Ten must-see works in Art Basel Hong Kong’s new section – The Art Newspaper

Contemporary art moves so fast that it can be hard to keep track. But the curated sections of contemporary art fairs offer an opportunity to grab a snapshot of the newest galleries, as well as the youngest, hippest artists. Who wants to go traipsing around warehouse districts in dark bits of the city when you can have it all in one brightly lit place? Echoes, which is the newest section at Art Basel Hong Kong, is dedicated to works created within the past five years, all shown in focused presentations of up to three artists by galleries from across the world.

Hyun Nahm, Whistle

Fusing classical East Asian aesthetics with a heavily technological approach, the Korean artist Hyun Nahm’s work with Whistle (pictured above) feels both like something ancient and a futuristic sci-fi flight of fancy. Based on the idea of chukgyeong—the miniaturisation of the vastness of nature—the artist uses epoxy, cement and polystyrene to scale down huge ideas of digital consumption, telecommunication infrastructure and global hyperconnectivity. It’s all the immenseness of the contemporary world, brought right down to size.

Leelee Chan, Klemm’s and Capsule Shanghai

Delving deep into mystic iconography and urban decay, the Hong Kong-based artist Leelee Chan’s latest sculptural intervention is like a shrine to modernity. Chan takes a quasi-religious approach to abstraction, and the piece on display at Art Basel Hong Kong—a joint presentation between Berlin’s Klemm’s and Capsule Shanghai—is a dizzyingly geometric wall relief in stark black, with amber-coloured glass panes and spider-like plant forms dotted across its surface, like some half-ancient, half-futuristic relic.

Tiffany Chung, Max Estrella

Data and statistics have rarely looked as good—or as interesting—as they do in the work of the Vietnamese American artist Tiffany Chung. Her work at Max Estrella’s booth centres around a huge embroidered map of the world that depicts the historic routes of the global spice trade. She is essentially tracing connections between cultures, culinary traditions, commerce and migration on a grand scale—what could be quite dry, historical, statistical observations are rendered very spicily.

Kei Imazu, Anomaly

Kei Imazu uses the future to confront the past. It is an approach she has been pursuing since the early 2000s, melding digital experimentation with painting. Cybernetics meet Surrealism in these new works filled with nods to traditional East Asian art forms, all with the aim of tackling socio-ecological issues in her adopted Indonesia and the dark colonial history of her native Japan.

Cian Dayrit, Catinca Tabacaru and Nome

The Filipino artist Cian Dayrit is endeavouring to uncover, disrupt and “unbuild” the very foundations of colonialism in his work at Art Basel Hong Kong. In a joint presentation between the Romanian gallery Catinca Tabacaru and Berlin’s Nome, Dayrit’s tapestry and sculpture-based work uses the tools of ethnography and archaeology to expose how colonialism has shaped the world and how it continues to erase marginalised people and stories.

Natalia Załuska, Double Q Gallery

Hong Kong’s Double Q Gallery is making its fair debut with a single-artist presentation by the Polish Minimalist Natalia Załuska. Her intervention here will transform the Double Q booth into a huge, immersive work of geometric abstraction, playing with the boundaries between two- and three-dimensional space. Załuska’s take on abstraction is anything but cold and mathematical though, emphasising an intentionally painterly approach filled with brush marks and human touches.

Jakkai Siributr, Flowers Gallery

London’s Flowers Gallery describes the work of the three artists in its presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong as “palimpsestic”, which is a very nice way of saying they reuse old material. Chief among them is Jakkai Siributr, whose display here, titled Despatch, is based on the concept of boro, a traditional Japanese practice of patchwork mending. His installation ruminates on ageing societies and the loss of cultural practices and linguistic forms.

Li Yiwen, Mocube

Ruined architecture appears over and over again in the work of the Chinese painter Li Yiwen. Trained in mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, his work at Mocube features broken, crumbling staircases in a ravaged, post-apocalyptic landscape. Walkways that once went somewhere now lead nowhere. Yiwen treats buildings like ghosts of the past—containers of cultural memory that are on the verge of being lost forever.

Daniel Boyd, Station

Identity, history and the loss of cultural memory are big topics in this year’s Echoes, and all three of the artists showing with Melbourne’s Station gallery are very much on theme. Daniel Boyd, one of Australia’s most recognisable contemporary artists, draws on his Indigenous heritage to uncover suppressed histories and challenge Eurocentric ideals through pointillistic figurative paintings made of thousands of congealed glue dots.

Lewis Hammond, Arcadia Missa and Christian Andersen

In dark, hazy, cryptic paintings, the young Berlin-based English artist Lewis Hammond aims to lay bare all the anxieties of our contemporary lives. His new works here have an intentionally disquieting aura, an uncomfortable sense of unease. In one, a figure falls asleep at a desk, in another, two rabbits climb over each other in a nook in a wall. They are shadowy, mysterious, penumbral images, but their hidden meaning is pretty obvious: the world is a dark place, and no one is really sure how to make sense of it anymore.