Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in our special Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter for Art Basel Hong Kong. Sign up here to receive it every day of the fair.
In December 2008, during Art Basel Miami Beach, an Artforum gossip columnist looking for signs of that moment’s dramatic art market downturn quoted ARTnews’s current editor-in-chief (then a reporter for Art + Auction magazine): “Observing the Cassandra-esque trend, Art & Auction’s Sarah Douglas sarcastically noted that there was no caviar at this year’s UBS dinner.” In an industry as opaque as art, where dealers are rarely forthright about their businesses, the most reliable economic data can sometimes be the party budgets.
So, it was with great anticipation that I was eyeing what this year’s social scene might look like in Hong Kong, as the city kicked off Hong Kong Art Week on Monday. During last year’s festivities, the conversation revolved around the disappearance of mainland Chinese collectors, as China quietly slipped into a recession due to an ongoing crisis in the country’s property market and a slowing economy. Throughout the year, amid a weak global art market and widespread uncertainty, the art markets in Hong Kong and China were particularly hard hit.
The question of economic uncertainty and recovery hangs over this year’s edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, as reporter Ilaria Maria Sala writes in a market preview for ARTnews this week. As Patricia Crockett, a senior director at David Zwirner in Hong Kong, told Sala, the city has not been immune to “the slowdown in the global economy and uncertain political shifts around the world.” At the same time, she added, “we have observed Hong Kong’s local collectors actually grow their acquisitions and support for the city’s art scene in the past year.”
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A particular dynamic has been present in Hong Kong since the city reopened at the end of 2022, which has continued this year. While the market has been tentative, the city’s art scene has shown incredible resilience and energy, in building a far more robust ecosystem than pre-Covid. That is on display in the wide variety of shows picked by writer Hok-hang Cheung for ARTnews as standouts to see this week. There’s videos and site-specific installations exploring the fragile nature of morality and humanity’s brutality by Hong Kong artist Tsang Kin-Wah at Galerie du Monde, and a show bridging traditional folk crafts with contemporary art—and foregrounding women’s unseen labor—at Centre for Heritage Arts & Textile, to name a couple.
For those taking a night-time ferry, or walking along Hong Kong island’s waterfront, there’s Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s Night Charades, a tribute to the city’s “golden age” cinema, on view on M+’s 200-foot-tall LED facade. Ho’s piece, which deliberately uses AI to transform iconic culture of the past, is emblematic of the forward-thinking work often on view in Hong Kong. Ho told me in a recent interview that he used AI for the first time in his practice in an effort to “decontextualize” this beloved culture and complicate widespread nostalgia around the city’s “golden age.” What’s left, he said, is “a strange and maybe slightly monstrous combination of different types of cultural references” that blur the boundaries between past and future.
Ho Tzu Nyen, Screening of “Night Charades” on the M+ Facade, 2025.
Courtesy of M+ and Art Basel, presented by UBS; Photo M+
As curator Aaditya Sathish explained to Cheung, “From what I could understand, Hong Kong was very much a place to trade global contemporary art. But over the pandemic, there was a focus on the local. A lot of independent art spaces started to emerge, and I remember seeing everyone flock to these places,” he said. “There was a desperate need to look at what was around us.”
The energy—and the extravagance—does seem to be back in Hong Kong this year, even if it hasn’t reached pre-pandemic heights of, say, Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s soiree at Jumbo Kingdom, the city’s since-closed iconic floating restaurant.
Monday night’s schedule was packed with swanky cocktail parties launching new projects. The Peninsula, one of the city’s oldest and most stately hotels, unveiled three new works for its “Art in Resonance,” for which the hotel and London’s V&A Museum commission large-scale installations. A red carpet stretched up to the hotel’s magnificent atrium, where stylish guests sipped wine and ate passed hors d’oeuvres as they waited their turn for photo ops. A short walk away, at the Rosewood, a gargantuan 33,880-square-foot hotel on the waterfront, the highly-anticipated Dib Museum, Bangkok’s first dedicated to global contemporary art, celebrated its upcoming opening in December. Purat Osathanugrah, the museum’s chairman and president and the son of late Thai arts patron Petch Osathanugrah, spent the party at private members’ club Carlyle. & Co, on stage playing jazz guitar. The most extravagant affair of the evening, however, was the annual opening party at M+, where guests experienced a full program of performances, a 360-degree photo booth, and a Dance Dance Revolution machine (the 2000s really are back) as they took in the contemporary art museum’s stunning terrace views of the city.
If party budgets or guest lists were tightened due to a challenging market, it wasn’t clear at M+ or elsewhere. As one Korean curator who I met last year shouted to me over the pulsing electronica at M+, “The vibes are better this year, no?”
Lunar Rainbow, a new installation commissioned by The Peninsula and the V&A Museum, for the “Art in Resonance” program. The work, by Hong Kong-based artist Phoebe Hui, hangs suspended over the entrance to the hotel.
Photo Courtesy of The Peninsula
While I’ll concede that the city is electric, the question of how that will translate at Art Basel Hong Kong on Wednesday—or at the auction houses this weekend—is as open as ever. At a press preview at Sotheby’s earlier in the day, I asked Sotheby’s CEO Charles F. Stewart if he thought the region, and China specifically, were still struggling from a soft market. Put him in the cautiously optimistic category, like most everyone else I talked to so far this week.
“To be honest, that’s why I’m here this week,” Stewart said. “I’ll be talking to as many people as I can to try to understand where the market is at. My sense is that it is getting better, but you never know. If you ask me in a week, I’ll have a better idea.”
Won’t we all.
Still, as Stewart reminded me, there’s a reason Sotheby’s, along with Christie’s and Phillips, have opened new headquarters in the city in recent years. “I’m not sure there’s another region in the world that has 1,000 or more high-net-worth individuals waiting to be on-boarded into the art market,” Stewart said.
As per the widespread rumors that Sotheby’s is in negotiations with Pace over a game-changing deal, Stewart was unequivocal. “No truth at all,” he said. “You do one pitch together and suddenly that’s all anyone can talk about. And the more you deny it, the more they think it is happening. What do you even say?”
There you go, straight from the source, not that I suspect that will stop the conversations at the fair.