Art Basel Hong Kong 2026: Best Booths

Stateless, exoticized, confined to diaspora—the artists in Blindspot’s presentation probe questions of belonging in a China adrift from its people. Any one of these artist could sustain a solo exhibition: the presentation includes recent works by Lap-See Lam and Trevor Yeung, coinciding with their respective solo shows elsewhere in Hong Kong. Together, they form a compelling meditation on identity amid a shifting world order, where consumerist desires have curdled into disillusionment, and socio-political forces have propelled generations into migration. Zhang Wenzhi, from Dalian in China’s Liaoning Province, presents stunning collage-like ink paintings where Chinese modern history collides with folkloric creatures—remnants of a magic vanished under urban sprawl. Nearby, the blazingly talented Cheung Tsz Hin puts his mindscape on canvas in paintings that read like photo negatives: neon visions of his now-unincorporated hometown, scrubbed from the map. 

“In the Atayal folk tale of Temahahaoi, a reclusive group of women once lived deep within the mountains of Taiwan”—so begins Kindom, Ciwas Tahos’s speculative installation at PTT Space. Developed in close collaboration with curator Alfonse Chiu, the project takes the Atayal fable as its point of entry into a broader inquiry into queer alternatives to heteronormative lifestyles predicated on the exploitation of nature. The artistic team traveled into Taiwan’s mountain ranges, tracing the story’s terrain as part of Tahos’s ongoing body of work, Finding Pathways to Temahahaoi, which encompasses the two-channel video installation Perhaps, She Comes From/To_Alang (2020); a large cloth map charting the routes and fragments of oral history embedded in Temahahaoi; and a wall-mounted sculptural installation of functional ocarinas. The project has previously been staged in major institutional contexts, including the latest Sharjah Biennial; in Hong Kong, it folds neatly into the broader narrative of discovery and dislocation woven throughout the fair.  

There’s much to admire at P.P.O.W. Gallery this year, from some terrific Martin Wong paintings tucked in the corner to the gallery’s rightful foregrounding of a disquieting installation by the late Vietnamese‑American multimedia artist Dinh Q. Lê. Titled Damaged Gene (1998), the work mimics a clothing kiosk filled with children’s garments and baby dolls— but a closer look reveals two-headed toys and missing sleeves, alluding to the insidious legacy of chemical warfare during the Vietnam War, particularly the use of Agent Orange. Presented in the fair’s Kabinett sector, Damaged Gene cuts through the commercial excess with a sober dose of reality. 

Anyone looking for an overdue history of Nepalese art should visit Tansbao’s booth, dedicated this year to Lain Singh Bangdel. One of Nepal’s most influential painters, novelists, and art historians. Bangdel (1919–2002), regarded as the “father of modern art” in the country, Bangdel grafted a Western visual lexicon onto South Asian sensibilities. The subjects of two works on view here, for example—a despondent figure and a gossiping pair, washed in sickly greens and blues—would have much to commiserate over with Edvard Munch’s cast of actors. But these are only fleeting likenesses; Bangdel’s vision is entirely his own, perfectly aligning with Art Basel Hong Kong’s stated mission of expanding the platform for regional artists, both emerging and historical. 

Cyberpunk meets magical girl in Ornament Survival, Emi Kusano’s new installation at √K Contemporary. A fitting entry in the digital sector Zero10, Kusano uses generative AI to multiply her own image, sending these infinite copies through a cascade of vignettes that veer too close to techno-dystopia to be cute, yet remain too hypercharged for despair. In one, she sprouts wings while attended by nurses—all bearing her face. With a twist of her limbs, the operating room becomes a cockpit, and she (and she and she and—) reappears as a flight attendant. In the twenty-first century, self-optimization is a demand for success; but in the thirty-first, where Kusano seemingly operates, will there be any self left? 

Hong Kong’s “East-meets-West” mantra meets deft curation in a striking matchup of works by Kimsooja, Bosco Sodi—who has just wrapped a landmark solo show at the He Art Museum in Guangdong, China—and Zoran Mušič. Presented in Art Basel’s Kabinett sector, which is dedicated to thematic curated presentations, the booth features Mušič’s haunting paper transmutations of his imprisonment in the Dachau concentration camp. Made decades after his liberation, these crumbling figures speak of memories too heinous to be captured in language, managing resonance only in art. Another booth standout: Jaffa Lam’s “Windbreak” series, which just made its debut at the ongoing Shanghai Biennale. According to interviews with Lam, the ceramics take inspiration from traditional building techniques in Shanghai. 

The veteran Hong Kong gallery returns with its signature curatorial nimbleness. The booth is anchored by an intergenerational dialogue between four Asian and diaspora artists—Chan Ka Kiu, Lov-Lov, Caison Wang, and Zhong Wei—whose work probes different epochs of technology, most urgently artificial intelligence. The presentation spills into Kabinett with work by seminal French conceptual artist Bernar Venet, represented here by Corten steel sculptures and a spread of his autonomous charcoal sketches. Timely as well: Venet’s soaring sculpture Convergence: 52.5° Arc x 14 (2024) was gifted to China last December to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Sino-French diplomatic relations.