With digital technologies becoming an ever-increasing part of artistic practices, countless works being presented at Art Basel Hong Kong incorporate digital means of production and display. Visitors should keep an eye out for pieces by artists who blend digital and traditional media, such as Mak2, Emma Webster, and Miao Ying, throughout the show, while in this year’s Encounters sector, the curator Alexie Glass-Kantor is including an entire digital aisle, titled Charge, with new installations by Jon Rafman, Frank Wang Yefeng, Alison Nguyen, and Lu Yang.

‘I really like the idea of “charge,” because there’s this idea of momentum, not just of energy,’ Glass-Kantor says. ‘You also don’t just charge forward without thinking, and these artists really consider the technology. They’re not using the technology because they have some reductive idea that they have to, they’re using it because it’s necessary for what they need to achieve. They couldn’t achieve the things they want to make without the technology.’

In Charge, Jon Rafman’s installation Signal Rot (2025), presented by Neon Parc (Melbourne), reimagines television for the AI age. The work uses the technology to generate an endless stream of music videos, animations, and experimental content, drawing inspiration from MTV’s golden age and reinterpreting it through our current state of hyperconnectivity. For the 8 x 8 m installation Desert Garden (2025), presented by Vanguard Gallery (Shanghai), Frank Wang Yefeng translates impressions from a trip he took to the Gobi Desert into a poetic meditation on movement, transformation, and nomadic existence. A giant flower, rendered on a transparent LED screen, seems to sway in the wind surrounded by fragments of desert landscapes created using man-made materials like glass and steel and custom-printed floor mats. In Prosthetic Memory (2025), presented by gdm (Hong Kong and Taipei), Alison Nguyen creates an immersive environment filled with LED lights, multichannel videos, dirt, gaming monitors, and cinder blocks in spaces separated by multicolored PVC curtains. The video works, augmented by the detritus, explore the relationship between media, cultural memory, and individual histories as shaped by – or in resistance to – assimilation.

The final work in Charge – DOKU the Creator by Lu Yang, presented by de Sarthe (Hong Kong) and COMA (Sydney) – offers an interactive experience that contemplates the art ecosystem within a highly technologized society. An LED wall showcases videos of DOKU, a digital persona Yang has been developing since 2020, while the overarching installation takes the form of a pop-up store stocked with items that suggest the avatar is an artist independent of its creator – posing questions about the relationship between art and authorship, between art and its value.

Beyond Encounters, Yang’s work will also be on view in the Galleries sector with Bank (Shanghai), while de Sarthe’s primary booth in Galleries will present works by Mak2 and Wang Xin. Mak2’s new series of triptychs on canvas, Home Sweet Home Backyard, will be accompanied by a video game that visitors can play. The canvas artworks foreshadow the world revealed in the game: Players can mine for gold in the backyard of the home depicted in the paintings. Wang’s most recent body of work, on the other hand, integrates the appearance of New Age spirituality with that of Silicon Valley tech, alluding to a certain fragility that lies beneath the promises of technology.

Also in the Galleries sector, Perrotin (New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Paris, London, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai) will exhibit Emma Webster’s new oil painting Hunter’s Garden (2025), which depicts what appears to be a digitally rendered buck with ram-like horns bending over at a water source in a glowing forest. To make her paintings, Webster merges traditional and digital techniques: She begins with physical or virtual models and then builds immersive 3D landscapes with virtual reality software. Each painting, including Hunter’s Garden, is based on a scene from the world built in VR, blending the natural and artificial.

Like Webster, the artist Miao Ying produces oil paintings but draws the subject matter from digital means. For her series ‘Training Landscapes’, a selection of works from which will be presented by Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder (Vienna), Ying trains an artificial intelligence model with fantastical landscapes from video games. She then collects glitched renderings by the AI to create a new dataset for a different AI to generate further abstracted imagery. Ying selects digital output from the AI and then hands it over to an artisan trained in Russian Realism, who reproduces the digital image in oil paint. Each work is named after a poem written by ChatGPT in an effort to describe the features of the abstract landscape and fantasy or technomancy spells, resulting in curious titles like Training Landscapes No. 26 – In shattered code and broken shell, Rebuild anew, revive the spell (2025).

Engaging with AI in a different way is Lu Pingyuan, whose collage Best of the Best Draw – The Night Dance of the Stone Saint (2024) will be presented by MadeIn Gallery (Shanghai). For his ‘Best of the Best Draw’ series, the Chinese artist views AI as a new ‘belief system’ and continually engages with it as if it were a god in search of idealized answers about faith. More specifically, Pingyuan prompts an AI to generate new mythological figures, which he then crafts from paper using traditional Chinese paper-cutting techniques. In this process, he bridges the ancient mythological realm and traditional belief systems with those that can be envisioned for the future.

At Ora-Ora (Hong Kong), the artist and programmer Henry Chu transforms the cryptocurrency market into generative cello music. The piece, F(ear) and G(reed) (2025), comprising cello parts, LED panels and display system, a steel frame, computer software, and footage of a cello performance, uses the Fear and Greed Index – a metric that tracks market sentiment in the crypto world – as its reference point. To create the music, Chu worked with the composer Lewis Chung, who composed a score inspired by recent Bitcoin price charts, which was then performed by the cellist Kevin Lam. As a generative artwork, sections of the score are continuously rearranged by a computer in real time in response to the current Fear and Greed Index.

Finally, in the Kabinett sector, Silverlens (Manila, New York) will present ‘Cloud Seed (Rain Window)’ (2020) by James Clar. In this series of works, Clar immerses viewers in a recreation of rain and fog. Each piece displays a generative video on a 4K screen, acting like a window to a simulated outdoor space. The viewer can see themselves in the screen as raindrops collect and streak down the surface in real time, blending the natural and virtual worlds to bring attention to our influence and control of the environment.

As exemplified by the galleries’ presentations throughout Art Basel Hong Kong and as Glass-Kantor says: ‘The digital is an inexorable and intangible part of the ways in which artists may create and propose new works. This is really the moment at which we want to see how artists are going to be the ones who can expand the way in which we incorporate the digital into the ways we think, act, work, play, and connect.’