From Hong Kong to Accra, artists at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2024 are illuminating lesser-known stories with poetic license

Gary Zhexi Zhang

For these artists, history is a blend of fact and fiction

Lee Kai Chung<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/8203/Tabula-Rasa-Gallery?lang=en"> </a><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/8203/Tabula-Rasa-Gallery?lang=en">Tabula Rasa Gallery</a>
London-based, Hong Kong-born Lee Kai Chung has built his practice upon a dense, knotty body of work, which ponders the social and political upheavals that defined the shared fates of China, Hong Kong, and the Asian continent in the mid-20th century. Comprising a single-channel video and nine bronze sculptures, The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament (2018), which received an honorable mention at the 2023 Sharjah Biennial, traces the fate of bronze statues erected by the British in Hong Kong that narrowly avoided being melted down as part of the Imperial Japanese war effort during Japan’s occupation of the territory. Lee cast the monuments ­– including two HSBC lions and a statue of Queen Victoria – as material witnesses to the warp and weft of colonial memory. Scavenging like a magpie in colonial archives, Lee’s works interweave personal anecdotes, oral histories, and documentary research with fictional narratives, threading emotional, social, and geopolitical trajectories. Often taking poetic license with the subjects of his research, Lee is presenting a multi-channel version of a new narrative piece at Art Basel Hong Kong. Tree of Malevolence (2024) explores the multiple lives and aliases of ‘Y’, a counter-intelligence agent working for Beijing between Hong Kong and Guangzhou during the Cold War. Such cryptic and unstable identities recur throughout Lee’s work, a synecdoche for the Asia region as a whole.

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/22118/Wang-Tuo?lang=en">Wang Tuo</a> <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1344/Blindspot-Gallery?lang=en">Blindspot Gallery</a>

Drawing on China’s past, from the imperial era to its revolutionary 20th century, the Beijing-based artist and filmmaker Wang Tuo operates in a register that he describes as ‘pan-shamanism,’ where real and fictional human characters and tales become a medium for historical consciousness. ‘The Northeast Tetralogy’ (2018-2021), for instance, for which the artist was awarded the 2023 Sigg Prize, treats the histories and legends of Wang’s native northeastern China as prisms that refract the traumas inscribed into modern and contemporary China. Chapters include Smoke and Fire (2018), based on the true story of a migrant worker who grew up to avenge his mother’s death, and Distorting Words (2019), which follows a student during the May Fourth Movement in 1919. A more recent work, the two-part video installation The Second Interrogation (2022), reflects on Chinese contemporary art since 1989 to question the stakes of artistic-political expression. One video tracks an exchange between an artist and censor, resulting in an intimate dialectic between cat and mouse, analyst and analysand. The other observes a performance taking place under banners depicting the ‘no U-turn’ sign used to promote the historic China/Avant-Garde
exhibition in Beijing in 1989. Wang’s next project is a foray into science fiction: a cyborg experiences phantom limb syndrome and discovers that her senses are surfacing political traumas that she had unknowingly erased from memory.

Steph Huang<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/50251/Public-Gallery"> </a><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/50251/Public-Gallery">Public Gallery</a>
Originally trained as a painter, Steph Huang works in a detailed sculptural register combining minimal, formal compositions with elements sampled from food cultures around the world. For her 2022 solo show, A Great Increase In Business Is On Its Way at London’s Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Huang drew inspiration from markets synonymous with working class communities in the UK capital – Deptford, East Street, Ridley Road – as well as those of Paris and Taipei. The show comprised a body of formal-but-whimsical sculptures riffing on culinary and architectural artefacts, from bar tops and butchers’ curtains to neon signs, as well as the fortune crackers from which the exhibition drew its title. Versed in a diversity of materials including handblown glass and bronze casts, Huang’s eclectic mise-en-scènes invoke histories of circulation, tradition, and commerce as well as deceptively simple matters of taste. At Art Basel Hong Kong, Huang will turn her booth into an ambiguously ‘Asian’ restaurant-marketplace, excerpting its throwaway aesthetics – at once nostalgic and transactional, ornamental and infrastructural – to explore the poignant role of food in Hong Kong’s cultural memory. Two hand-carved wooden panels depict the floating Jumbo Kingdom restaurant, which was, for half a century, an icon for tourists and locals alike, before it accidentally capsized in 2022.

Thao Nguyen Phan<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2704/Galerie-Zink?lang=en"> </a><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2704/Galerie-Zink?lang=en">Galerie Zink</a>
Thao Nguyen Phan was originally schooled in lacquer painting in her native Vietnam, before she departed from her traditionalist training to work freely across painting, installation, and moving image under the mentorship of Joan Jonas. Based in Ho Chi Minh City, Phan is known for poetic and essayistic films exploring grand and minor narratives of Vietnamese history, inflecting historical research with artistic fictional license. Born after the Vietnam war, the artist speaks of the ‘dangerous optimism’ of economic development and the adrenaline rush of entering a global economy that turns growth into a common rule, at the cost of ecology in particular. Not unlike Wang Tuo, reincarnation figures in Phan’s elliptical narratives, as humans, animals, and landscapes inhabit one another in the circulation of matter and mythology. In Becoming Alluvium (2019-), for example, two brothers who are killed in the collapse of a hydroelectric dam on the Mekong River return as water hyacinths and a species of endangered dolphin. Phan is showing a multi-channel iteration of an ongoing work, Reincarnations of Shadows (moving-image-poem) (2023), at Art Basel Hong Kong. Part documentary and part fiction, the film tells the story of the female Vietnamese artist, Diem Phung Thi, who moved to France in the 1950s as a dentist but went on to become a celebrated Modernist sculptor. Phan developed a fascination with Thi’s exceptional life, eventually tracking down an archive of her photographs and personal materials.

Godfried Donkor Gallery 1957

History, for the British-Ghanaian painter Godfried Donkor, is a continuity between mythology and fact. Soon to embark on a research trip to the Smithsonian in Washington DC, where he will research the historical connections between Ghana and Britain, the artist’s expansive body of figurative works explore the contemporary iconographies of Black culture, from African art history to British peasant histories to African-American pop culture. With a practice rooted in drawing and collage, Donkor works on multiple compositions at once, often for 2 or 3 years at a time, combining materials from his travels with historical photographs to create semi-fictionalized, novelistic portraits of his subjects. His recent series, ‘Battle Royale’, takes the history of boxing in Ghana as a starting point to explore the grit, glamour, and socio-cultural resonance of ‘the art of self-defense.’ In particular, he has returned repeatedly to the Jamestown area of Accra, a small district with over two dozen boxing gyms, which counts eight world champion boxers among its sons. The work Donkor is showing in Hong Kong, a painting of the Ghanaian boxer Roy Ankrah, is characteristic of the artist’s compositional flair. Ankrah, who trained in Jamestown in the 1950s and reached the heights of his career in the post-independence era, appears haloed like a religious icon, his fists raised in a proud pugilist’s stance against a gold leaf background, flanked by ibises.

Gary Zhexi
Zhang is an artist and strategist based in London and Shanghai.
Published on January 29, 2024. 
Caption for full-bleed image:&nbsp;Wang Tuo, Smoke and Fire (video still), 2018. 4K single-channel video, 31’17”, Edition of 6 + 2AP. Courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery.

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From Hong Kong to Accra, artists at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2024 are illuminating  lesser-known stories with poetic license

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