Over 3,000 artists will bring the best of Asian and Western art across media to the third edition of Art Basel Hong Kong. These are the artists that caught our attention:
Who: Hajra Waheed
What: In her KH21 installation, the Canadian artist uses photographic documentation – she cuts, rearranges and reconstructs original associated press images, news clippings, government reports, etc – to refer to USA’s recently declassified HEXAGON project. In the Cold War era, a series of photographic reconnaissance satellites were launched by the US National Reconnaissance Office to take pictures of the Soviet Union and China. These ‘real’ images are woven into her ‘imagined’ story of an estranged airplane pilot – you see the images while listening to a recording of said pilot.
Section: Discoveries
Gallery: Experimenter (Experimenter.in)
Who: Trevor Yeung
What: Garden Cruising: It’s Not That Easy Being Green features selections from the Hong Kong-based multimedia artist’s body of work including his on-going (since 2011) series Sleepy Bed – Yeung’s voyeuristic shots of people sleeping intended to highlight the intimate connection between the photographer and the photographed.
Section: Discoveries
Gallery: Blindspot Gallery (Blindspotgallery.com)
Who: Samanta Batra Mehta
What: New York-based Samanta Batra Mehta created ‘The wall of objects and other in-destructibles (Part A)’ by pasting cut-outs of her drawings on her collection of vintage toys and wooden objects. The eerie-quirky layering alludes to the interplay between childhood imagination, fantasy, commodification and childhood memory.
Section: Discoveries
Gallery: Shrine Empire Gallery (Shrineempiregallery.com)
Who: James Turrell and Yoshimoto Nara
What: A new edition of Turrell’s Suite From Aten Reign (2014), based on the American artist’s iconic installation Aten Reign (his 2013 project at the Guggenheim where he filled the volume of the rotunda of the building with shifting natural and artificial light as a re-imagination of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture), will be shown in Asia for the first time. And you can expect new work from Japan’s Yoshimoto Nara, known for his simplistic (no complicated, layered metaphors here) seemingly child-like art.
Section: Galleries
Gallery: Pace Prints (Paceprints.com)
Who: João Vasco Paiva
What: The Encounters section at the fair is dedicated to large-scale sculptures and installations that cannot be contained within regular stalls, like the work of Portugal native João Vasco Paiva. The Hong Kong-based artist’s structural installation, Mausoleum, has been built using Styrofoam boxes cast in stone resin. Why? To elevate the quotidian and give it new meaning.
Section: Encounters
Gallery: Edouard Malingue Gallery (Edouardmalingue.com)
Art Basel Hong Kong is on from March 15 – 17. Artbasel.com
