SO CLOSE, YET SO FAR AWAY (2024)

Late last year officially marked the end of Covid in China, and it was also the post-pandemic return of Art Basel Hong Kong. Crowds donned masks and poured into Hong Kong’s long-lost, grandiose art affair while the virus wantonly huffed its last exasperated breath. I still remember the miserable state of my own post-infection body lingering for three months. The tight schedule of art-related activities in Hong Kong this March had obviously recuperated its pre-2019 vigor, with institutions and galleries organizing openings during the week leading to Hong Kong Basel’s arrival, while dinners and meetings filled the entire month. Clearly, the art world is gradually returning to the former rhythms dictated by the art markets.

New York–based artist Aki Sasamoto opened her first Hong Kong solo exhibition, “Sounding Lines,” on March 15 at Para Site. Her performance was an honorary commencement for the art pageantry in its entirety, and drew enormous crowds who—whether or not they were familiar with her works—were entranced by the infectious Zen-like qualities of her performance. Sasamoto applies her “Midas touch” to common objects, and in this performance spectators didn’t see anything resembling artwork on the ground—suspended and linked by metal Slinkys stretched through the space were what careful observation revealed to be common kitchen objects like spoons, strainers, and knives embedded in fish-shaped molds dangling like waves, echoing the harbor views outside Para Site’s windows. Sasamoto’s performance lasted twenty minutes, a process in which she walked and incanted softly to herself, drawing images on a blue acrylic board to document her meditations on various distances seen outside the window. When the performance was over, spectators could weave among the elongated metal springs and their “seafood” or take in Sasamoto’s newly commissioned video work Point Reflection, 2023. In the exhibition brochure, the artist shared some enlightening thoughts, which seemed to be a graceful summation of the past four years of life in “social isolation”:

Distancetoastranger,whobehaveslikeabillfish. Distancetoastranger,whoactslikeamosquito. Distancetoafriend,whoishonestlikeabankstatement. Ineedtomeasuremydistancetoeachcharacterinmylife.

That same day, the Centre for Heritage, Arts, and Textile’s (CHAT) MILL6 Foundation opened its fifth-anniversary exhibition. Following years of toil, the former Nan Fung cotton-spinning mill has been transformed into a local art destination, expatiating upon and supporting various art practices centered on weaving and the history of the textile industry. CHAT’s public programming also reflects its deep connections with the Tsuen Wan District. Its “Factory of Tomorrow” exhibition included many artists familiar to the international biennial scene and commissioned works resonating with the history of Tsuen Wan or Hong Kong in general. Ho Rui An’s Lining (2023) is a history of textile manufacture in the Pearl River Delta and tells the story of the Hong Kong textile industry’s rise and fall against a background of labor and technology developments from 1946 to 1996. It also describes Hong Kong’s evolution into a financial center centered on real estate transactions. Malaysian artist Yee I-lann’s practice intertwines craft, gender, labor, and a critical approach to local culture, all demonstrated in Cantopop Karaoke Mat, 2023, into which the lyrics of ten Cantonese love songs were woven. Takahiro Iwasaki’s Beyond Chaos (Change) silhouetted the Hong Kong skyline in thirteen cotton sculptures. Each artwork tells a story of Hong Kong using the language of textile arts.

Newly established this year, gallery association Supper Club provided art enthusiasts and collectors another interesting foothold during the fair. On March 25, en route to The Party at M+, we stopped at the Fringe Club to attend its opening. Supper Club is organized by two galleries, PHD Group and the Shophouse, and invited both select galleries included in Art Basel HK as well as some excluded from the fair to explore the local art economy. Some of these included 47 Canal (New York), Anomaly (Tokyo), P21 (Seoul), MadeIn Gallery and Vanguard (Shanghai), and Tabula Rasa (Beijing/London). Supper Club also invited art researcher Li Anqi to act as curator, who unexpectedly organized the site not by gallery booths, but in an exhibition format. She collaborated with the local architectural firm BEAU for spatial design, and followed a curatorial line of thought in scattering artworks across the Fringe Club’s four floors. The dialogues they hosted were also innovative, the first session bringing together young collector Qiao Dan of Tank Shanghai with Hong Kong–based collector Shane Akeroyd in an intergenerational and international dialogue. The cynicism in the name “Supper Club” demonstrated the ambitions of a new generation of galleries for new strategies in bringing together art, community, and young collectors.

It’s unclear when invitations to The Party at M+ and its exhibition opening became such a hot commodity. Apparently, the party had more than 2,500 attendees last year, and there were no fewer people here tonight. The M+ galleries didn’t require tickets during the event, and we were allowed to peruse all the exhibition rooms, including the “M+ Sigg Collection: Another Story,” “Madame Song: Pioneering Art and Fashion in China,” and the recently opened “Shanshui: Echoes and Signals,” as well as Japanese artist Ay-O’s solo exhibition “Hong Hong Hong.” The first-floor exhibitions included “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography” and, most memorably, Primitive (2009), Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s immersive video installation in the performance space. Honestly, the M+ exhibitions shared a common formula, or “survival tactic,” that relied on outstanding artworks organized under weak exhibition themes. The art was classic, with solid international standing, such as Gu Dexin’s 2021-11-12 (2000/2023) in the Sigg Collection. Its sofa component was restuffed with animal entrails and pork fat, allowing visitors the rare experience of the artist’s original intent. But curatorially speaking, “Shanshui: Echoes and Signals” presented an ambiguous mash-up of interpretations on traditional Chinese ink landscapes with cyber-landscapes in digital media; the rich visual references of “Madame Song” impressively documented her arrival on the international stage in the 1990s, but the exhibition attempted to frame a macro-history of Chinese culture through the singular lens of a legendary figure; and in their midst, Ay-O’s exhibition lacked the language to engage in dialogue. Surmising from the curatorial themes circulating at M+, its public image is resting on volatile ground, and the institution seemed to be searching for a sustainable path somewhere between the authentic presentation of Chinese art and culture and the forging of a cultural juggernaut capable of engaging the rest of the world in that dialogue.

While perusing the island’s institutional exhibitions, there is one phrase that sticks in the back of my mind: Chinese elements. The topic lingers like a specter, hard to bring up and impossible to discuss. Hong Kong is no longer the Hong Kong of days past; it is in constant flux. The first dialogue hosted by Art Basel was a provisional response to some of my queries, a panel moderated by Pi Li, the “head of art” at Tai Kwun Contemporary, with Chinese-art mega-collectors Johnson Chang and Uli Sigg, who elaborated on their respective experiences under the rubric of “How to Build a Historical Collection of Chinese Contemporary Art.” Both collectors have been instrumental in shaping the landscape of contemporary art over the past thirty years, but have divergent ideas. Sigg maintained that his work as collector served as a conduit for people unfamiliar with China to understand its culture. He discussed the enduring influence of the “Mahjong” exhibition in Europe and the United States while Chang used the curatorial concept behind the Hanart TZ Gallery’s thirty-year retrospective exhibition,“3 Parallel Artworlds: 100 Art Things from Chinese Modern History,” to discuss how he established Chinese modernity at the level of visual culture, promoting a “Chinese Renaissance.” Asked to respond to critical takes on their work, both cleverly avoided the historical problem of using wealth to formulate Chinese contemporary art narratives; both described their collecting habits as idiosyncratic cultural interests. Perhaps the era of art trends fueled by private collectors is over, and the contemporary art discussed today is no longer “Chinese contemporary art,” but rather contemporary art in China. In the foreseeable future, establishing the popular perception of China’s art will be tasked to public institutions.

On March 29, for my last stop during art week, I chose an event distant from the fairgrounds, a tour of artist-run spaces in Kowloon’s Sham Shui Po organized by AFIELD. Chantal Wong led our group of more than twenty people on foot to three independent artist spaces: THY LAB, Parallel Space, and Halfcupsquat. The founder of THY LAB, Alberto Gerosa, gave a humorous introduction to the tenth-anniversary exhibition “Thieves—An auction of stolen artworks,” where all the artworks were “stolen” (invisible), including Andy Warhol’s Invisible Sculpture, and all the auction proceeds went to benefit THY LAB’s operating budget. Gerosa has been hosting screenings, performance workshops, and documentaries for a decade in this repurposed former rooftop slum; he calls Sham Shui Po the “shadow of Hong Kong,” because Chinese, Vietnamese, African, and South Asian immigrants can quickly find a place to stay here.

Organized by the anonymous artist collective PHEW, Parallel Space’s exhibition “Fast Forward” collected images and video from local news media from 1984 to 2024: Hong Kong’s 1997 handover ceremony, Deng Xiaoping toasting Margaret Thatcher, the closure of Kai Tak Airport. Chantal spoke with teary eyes about the “Things that can happen” space that she co-opened with Li Jie in 2015, and I couldn’t help but think of Hong Kong’s other alternative spaces that have since disappeared: Woofer Ten (2009–2015), Green Wave Art (2016–2019) . . .

Our last stop was Halfcupsquat, a corner teahouse/bookstore/community shop owned and operated by local artist and literary worker Li Weitai. Her practice appears relatively commonplace and gentle—operating a teahouse, selling secondhand books and handicrafts—but she is also a community organizer of reading groups, workshops, and lectures, and has made Halfcupsquat into a neighborhood arts information hub. When the context and direction of larger art institutions remains unclear, the community-based practice of a single artist is often the most effective strategy. Art Basel’s presence still illustrates Hong Kong’s role as the most robust art market in greater China, and fortunately the many tireless art laborers still working in its shadows are still visible.

Translated from Mandarin by Lee Ambrozy