Art_Basel_2016_HiRes

The Business of Art

by
March saw Hong Kong morph into an art-fuelled frenzy that completely enveloped the city for the week of Art Basel 
 
 
Now in its fourth year, the event filled the expansive Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Center with 239 contemporary art exhibitors from across the world, gathering an innumerable range of paintings, sculptures, installations, prints, photography and video art by over 4,000 artists. 
 
As the youngest and fastest growing of the Basel brand fairs, Art Basel Hong Kong was the first of the 2016 fair editions, with its international clientele touching down in the Chinese port city for the fourth year of the fair under the global fair franchise’s supervision, running from March 24 to 26.
 
Art Basel stages the world’s premier art shows for Modern and contemporary works, sited in Basel, Miami Beach, and Hong Kong. Defined by its host city and region, each show is unique; a fact reflected in the participating galleries, artworks presented, and the content of parallel programming produced in collaboration with local institutions for each edition. Interestingly, half of Art Basel’s galleries have exhibition spaces in the Asia and Asia-Pacific region.
 
Alongside a strong presence of returning galleries from across the globe, this year’s edition featured 28 galleries participating for the first time. Nine new galleries joined from Asia and 18 leading Western galleries also joined for the first time. Selma Feriani Gallery (Sidi Bou Said, London) joined Art Basel as the first African gallery outside of South Africa to ever participate in an Art Basel show.
 
Galleries, the main sector of the show, featured 187 Modern and contemporary art galleries, presenting the highest quality paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, photography, video and editioned works. 
 
Exhibitors returning after a brief hiatus included Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York) and Applicat-Prazan (Paris), while many Asian galleries moved from other sectors of the show into Galleries, where they presented a wider range of their gallery programs.
 
The Insights sector was dedicated to curatorial projects by 28 galleries with spaces in Asia and the Asia-Pacific region and featured solo shows, exceptional historical material, and strong thematic group exhibitions. This year’s edition featured a particularly strong presentation of Modern work, with around half of the galleries presenting material from this period. This year’s Insights provided a particularly diverse and in-depth overview of art from across the region with featured artists from Australia, Bangladesh, India, Iran, Japan, Mainland China, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Turkey. 
 
Highlights included eight large photographic works by Australian Michael Cook, forming a panoramic narrative reflecting on colonial histories and drawing on the artist’s Bidjara heritage, presented by This Is No Fantasy + dianne tanzer gallery (Melbourne).   Antenna Space from Shanghai presented sculptures by Chinese artists Guan Xiao and Yu Honglei, each responding to themes of ‘postproduction’ and ‘reproduction’. 
 
The Discoveries sector presented its strongest showcase of emerging artists so far, with solo- and two-person exhibitions presented by 24 galleries. For this year’s edition, five of the galleries were completely new to the show, while another six returned after a brief hiatus. 
 
Highlights of the sector included intricate ink drawings by Pakistani artist Waqas Khan, presented by Sabrina Amrani of Madrid; and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi from Berlin showing parts of Wu Tsang’s new body of work ‘Duilan’, exploring the close female relationship between revolutionary poet Qiu Jin and calligrapher Wu Zhiying.
The Encounters sector had some of the show’s most striking pieces, exhibiting 16 artworks on an institutional scale, presenting largescale sculptural installation pieces and performances, sited in prominent locations throughout the two exhibition halls. 
 
Alexie Glass-Kantor, Executive Director of the contemporary art institution Artspace in Sydney, returned for this edition to curate the sector for the second time. In this sector, the work of one of Australia’s greatest contemporary artists, Brook Andrew, took centre stage. Known for placing his home country under the magnifying glass, Andrew tackles the thorny issues of dominant Western narratives and colonialism through immersive installations. This year, his first time presenting at Art Basel, saw him construct a stage-like installation with components suspended from the ceiling. Building (Eating) Empire drew inspiration from his mother’s Aboroginal heritage.
 
Another artist making an impression in this sector was Korean artist Kyungah Ham with ‘Chandeliers for Five Cities’ (2016), an installation of five large embroidery paintings that are deceptive from afar, looking like photography or paintings. The embroidery is grandiose and decorative, referencing political power and the split of North and South Korea as a result of World War II. By working with these artisans, Ham established an alternative way of communicating with an isolated North Korea. 
 
The popular Film sector was once again curated by Beijing and Zurich-based curator, multi-media artist and producer Li Zhenhua. Presented in collaboration with the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the program was expanded to include feature-length and documentary films. The sector included five feature-length and documentary films in addition to 67 short films, exploring six different and diverse themes, encompassing films by and about artists. 
 
Highlights included William Kentridge’s 10 Drawings for Projection tracing the artist’s observations of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. The film disregards politics, focusing instead on the changes in the life of the film’s main character. 
 
In the spirit of Art Basel’s high profile artists and supporters, the Conversations and Salon program hosted a wide range of panels within the international art world, from leading artists, gallerists and collectors, to museum directors, curators and critics. Artists included Charles Avery, Heman Chong, Tracey Emin and Zhao Zhao.
 
And in true Hong Kong glamour, internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima presented a new largescale public light installation during Art Basel. ‘Time Waterfall’ was shown across the entire façade of Hong Kong’s iconic 490 meter high International Commerce Centre (ICC) on the Kowloon harbour front. 
 
According to the artist: ‘Time Waterfall’ conveys the eternal luminance of human life, expressing an ethos of ‘living in the present’. The work was comprised of the natural numbers one to nine, cascading down the face of the ICC, never reaching zero. The continuous counting down symbolized life, while the zero implied by the extinction of light acted as a metaphor for death. 
 
Each digit was of a different size, cascading at its own speed, creating a number of layers representing a trajectory of individual lives. This work continues the artist’s signature use of LED counters to demonstrate his three fundamental concepts – ‘Keep Changing’; ‘Connect with Everything’; and ‘Continue Forever’. 
Much like the spirit of art. 
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