world, briefly once even the largest, the spillover effects of the art boom from the mainland after 1997 to the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau are palpable and profound.
Basel’s Magnus Renfrew helmed the last Art HK last year before it got the ermine ‘Basel’ livery which was an anointment of Hong Kong as a World City of arts and culture in the Asia-Pacific.
Hong Kong’s main allure was as Art Basel director Marc Spiegler put it, “no censorship issues” (Warhol’s Mao prints and dissident Ai Wei Wei’s installations came up against a brick wall for an exhibition in Shanghai) apart from red tape, and the absence of tax (in China, it’s 23% to 34% even with the trial concession of a halved import tax of 6%).
The selection in Art Basel Hong Kong, sandwiched in between the Frieze of London and the 55th Venice Biennale not to mention the Basel Basel on June 13-16, was much more stringent, restricting the overall participants to 245 (including those in the ‘Insights’ of solos, ‘Discoveries’ for emerging artists, and the ‘Encounters’ 18 large-scale projects, with 48 galleries making their debut).
Malaysia’s Ivan Lam, under the aegis of Wei-Ling Fine Arts, made a parody of this rigorous selection in his brilliant automa-art art-on-tap – a vending machine dispensing miniaturised artworks in acrylic blocks offering a pseudo interaction whilst marrying art, sculpture/installation and technology. This way, Ivan Lam also bypassed and cocked-asnook at the vetting process by “smuggling” in his reputable Malaysian artist-friends (38 of them) and having a backdoor exhibition of Malaysian art.
Rome-based H.H. Lim, who is also taking part in the Venice Biennale, was the only other Malaysian represented, by Tang (Bangkok-Beijing).
Building the base
So, what’s so terribly different between Art HK 2012 and the first Art Basel HK?
Renfrew, who directed both, said Art Basel HK had the backing of the full resources of the Basel organisational juggernaut and expertise that powered its art fairs in Basel and Miami, apart from the A-list galleries, the high-profiled projects including talks, and the network of big-time collectors and art-industry leaders. Topping the Conversation sector was ‘The Artist and the Gallerist’ between Zhang Xiao-Gang and Pace Beijing’s Leng Lin. Also, the layout was more spacious over the two levels of exhibitions.
At the vernissage, a tidal wave of the rich and famous thronged the booths and heady private receptions despite Hong Kong being hit the day before by the worst black rainstorms in decades.
Visitorship had spiked from 19,000 from the first Art HK in 2008 to more than 60,000 this year.
But HK, with an estimated population of only 7.15 million (as of July 2012), is already at the cusp of it all with an art ecology second to none in the region. It’s strategically located at the gateway of the China economic powerhouse and a financial hub to boot.
Its US$2.8bil (RM8.7bil) West Kowloon Cultural District project on a 40-ha waterfront site in Tsimtshatsui is expected to come onstream in 2015 and already M+ is having a playground of inflatable sculptures of vinyl-coated fabric and fans, that are creating incredible buzz, especially for the works