Fading of God – Deer Calls in the Secluded Valley , 2026
Qiu Anxiong
Pearl Lam Galleries
During Art Basel Hong Kong 2026, which runs March 27 to 29 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, the city’s galleries will enter their busiest week of the year. Across the island, global powerhouses and long-standing Asian galleries will stage exhibitions for an international crowd.
Many of these spaces are within walking distance of each other in Hong Kong’s Central neighborhood. The vertical tower H Queen’s houses Hauser & Wirth. White Cube and MASSIMODECARLO are nearby, as are long-standing spaces such as Pearl Lam and 10 Chancery Lane, fixtures of the city’s contemporary art scene since the early 2000s. Alisan Fine Arts, founded in the 1980s and one of Hong Kong’s longest-standing contemporary galleries, is also here, with Double Q Gallery just a short distance away in Wong Chuk Hang.
Thanks in part to such galleries, the city’s art ecosystem has grown slowly but with increasing depth, entering a more mature phase since the pandemic. While Hong Kong remains one of the world’s key art market hubs, accounting for roughly 14% of global art exports in 2024 according to the UBS Art Market Report, it increasingly functions not just as a marketplace but as a platform for ambitious exhibitions and projects.
“As we head toward Art Basel Hong Kong, the city is coming alive with exhibitions that show just how dynamic this global hub in Asia truly is,” Angelle Siyang-Le, director of Art Basel Hong Kong, told Artsy. “Together, these shows offer essential context for the artists, ideas, and conversations that will animate the fair this year.”
Here are seven gallery shows worth seeing right now.
El Anatsui
“MivEvi”
White Cube
Mar. 25–May 9
MivEvi V, 2025
El Anatsui
White Cube
Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui once said, “When you unite things, their power keeps growing.” The artist, renowned for transforming discarded materials into monumental sculpture, makes his Hong Kong debut at White Cube with a new series of shimmering aluminum and copper wire installations made from thousands of flattened liquor-bottle caps collected and assembled in his Accra studio.
The material itself carries historical weight: Liquor bottles circulated along colonial trade routes tied to the transatlantic slave trade. “These are things people expect to throw away,” Anatsui has said, “but they preserve the history of a place.”
The exhibition follows the artist’s widely discussed Tate Modern Turbine Hall commission, Behind the Red Moon (2023–24). Stitched into vast, tapestry-like fields of metal, the new works expand Anatsui’s long-running exploration of what he calls “non-fixed form,” a sculptural language that challenges Western categories of sculpture while drawing on West African traditions of weaving and metalwork.
For the first time, several sculptures are designed to shift shape and be viewed from both sides, allowing them to be experienced fully in the round.
Nicole Eisenman
“Fallen Angels”
Hauser & Wirth
Mar. 24–May 30
Tidal Wave, 2025
Nicole Eisenman
Hauser & Wirth
A Good Place to Start, 2025
Nicole Eisenman
Hauser & Wirth
At Hauser & Wirth, American painter Nicole Eisenman presents a new group of paintings and sculptures that shift the focus of her socially charged practice toward more intimate scenes.
The exhibition includes 11 oil paintings and three sculptures, many set in everyday spaces such as apartments, studios, and beaches. Here, Eisenman turns from her typically crowded scenes toward quieter compositions, with figures caught in moments of reflection and unease. Thick, expressive brushwork and darkening skies recur throughout the new works. “Escapism is a funny paradox,” Eisenman has said. “A catastrophic wave is about to break.”
Eisenman’s new sculptures include assemblages made from furniture taken directly from the artist’s studio, bringing traces of the creative process into the gallery.
Lily Stockman
“A Grass Roof”
MASSIMODECARLO
Mar. 24–May 21
Los Angeles–based painter Lily Stockman makes her Hong Kong debut with a series of luminous abstract paintings inspired by an eighth-century Zen poem by the Buddhist monk Shitou Xiqian.
The poem imagines a small hermitage that “includes the entire world,” an idea Stockman explores through layered compositions, many in deep blues and greens. The artist uses delicate badger-hair brushes traditionally used in Chinese calligraphy. She builds her compositions from wavering lines, nested frames, and softly dissolving shapes.
Stockman, who splits her time between Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert, often draws inspiration from natural phenomena such as mineral pools, birdsong, and shifting light. Here, painting becomes a shelter, each canvas like a window left slightly open, letting the breeze in.
Fang Zhaoling
“In Pursuit of Naïveté: Fang Zhaoling’s Journey”
Alisan Fine Arts
Through May 16
Living in Cave Dwellings, 1996
Fang Zhaoling 方召麐
Alisan Fine Arts
Untitled, 1976
Fang Zhaoling 方召麐
Alisan Fine Arts
Modern Chinese ink pioneer Fang Zhaoling (1914–2006) is the subject of a survey at Alisan Fine Arts, the first such exhibition at the gallery since 2012. Born into a scholarly family in Jiangsu, China, and later based in Hong Kong, Fang studied under the legendary painter Zhang Daqian, absorbing classical brush techniques before developing her own expressive style.
The survey brings together more than 20 works spanning the 1960s to the 1990s and includes landscapes, bird-and-flower paintings, and calligraphy. Many feature Fang’s distinctive motif of tiny figures climbing monumental mountains, a poetic image of perseverance within vast landscapes. Though rooted in the literati tradition, her energetic brushwork often approaches abstraction, revealing how she transformed centuries-old techniques into a strikingly modern visual language.
The exhibition coincides with Alisan Fine Arts’ 45th anniversary, alongside a presentation of works by the emerging contemporary artist Xiaoli Zhang at the gallery’s nearby project space, Alisan Atelier.
Qiu Anxiong
“Bearing the Unseen”
Pearl Lam Galleries
Mar. 24–May 30
Peach Blossom Spring Wonderland—Encounter with a Snake , 2025
Qiu Anxiong
Pearl Lam Galleries
For more than two decades, Shanghai-based artist Qiu Anxiong has expanded the language of Chinese ink painting through animation, moving image, and immersive installation. In his new exhibition at Pearl Lam Galleries, he unites these media to imagine a world shaped by ecological crisis and technological acceleration.
Drawing inspiration from ancient texts such as the Classic of Mountains and Seas, Qiu’s landscapes replace idyllic mountains and rivers with industrial zones, surveillance systems, and hybrid creatures. Animals often appear as silent witnesses to human activity. The artist describes his work as exploring “modernity in flux,” where myth, technology, and environmental change collide.
Often cited as a pioneer of animation in Chinese contemporary art, Qiu continues to push the possibilities of ink painting into the realm of time-based media.
Dinh Q. Lê
“REMEMBRANCE: A Tribute to the Work of Dinh Q. Lê”
10 Chancery Lane Gallery
Mar. 20–May 16
Untitled (Hill of Poisonous Tree series), 2008
Dinh Q. Lê
10 Chancery Lane Gallery
“The hardest part about creating art about war is deciding which parts should be forgotten and which parts should be remembered,” said the late Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê (1965–2024), one of the most influential contemporary artists to emerge from Southeast Asia. The presentation at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery is among the first showcases of his work following his 2024 passing.
Born in southern Vietnam in 1965, Lê fled the country with his family in 1978, spending a year in a Thai refugee camp before growing up in the United States. The experience of displacement shaped a practice deeply concerned with memory and the construction of history.
The artist became internationally known for his “photo-weavings,” a technique inspired by traditional Vietnamese grass-mat weaving: He cut and interlaced photographic strips, often from portraits, into layered, mosaic-like compositions that consider how histories are remembered and represented.
Luca Sára Rózsa
“Last Trip to the Amazon”
Double Q Gallery
Through May 9
I Stutter, You Leave, 2026
Luca Sára Rózsa
Double Q Gallery
Once It Is You Then It Is Me, 2025
Luca Sára Rózsa
Double Q Gallery
A childhood journey to the Amazon rainforest inspired Hungarian painter Luca Sára Rózsa’s new series of figurative paintings.
The works, which draw on photographs taken during a family trip in 2004, depict lush tropical landscapes inhabited by semi-nude human figures. Rózsa’s paintings often draw from mythological and biblical symbolism while exploring humanity’s place within nature. At times, they suggest a return to more instinctive, animal-like states. Revisiting the journey years later, the artist connects personal memory with broader concerns about ecological fragility and the changing relationship between humans and the natural world.
The paintings are spread across both floors of the gallery and accompanied by ceramics and embroideries that extend the narrative into installation.
