Highlights include a restaging of the collective Boloho’s project for documenta 15, Kimsooja’s first solo show in the city, and Tiffany Chung’s poignant acts of remembrance

Ophelia Lai

Six must-see gallery shows during Art Basel Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s art scene remains remarkably vibrant and variegated, with a range of institutions, galleries, and independent spaces promoting a balance of local and international artistic perspectives. This is borne out by an array of gallery exhibitions this season that engage with themes of violence, communality, and cultural change while also pointing to solidarities within and beyond Hong Kong’s borders. Here are six gallery shows worth visiting during Art Basel Hong Kong.

Boloho, ‘BOLOHOPE’ Hanart TZ Gallery Through April 6, 2023Visitors to Boloho’s exhibition at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1380/Hanart-TZ-Gallery" target="_blank">Hanart TZ Gallery</a> will find themselves in a replica of a cha chaan teng, or a Hong Kong-style cafe. Titled BOLOHOPE (2022), the project is a restaging of what the Guangzhou-based collective created for documenta 15 and proposes the humble eatery as a space of creative communion – a recurring theme that originates from the artists’ habit of dining together. This iteration of the project is activated by a performance series titled ‘Surviving and Chilling’, which invites guests to cook, eat, and chat with the artists.&nbsp;

Beyond the cafe, sectioned off by large patchwork canvases of cartoonish figures, animals, and socialist-realist motifs, is a model living room with a television playing zany animations and a live-action parody of Hong Kong sitcoms. As a whole, the exhibition demonstrates the collective’s knack for visualizing the clashing iconographies that shape China’s contemporary cultural landscape as well as an endearing commitment to choreographing playful collective experiences.

Jes Fan, ‘Sites of Wounding: Chapter 1’ Empty Gallery March 18 – May 6, 2023Pinctada fucata is a species of oyster native to Hong Kong, where the history of pearl harvesting dates back to the tenth century. Intrigued by the technique of industrial pearl cultivation, which entails grafting a foreign body into the mollusk to trigger nacre secretion, artist Jes Fan has created a new series of shell-like sculptures for his second solo show at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/13611/Empty-Gallery" target="_blank">Empty Gallery</a>. Blown-glass blobs are held in aqua-resin receptacles cast from human body parts, destabilizing the boundaries between self and other, exploiter and exploited. Fan’s exhibition marks the beginning of a long-term project examining the deliberate injuring of organisms by humans in various extractive processes.

Shubigi Rao, ‘Eating One’s Tail’ <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1432/Rossi-Rossi" target="_blank">Rossi &amp; Rossi</a> March 18 – May 13, 2023Singapore-based artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/stories/how-i-became-an-artist-shubigi-rao" target="_blank">Shubigi Rao</a> has spent the past decade tracing the history of book destruction and censorship, presenting her research in the form of publications, films, and installations. ‘Eating One’s Tail’, her first survey show in Hong Kong, highlights this ongoing endeavor along with drawings, prints, and other projects from her eclectic oeuvre. The artist notably combines assiduous documentation with speculative retellings, as exemplified by The Pelagic Tracts (2018). Centered on a fictional band of book smugglers, this film is part of a body of work involving S. Raoul, an invented 20th-century polymath who provides an entry point for Rao to engage with topics encompassing pseudoscience, ecology, and trade. Together, the works in Rao’s exhibition interrogate how systems of power determine knowledge production while proposing imaginative methodologies for establishing counter-narratives.

Kimsooja, ‘Topography of Body’ <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2177/Axel-Vervoordt-Gallery" target="_blank">Axel Vervoordt Gallery</a> March 18 – June 3, 2023In&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/12201/Kimsooja" target="_blank">Kimsooja</a>’s multidisciplinary practice, small gestures represent broader dynamics of labor, migration, and cultural production. This comes to the fore in the South Korean artist’s first solo show in Hong Kong, featuring works created over the past decade. The video Thread Routes – Chapter III (2012), which explores traditional dyeing and embroidery techniques in India, is presented alongside an installation of table covers bearing palimpsests of indigo ink. Used as base layers in Indian block-printing, these textiles evoke the repetitive labor involved in a craft industry historically fueled by British colonial demand. Also on view are two abstracted and enlarged images of fingerprints, referencing biometric controls at border crossings, and a new series of indented clay objects that bring to mind indexical modes of mark-making.

Tiffany Chung, ‘entangled traces, disremembered landscapes’ Kiang Malingue, Sik On Street March 20 – May 6, 2023<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/15569/Tiffany-Chung" target="_blank">Tiffany Chung</a>’s solo show at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1401/Kiang-Malingue" target="_blank">Kiang Malingue</a> unveils USM GLOBAL (2022–23), an embroidered map of United States military bases around the world that visualizes the territorial ramifications of American imperialism. Additionally, mixed-media abstractions from the Vietnamese American artist’s series ‘Terra Rouge: circles, traces of time, rebellious solitude’(2022) uncover the traumatic past of the Bình Long–Phước Long plateau, the site of sprawling French colonial rubber plantations as well as several battles in the 1972 Easter Offensive. Likewise, the shadow of violence looms large in the three-channel video If Water Has Memories (2022), which depicts a symbolic burial for refugees who were attacked at sea in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. As the exhibition reveals, Chung’s works are not only investigations of fraught geopolitical histories but also poignant acts of remembrance for people caught in conflict.

Wang Tuo, ‘The Second Interrogation’ <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1344/Blindspot-Gallery" target="_blank">Blindspot Gallery</a> March 21 – May 6, 2023In&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/22118/Wang-Tuo" target="_blank">Wang Tuo</a>’s short film The Interrogation (2017), an officer at China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection elucidates methods of interrogating uncooperative subjects. For the sequel, The Second Interrogation (2022), Wang turns his attention to more insidious forms of repression in the art world through an uneasy dialogue between a young Chinese artist and an older state censor. Intercut with scenes that reimagine seven performances from the historic ‘China/Avant-Garde Exhibition’ (1989) in Beijing, Wang’s two-channel film grapples with questions of artistic intention, meaning, and performative resistance. The film installation is accompanied by related drawings, archival documentation of populist movements, and a new series of oil portraits of figures from China’s underground art scene.

Ophelia Lai is a writer and editor based in Hong Kong.Published on March 15, 2023.Captions for full-bleed images: 1. Shubigi Rao, The Pelagic Tracts (film still), 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Rossi &amp; Rossi.&nbsp;2. Installation view of Boloho's exhibition ‘BOLOHOPE’, Hanart TZ Gallery, 2023. Photo by Kitmin Lee. Courtesy of Hanart TZ Gallery. 3. Wang Tuo, The Second Interrogation (video still), 2023. Courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery.

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Highlights include a restaging of the collective Boloho’s project for documenta 15, Kimsooja’s first solo show in the city, and Tiffany Chung’s poignant acts of remembrance

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