There are events that transcend the boundaries of an art fair. Moments when art is no longer simply viewed, but becomes an experience, a ritual, a shared breath. Art Basel Hong Kong, in its 2025 edition, promises to be one of these rare crossroads, at the intersection of visual utopia, emotional architecture, and a profound engagement with the material world.
From March 28 to 30 (with days of preview (from the 26th), the luminous enclosure of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center (HKCEC), in addition to becoming a showcase for prestigious galleries – 240 from 42 countries – will also be the scene of a multifaceted narrative, woven with monumental encounters, underground dialogues and visions projected towards elsewhere.
Encountersto think big
It's in the sector Encountersdedicated to large-scale installations, which beats at one of the most vibrant hearts of this edition. Curated by Alexie Glass-KantorThis section is structured around four platforms with evocative titles: Passage, alteration, Charge, and The ReturnEach one traces a sensitive trajectory, a way of approaching the world – through memory, metamorphosis, the tension between digital and organic, or the recurrence of buried myths.
The diversity of the works presented is not limited to a spectacular aesthetic. It engages a visceral, intellectual, sometimes dizzying relationship. Pacita AbadFor example, he resurrects the iconographic emotions of the Global South with three monumental canvases, while Christopher K. Ho plays with reflections of modernism in a series of brass sculptures that challenge the eye.
The pop-up store of Lu YangInhabited by the digital avatar DOKU, it blurs the lines between avatar and artist, artwork and product, with disarming audacity. A commercial performance? A critique of the commodification of the self? Perhaps both. As for Frank Wang Yefeng, The Gobi desert inspired him to create an abstract garden installation, a fragile nomadic utopia, born from a trip to that place.
Outside the fair, at Pacific Place Park Court, Monster Chetwynd unfolds a ballet of sculptural and choreographic lanterns. More than a simple scenographic feat, this piece questions the body in transformation, borrowing its codes from cinematic metamorphosis.
cabinet When the intimate becomes manifest
The area cabinetIn its alcoves within the galleries, it carves a more introspective path. It reveals projects on a human scale but endowed with high symbolic power. Thirty-eight presentations, a record, the majority of which feature artists from Asia-Pacific, map out a landscape of solitude, quests for meaning, and invisible lineages.
Here we encounter the ceramic and pictorial gestures of the late Martin Wong, the watercolor figures ofAnn Leda Shapirowho examine the Qi and the landscapes of the body, or even the cardboard sculptures of Vũ Dân Tân, inhabited by the idea that clothing is a cultural armor.
Takahiro KondoWith its "silver mist" technique, it captures water not as an element but as a moving memory, a skin in perpetual reconfiguration. And Pei Yanqing, in its muted and dreamlike palette, suspends time in a delicate in-between space between traditional Chinese painting and contemporary reverie.
The moving image: cinema, narratives, resistance
We must not forget the Film Program, this year entrusted for the first time to Para Site, an independent Hong Kong institution. Entitled "In space, it's always night", the program takes as its starting point a queer science fiction film (Vampires in Space (by Isadora Neves Marques) to weave a network of fragmented, poetic, critical narratives.
The screenings, seven in total, address such burning themes as altered memory (Sung Tieu), AI-driven agricultural futures (Cao Shu), forgotten queer customs (Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings) or the ghostly metaphors of the Nowness Asia collective. Far from the usual format of fairground films, these works are animated by a fragile, sometimes incantatory breath.
The city as an extension of the work
Art Basel Hong Kong isn't just about the hushed halls of the HKCEC: art dissolves into the city, is displayed on its facades, infiltrates its interstices. The algorithmic installation Night Charades de Ho Tzu Nyenprojected every evening onto the museum's facade M+, reinvents Hong Kong cinema as a kaleidoscope in perpetual mutation.
Many institutions – of Tai Kwun à Para Site, CAT à Tomorrow Maybe – take part in this great sharing. And the Artists' Night, a festive and hybrid event, brings together the everyday, the intimate and the performative in a night dedicated to the body and AI.
An art of connection, a shifting cartography
Ultimately, what this 2025 edition conveys is less a display of power than a desire to explore the invisible, to bring forth voices, forms, fractures, and impulses. There is a political thought at work—on migration, technology, and heritage—but also a pervasive poetry, a desire to let the artworks express themselves in the city, among the people.
In this respect, Art Basel Hong Kong is not simply a fair. It becomes an artistic ecology. A way of reaffirming that art, in a fragmented world, remains one of the few languages capable of connecting, moving, and transforming.
art basel hong kong
Convention & Exhibition Center
1 Harbor Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong (China)
March 28 to 30, 2025
