There are events that go beyond the art fair. Moments when art is no longer just something to look at, 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 crossroads of visual utopia, affective architecture and a deep engagement with the matter of the world.
From March 28 to 30 (with preview days starting on the 26th), the luminous precincts of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC) will not only be the setting for 240 prestigious galleries from 42 countries, but also the stage for a multiple narrative, woven from monumental encounters, underground dialogues and visions projected elsewhere.
Encounters, to think big
The Encounters section, dedicated to large-scale installations, is where one of the most vibrant hearts of this edition beats. Curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor, this section is divided into four evocatively-titled platforms: Passage, Alteration, Charge and The Return. Each 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 spectacular aesthetics. It engages a carnal, intellectual and sometimes vertiginous relationship. Pacita Abad, for example, resurrects the iconographic emotions of the global South in three monumental canvases, while Christopher K. Ho plays with the reflections of modernism in a series of eye-challenging brass sculptures.
Lu Yang's pop-up store, inhabited by the DOKU digital avatar, disarmingly blurs the lines between avatar and artist, artwork and product. A commercial performance? A critique of the commodification of the self? Perhaps both. As for Frank Wang Yefeng , the Gobi Desert inspires him to create an abstract garden-installation, a fragile nomadic utopia, born of a trip there.
Outside the show, at Pacific Place Park Court, Monster Chetwynd deploys 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.
Kabinett: when intimacy becomes manifest
The Kabinett sector, with its gallery alcoves, takes a more introspective approach. It reveals projects on a human scale, but with great symbolic power. Thirty-eight presentations - a record number, with a majority of artists from Asia-Pacific - sketch out a cartography of solitudes, quests for meaning and invisible filiations.
We come across the ceramic and pictorial gestures of the late Martin Wong,Ann Leda Shapiro's watercolor figures, which examine Qi and the body's landscapes, and Vũ Dân Tân's cardboard sculptures, inhabited by the idea that clothing is a cultural armor.
Takahiro Kondo, with his "silver mist" technique, captures water not as an element but as a moving memory, a skin in perpetual reconfiguration. And Pei Yanqing's muted, dreamlike palette suspends time in a delicate in-between between traditional Chinese painting and contemporary reverie.
The moving image: cinema, storytelling, resistance
Not to be forgotten is 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 web of fragmented, poetic and critical narratives.
The projections, seven in all, tackle 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 formatting of fairground films, these works are animated by a fragile, sometimes incantatory breath.
The city as an extension of the work
rt Basel Hong Kong doesn't just take place in the hushed aisles of the HKCEC: art dissolves into the city, flaunting itself on its facades, seeping into its interstices. The algorithmic installation Night Charades by Ho Tzu Nyen, projected nightly on the façade of the M+ museum, reinvents Hong Kong cinema as a kaleidoscope in perpetual mutation.
Numerous institutions - from Tai Kwun to Para Site, from CHAT to Tomorrow Maybe - are taking part in this great sharing. And Artists' Night, a festive hybrid event, brings together the usual, the intimate and the performative in a night dedicated to the body and AI.
An art of links, a moving cartography
What this 2025 edition is really about is less a demonstration of power than a desire to question the invisible, to bring out voices, forms, fractures and impulses. There's a political thought at work - on migration, technology, heritage - but also a diffuse poetry, a desire to let the works express themselves in the city, among the people.
In this respect, Art Basel Hong Kong is more than just a fair. It becomes an artistic ecology. A way of reaffirming that art, in a fragmented world, remains one of the rare languages capable of connecting, moving and transforming.
Art Basel Hong Kong
Convention & Exhibition Centre
1 Harbour Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong (China)
March 28-30, 2025
