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Hong Kong’s biggest week for art has kicked off and it seems that every night is opening night for Art Basel Hong Kong (ABHK) who first held their Private View on Tuesday, followed by its Vernissage the next day. Before the doors opened for the private view that afternoon, the concourse at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre was packed with VIPs eagerly waiting to dash through halls to lock down their purchases—all of course, with champagne in hand. For this fourth edition of ABHK, 239 modern and galleries made the cut, showing over 4,000 artists. The “Encounters” section, curated for the second time by Alexie Glass-Kantor from Sydney’s Artspace presented 16 large-scale projects that dotted the main arteries of both halls. Southeast Asia had a particularly strong presence at Encounters, which included Bandung-based trio Tromarama’s monumental structure Private Riots (2014) made from playful protest banners, the late Filipino conceptualist Roberto Chabet’s plywood installation Cargo and Decoy (1989), and Indonesian, now Brisbane-based Tintin Wulia’s Five Tonnes of Homes and Other Understories (2016), a cardboard installation that represents her over-one-year-long engagement with the Filipino domestic worker community in central Hong Kong. New faces and works in the main galleries section has brought a refreshing lift to ABHK. Here’s a look around the fair, which runs until Saturday, March 26, 2016.
All photos by ArtAsiaPacific.
