The harbor is brimming with events but don’t miss their works on the show floor – and online

Payal Uttam

Seven artists to seek out at Art Basel Hong Kong

As Hong Kong’s stringent Covid-19 restrictions finally ease, there is palpable excitement in the air. Anticipation couldn’t be higher for this year’s Art Basel and the surrounding events. The harborside convention center hosting the fair will come alive with works that span sublime ink paintings created at a sacred Buddhist site in China to bulbous wall reliefs and other experimental approaches. Here are seven artists not to miss.

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6908/Liu-Xiaodong" target="_blank">Liu Xiaodong</a> <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1104/Massimo-De-Carlo" target="_blank">Massimo De Carlo, Hong Kong</a><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1104/Massimo-De-Carlo" target="_blank"></a>The Chinese realist Liu Xiaodong provides an unflinching look at the daily lives and experiences of his myriad subjects. Whether it’s a transgender actress in Berlin, a sheriff on the Texas-Mexico border, or jade pickers from China’s Uyghur minority, he portrays each of his sitters in a deeply empathetic and human light. Often embedding himself in communities for several weeks, he paints en plein air or works from photographs and sketches to create life-size portraits. Although he often captures what appear to be unremarkable moments in ordinary people’s lives, his vivid tableaux read as contemporary history paintings. Addressing significant social issues, Liu’s work also reflects the trials and tedium of human existence.

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/26456/Bingyi" target="_blank">Bingyi</a> <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2013/Ink-Studio" target="_blank">Ink Studio, Beijing and New York City</a><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2013/Ink-Studio" target="_blank"></a>The Chinese artist Bingyi is known for her monumental action paintings, for which she flings buckets of ink and water onto scrolls of cloth or paper. A scholar and a poet, she produces work that stems from ancient Daoist philosophy and literati traditions of Chinese shan shui (landscape) painting. In 2018, she unfurled a massive bolt of cloth down a dry waterfall at Mount Emei, a sacred Buddhist site in Sichuan province, allowing ink to flow down the steep surface and bleed into the fabric. On view in the Encounters sector will be three of her large ink paintings, each stretching 10 meters in length, which Bingyi painted on paper draped across more gently sloping terrain of Emei. Working with weather, gravity, and the topography of the site, she created dramatic works suffused with passages of velvety black ink. Seen together, the works have an immersive effect on viewers – and offer a glimpse of the sublime.

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/9904/Norio-Imai" target="_blank">Norio Imai</a> <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2177/Axel-Vervoordt-Gallery" target="_blank">Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Hong Kong</a><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2177/Axel-Vervoordt-Gallery" target="_blank"></a>The youngest member of the Japanese avant-garde Gutai group, Norio Imai began staging interventions and creating experimental installations in the 1960s. In one of his earliest performances, he stood on the rooftop of a building in a bustling shopping district with two other artists, broadcasting the rhythmic sounds of their heartbeats through huge speakers. Looking to confront people with art in an ordinary setting, the work drew people out of their everyday routines. Over the years Imai has become known for his cloth reliefs, for which he uses white fabric to create a taut skin, or membrane, pulled across hidden objects that appear to be pushing forward. A series of these sculpted works will be on view at Axel Vervoordt’s solo booth. ‘White is a landscape made of nothingness and emptiness,’ Imai once said. Not unlike his early performative works, his serene sculptures have a mesmeric quality and invite us to reflect on the incorporeal.

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/31648/Dinh-Q-Lê" target="_blank">Dinh Q. Lê</a> <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1351/10-Chancery-Lane-Gallery" target="_blank">10 Chancery Lane, Hong Kong</a>, and&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1284/STPI" target="_blank">STPI, Singapore</a><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1284/STPI" target="_blank"></a>As a child, the Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê learned how to weave grass mats from his aunt, a tradition he has transposed to his contemporary art practice. Casting a critical eye on the role of the media and photography in constructing biased narratives of the Vietnam War, he shreds historic photographs and interlaces the pieces, so that they become vivid tapestries that tell a different story. Hong Kong’s 10 Chancery Lane will exhibit one of his largest photo-weavings to date, Khmer Reamker #12 (2021), which reworks a mug shot of a teenage girl who was tortured and killed by the Khmer Rouge regime in one of its most notorious prisons. Instead of portraying her simply as a victim, he seeks to bestow a sense of dignity on her and her country.

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/9413/Guan-Xiao">Guan Xiao</a> <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2002/Antenna-Space" target="_blank">Antenna Space</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2002/Antenna-Space" target="_blank">Shanghai</a><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2002/Antenna-Space" target="_blank"></a>The Beijing-based artist Guan Xiao’s anthropomorphic sculptures appear at once alien and familiar. A pink paper umbrella may poke out of a gnarled traditional Chinese tree root, evoking a human figure (holding onto a robot-like pet created using a camera tripod), while a motorcycle kneepad may appear as the head of a futuristic red serpent. Combining old cultural artifacts with contemporary industrial readymades, Guan conflates what she calls the primordial past and a future that is yet to come. By fusing together disparate items and materials gathered from different places and moments of history, her assemblages dislodge the fixed context of objects and meditate on the cyclical nature of time.

Anna Zemánková <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1101/David-Kordansky-Gallery" target="_blank">David Kordansky, Los Angeles</a><a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1101/David-Kordansky-Gallery" target="_blank"></a>Born in 1908 in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), the self-taught artist Anna Zemánková suppressed her artistic impulses for much of her life. Only when she reached her fifties did she really find her voice. Despite her declining health, she would draw fervently into the early hours of the morning, populating large sheets of paper with a profusion of feathery forms, fantastical flowers, and colorful herbage. Over time, she started puncturing her pastel drawings, adding embroidery and affixing strips of fabric. While she is often grouped with Art Brut or outsider art, she ultimately eludes categorization. Her multimedia works conjure claws, connective tissue, and webs of surreal organisms that float amid softly glowing backgrounds. Alongside drawing from Moravian folk art and art nouveau, she mined her subconscious to make art distinctly her own.

<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7616/Angela-Bulloch" target="_blank">Angela Bulloch</a> <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1265/Esther-Schipper" target="_blank">Esther Schipper, Berlin</a>Berlin-based Angela Bulloch’s technically rigorous works range from stacks of light boxes pulsating with color to electronic simulations of the starry night sky. Since the 1980s, when use of personal computers was first taking off, Bulloch has reflected on the ethics of technology and the influence of media on our lives. In the 1990s, she began working with engineers to create sculptural manifestations of pixels – programmed cube-sculptures capable of displaying 16 million colors, just like a standard computer screen. Playing with time-based elements including patterns of light, soundscapes, and film footage, she embeds viewers in spaces with subtly changing atmospheres that rely on their presence. As they encounter her works, Bulloch invites them to consider their own acts of negotiation, observation, and perception.

Payal Uttam is an independent writer and editor who divides her time between Hong Kong and Singapore. She contributes to a range of publications including Artsy, The Art Newspaper, South China Morning Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

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