Art Basel Hong Kong arrives 27-29 March as the city’s annual cultural coronation – a multi-media tentpole where the globe’s gallery elite, collectors with bottomless wallets, and assorted art-world camp followers descend on the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre for confabs beneath multi-million-dollar paintings and argue about the future of contemporary art over champagne.
Since its 2013 debut, Art Basel Hong Kong has evolved into something far more ambitious than a mere marketplace for the ultra-rich. The fair now functions as a genuine articulation of Hong Kong’s metamorphosis into what Angelle Siyang-Le, the fair’s director (who gave us a local’s guide to Hong Kong ahead of the event), calls ‘a leading centre for contemporary culture’. The numbers back her claim: 240 galleries from 41 countries and territories fill the fair, with the majority championing Asia-Pacific artists and galleries. Siyang-Le grounds Hong Kong’s strength in its ‘free-port status, world-class logistics, and exceptional connectivity’, yet equally stresses the city’s ‘openness and cultural ecosystem from institutions like M+ and Tai Kwun to an incredibly vibrant network of galleries and nonprofit spaces’.
In particular, what distinguishes 2026 is structural ambition. Thirty-two galleries are participating for the first time, while the fair debuts two significant new platforms. The first, Echoes, comprises just ten booths, each presenting works from the past five years, a focused curatorial statement about where contemporary practice is heading. The second, and equally significant, Zero 10 marks Art Basel’s debut foray into dedicated digital art programming. The moniker references Malevich’s 1915 show in Petrograd, the ‘0,10’ exhibition that redefined the avant-garde’s relationship to abstraction. Supported by OpenSea, the initiative signals the fair’s conviction that digital creativity belongs within – not adjacent to – the contemporary art economy.
Elsewhere, the curatorial shifts run deep to reflect a fair reshaping itself toward regional perspectives and experimental methodologies. Encounters, the sector for large-scale installations and performances, has been reorganised around a collective of four Asia-based curators: Mami Kataoka (Mori Art Museum), Isabella Tam (M+), Alia Swastika (Jakarta), and Hirokazu Tokuyama (Mori Art Museum). The Film Program, historically curator-led, will be directed by Ellen Pau – the first time an artist assumes this role.
Meanwhile, public programming extends beyond the convention centre. Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander’s commission for the soaring façade of M+, 3 to 12 Nautical Miles, launches a few days earlier, on 23 March. Projected across the museum’s exterior will be hand-painted animations that trace colonial networks and contemporary commerce flowing through the South China Sea.
With so many booths occupying the centre and overflow programming throughout the city, narrowing down what matters requires some strategic thinking. Here are half a dozen artists worth your time.
Six artists to see at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026
Woo Hanna
(Image credit: © Woo Hannah. Courtesy of the artist and G Gallery. Photograph by Seungheon Lee.)
Korean sculptor Woo Hanna hijacks domestic textiles to reimagine the body’s architecture. Her Bag With You series literally takes organic forms – lungs, stomachs, intestines – and stitches them into objects that can be worn or carried. There’s dark humour here: something visceral made gentle through textile, something private made portable. By transforming biology into accessory, Woo asks uncomfortable questions about what we carry inside and what we’re willing to expose.
Chan Ting
Chan Ting, Abandoned Abundance #9, 2025
(Image credit: Photo by Felix SC Wong. Courtesy the artist and PHD Group)
At 31, Hong Kong artist Chan Ting excavates history with an archaeologist’s precision and a queer sensibility. His Abandoned Abundance (2025) layers collectibles – a Guanyin statue, Indian military chest, Shanghai doors, Japanese carved flowers – under plaster and pigment. The result looks weathered, fossilised, grown over. By treating contemporary found objects as archaeological specimens, Chan stages a conversation between geographies and time periods. His work asks: what happens when we layer histories on top of each other? What emerges from that sediment?
Neerja Kothari
In Walking erasure (2025, ongoing), 51 pages taken from two essays about wandering – Thoreau’s Walking and Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting – hang at eye level, creating a walking path through Neerja Kothari’s installation. The work emerged after illness stripped away her ability to walk and her therapist taught her the basics again, one step at a time. Now these books – gutted to just two pairs of homophonic words, heel/toe, and heal/tow – guide visitors through the same elementary lesson. It’s a startling new visual grammar on how to move your body through space.
Miler Lagos
(Image credit: © Courtesy of the artist and Galería Max Estrella)
In his Trees series (2025), Colombian sculptor Miler Lagos salvages discarded books – texts on botany, trade, colonial histories – and carves them into tree-like forms. The gesture is deliberately paradoxical: returning paper back to wood, knowledge back to matter. Stacked vertically, these sculptures become monuments to extraction: the forests logged for pulp, the information harvested and commodified, the ecosystems we’ve sacrificed to feed our hunger for documentation. Each work asks what we’ve surrendered in the name of progress.
Emi Kusano
Emi Kusano, HIMIKO: The Algorithmic Mirror (2025)
(Image credit: Courtesy of Emi Kusano)
Japanese artist Emi Kusano uses AI to expose what data capitalism demands of us. Ornament Survival – Recursive Heart (2026) takes the Magical Girl – a contradictory figure that promises liberation while demanding consumption – and updates her/it for the algorithmic age. Using generative AI to multiply her own image endlessly, Kusano visualises the labour hidden in our digital lives: the constant self-optimisation required to remain visible, the boundaries we dissolve to feed the networks. She doesn’t critique the system so much as anatomise it from within.
Wang Qiang
Wang Qiang (b. 1957), A Six-storey Residential Block
(Image credit: Images courtesy of Wang Qiang Studio and Ginkgo Space)
Wang Qiang sculpts Soviet prefab housing – Type K-7 apartments designed in 1954 to solve housing shortages – in miniature cement and steel, each stained to look aged. The Chinese artist’s concern is what happens when utopian ideals become concrete fact. Each building is a memory of a promise: standardised design that was meant to erase class difference, frozen now in his hands. In an era of unaffordable housing and failed utopias, the work feels urgently contemporary.
Art Basel Hong Kong will be showing 27-29 March 2025 (Preview Days on 25-26 March) at Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre, 1 Harbour Road, Wan Chai.
Also read: A local’s guide to Hong Kong by Angelle Siyang-Le
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