Suppose you’re an emerging artist. You receive a call from your gallerist, in which they tell you they’d like to present your work at Art Basel. It would be your first time doing so. You have two months to outline a project and, if it makes the cut, another eight to produce the work. You’ll show alongside hundreds, if not thousands, of other artists, including some of your idols – from 20th-century masters to fellow emerging voices – but only for a few days, relentlessly examined by collectors, curators, museum directors, and fellow art practitioners. What would you say?
‘The essential figure in the system is of course the artist. His is the product on which the system depends,’ wrote critic and curator Lawrence Alloway in his 1972 essay ‘Network: The Art World Described as a System,’ a piece that identifies the art world as an intricate web of objects, ideas, and people with shifting roles and goals. Indeed, without artists and the work they make, there would be no art world, and certainly no art fairs. So, what happens to an artwork, and to the artist who made it, when it leaves the studio and enters an art fair? And what does it mean for an artist to attend or exhibit at an Art Basel show?
Increasingly, artists see an invitation to show at Basel, Paris, Miami Beach, or Hong Kong as a significant milestone, especially early on in their careers. That wasn’t always the case: Many avant-garde art movements of the last century saw the relationship between artists and the art market as tense, even oppositional. ‘Sometimes artists really put themselves in the picture by exhibiting at Art Basel,’ says Nadim Samman, a curator at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art and frequent fairgoer. ‘Showing at an Art Basel fair can add to the creation of a persona for artists on the cusp of wider recognition.’ To name just a few, artists such as Xinyi Cheng, Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Sable Elyse Smith, and Lu Yang saw a notable increase in exhibitions – at both institutions and commercial galleries – following their outing at Art Basel. They are now firmly established as mid-career practitioners.
The Hong Kong-based multimedia artist Mak2 – who also makes YouTube videos and Instagram filters, and is a popular standup comedian in the Cantonese-speaking world – already has a strong local name and a rising international following, but her planned installation with de Sarthe Gallery at Art Basel Hong Kong’s Encounters sector in March might bring her even more accolades and attention. The unusual piece will embed four layers of ‘copies,’ the first of which is a simulation, into an oversized structure whose upper portion mirrors the lower. If it’s anything like her previous work, it will be a tongue-in-cheek critique of our increasingly tech-driven society and its domestic spaces, packed with subversive humor, vibrant color, and a dash of philosophy.
The work will certainly broaden Mak2’s visibility. ‘In 2023, Art Basel Hong Kong drew an international audience of 86,000 collectors, curators, galleries, and artists from 70 countries over five show days,’ says Pascal de Sarthe, whose Hong Kong-based gallery has connected Eastern and Western contemporary art since the late 1970s. ‘It holds immense importance for an artist’s career, as it amplifies awareness of their work within the global art market.’ Mak2 – whose given name is Mak Ying Tung; the addition of the ‘2’ relates to auspicious feng shui, which she also incorporates into her simulation-based artworks – isn’t a stranger to Art Basel. ‘I feel like I have a special connection to Art Basel. The reason I became an artist was because I was invited by Hans Ulrich Obrist to an Art Basel event back in 2013. At that time, I was still studying, and I didn’t know who he was,’ she says of the ubiquitous star curator, bursting into peals of laughter.
The installation – which will also include paintings – will be fabricated with de Sarthe Gallery’s logistical and financial assistance. ‘Over the years, we have provided comprehensive support and covered the production costs for our artists’ projects. When these large-scale installations are sold, we deduct the costs incurred and share the remaining profits with the artist,’ says de Sarthe, describing a production model that has become standard for many galleries. The paintings – which the artist outsources – were completed before Christmas 2023, but the installation will come together onsite in March.
Taking part in Encounters was the result of kismet: More than two years ago, Mak2 met with Encounters curator Alexie Glass-Kantor, during the strict COVID-19 lockdowns in Asia. ‘We met in front of a closed, Hong Kong-style cafe,’ she says. After Glass-Kantor saw images of Mak2’s work on her iPad, the curator invited her to exhibit in the fair sector that offers space to large-scale works that wouldn’t fit in a standard booth. The artist’s Encounters piece was postponed for a year due to exhibition scheduling conflicts; mounting a work on this scale takes a tremendous amount of planning, resources, and time.
Antonia Kuo, an artist living and working in her native New York, has a different take on how to make art for an Art Basel fair. ‘With a gallery show, you can turn up with wet paintings. It’s all very fresh and by the seat of your pants,’ says the artist, who will be exhibiting in the Discoveries sector at Art Basel Hong Kong with her gallery, Chapter NY. ‘But it’s definitely another mode for Art Basel Hong Kong, or a museum show. There are many different stages of approval and conceiving of a work before it exists. An art fair requires a lot more foresight and planning.’
Last summer, when Chapter NY’s application to Art Basel Hong Kong was green-lit, Kuo began producing a new group of works for the fair. She’ll show a series of her multipanel chemical ‘paintings,’ which use photochemistry, dyes, and toners to process light-sensitive silver gelatin paper to create compellingly ethereal and atmospheric abstract images. Part of this long run-up had to do with the artist’s personal life – she has a newborn – but it also relates to the development of new elements in her practice, which for the first time incorporates lens-based photographic images into the panels, and will also feature sculptures. The work earmarked for Art Basel Hong Kong is not quite complete: She’s back in the studio in January to put the finishing touches on pieces to be photographed, packed, and shipped from New York to Asia by mid-February.
Kuo joined Chapter NY in spring 2023, after being in the gallery’s orbit for several years. ‘It’s almost like dating: There are a lot of considerations concerning the chemistry and working with someone personally, their tastes, their professionalism. Nicole (Russo, the gallery’s owner/director) was someone who checked all those boxes for me,’ she says, noting that she’s known Russo from the New York scene since 2020 – enough time to develop the deep trust on which good gallerist/artist relationships are built. ‘From the moment we started working with Antonia, I knew she would be able to rise to the occasion of a solo presentation,’ adds Russo. ‘Even though she has only been with the gallery about a year, I have been a fan for some time and I am thrilled not only to work with her but to be able to show her around the world.’
Being accepted into Art Basel Hong Kong’s Discoveries sector ‘jumpstarted a fire’ in Kuo’s brain about what the new work could be, even if she had to make some adjustments along the way. (Her original concept was too large for Chapter NY’s booth.) ‘While I might prefer the free-flowing, chaotic version of making artwork, my practice still allows me to include a chaotic element in the process even when I’m producing to spec.’
The late artist John Baldessari once quipped that an artist attending an art fair was like a child catching its parents in bed – a paraphrase of his slightly spicier formulation. But many artists have overcome their old inhibitions of showing up at one of the most important places in which art and commerce meet. Both Mak2 and Kuo are hoping to attend Art Basel Hong Kong in person, to explain their work to new viewers and potential collectors, to drink in the atmosphere, and to make connections. ‘A sociable artist can really work the room,’ observes Samman.
For Kuo, there’s an extra layer of meaning to exhibiting here: ‘As a Taiwanese American, I’ve always been invested in being a part of not just an international art scene but, specifically, the Asian art scene,’ she explains. ‘It was a big deal for me to have this opportunity to show in Hong Kong and to enter that broader audience.’
Artists have become increasingly visible at Art Basel Hong Kong and its other iterations, not only as personalities on the fair floors and at the many affiliated parties and dinners, but also in the fairs’ programming. The Art Basel Conversations panel discussions bring together artists with other art-world players to debate the hottest topics in current discourse, while Art Basel’s various editions increasingly commission and orchestrate large-scale performance pieces for which the artists are frequently present. Art’s many systems depend on them, now more than ever.
Mak2 is represented by de Sarthe (Hong Kong).
Antonia Kuo is represented by Chapter NY (New York).
Kimberly Bradley is a writer, editor, and educator based in Berlin. She is a commissioning editor at Art Basel Stories.
Art Basel Hong Kong takes place from March 28-30, 2024. Find out more here.
Captions for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1. Installation view of Bank's solo booth at Paris+ par Art Basel 2023, presenting a work by Lu Yang. 2. Mak2, Home Sweet Home: Time and Space 1 (detail), 2024. © Mak2. Courtesy of de Sarthe. 3. Antonia Kuo, Sea Lily (detail), 2023. Photography by Charles Benton. 4. Installation view of the Encounters sector at Art Basel Hong Kong 2023.