Art Basel Hong Kong 2025, March 30

Hybrid architectures: when art meets design

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Cui Jie, artist,&nbsp;Shanghai Kulapat Yantrasast, Founder and Creative Director, WHY Architecture,&nbsp;Los Angeles Moderator: Marisa Yiu, Cofounder, Lead Curator, and Executive Director, Design Trust,&nbsp;Hong Kong 
What can art learn from architecture and vice versa? Reflecting on the question are Design Trust cofounder Marisa Yiu, the artist Cui Jie, and architect Kulapat Yantrasast, whose recent projects include Dib Bangkok and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s renovated Rockefeller Wing. 
Cui Jie creates paintings which explore different perspectives and geopolitical contexts by incorporating diverse layers. The cities she depicts in her works are closely associated with her personal history: one can identify influences as broad as the Bauhaus, ideologies of Chinese propaganda art, Soviet communist aesthetics, and the Japanese Metabolism architectural movement, among others. In rendering specific cities, architectures, and landscapes, Cui explores the embedded histories of perspectives, and shrewdly proposes the political meanings of distance, angles, and time. 
Kulapat Yantrasast, founder of WHY, is a visionary architect originally from Bangkok. Receiving a master’s and PhD in architecture from the University of Tokyo, Yantrasast collaborated with Tadao Ando on influential cultural projects before founding WHY in 2004. Under his leadership, WHY designs innovative spaces that integrate art, culture, and community, with notable works including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Rockefeller Wing and an upcoming Louvre transformation. A respected speaker and educator, Yantrasast received Thailand’s Silpathorn Award in 2009, and serves on numerous boards, including at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and the Noguchi Museum. 
Marisa Yiu is the cofounder and executive director, and lead curator of Design Trust, an initiative of the registered charity Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design that supports design and research projects in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area within an international context. An architect and founding partner of ESKYIU, Yiu continues to dedicate her career to advocating for the value of design in shaping cities, education, and cultural programming. 

The Art Basel Hong Kong 2025 Conversations program is curated by Stephanie Bailey.

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