Galleries and Museums to Visit During Art Basel Hong Kong

This week, a day at M+ would be well spent. The museum of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture has a can’t-miss exhibition lineup, including a deep dive into Robert Rauschenberg’s long under-examined relationship with South and East Asian art. Aptly titled “Robert Rauschenberg and Asia,” the show brings together major works produced during—and in response to—his travels in the region, encompassing textiles and collaborations with papermakers and ceramicists in China, India, and Japan. 

Elsewhere in the museum, “Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now” offers the most comprehensive survey to date of Lee Bul, one of the most formidable artists to emerge from the region in recent decades. The exhibition opens with an immersive, open landscape featuring architectural installations from her Mon grand récit series (2005–ongoing), alongside her landmark Cyborg and Anagram works from the late 1990s and early 2000s, which first brought her international recognition. 

There is more to hear here, too: “Seeing Sound, Hearing Time,” a tribute to the legacy of composer, producer, and artist Ryuichi Sakamoto. The exhibition features installations developed in dialogue with his sonic practice, including collaborations with artist Shiro Takatani—what the pair described as “installation music.” Among its core is Sakamoto’s 2017 album async, reimagined as async–immersion (2023), a large-scale installation conceived as the music’s three-dimensional body. 

Para Site, Hong Kong’s contemporary-meets-cutting-edge mainstay, marks its thirtieth year with “Site-seeing,” an institutional retrospective revisiting its 1996 exhibition of the same name. According to the show’s website, it aims to “re-engage” with its central preoccupation: the symbiotic relationship between art, the metropolis, and collective memory. 

To that end, Para Site has brought together nine artists and artist groups from across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Among them is Singaporean artist Heman Chong, whose two-decade practice examines how policy shapes the ways people enact their will on public space; Hong Kong–based Ko Sin Tung, who turns an investigative eye toward subjects such as the high-speed railway linking the city to mainland China; and Bangkok-born artist and curator Nawin Nuthong, whose work probes the myths and messaging that undergird history and media. 

The 61st Venice Biennale opens on May 9, but visitors to the Hong Kong Museum of Art can get an early glimpse with “Fermata,” a serene, site-specific exhibition by Hong Kong artists Kingsley Ng and Angel Hui. Jointly organized by the museum and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council, the presentation will travel to Venice as Hong Kong’s first contribution to the Biennale Arte’s Collateral Events. 

Atmospheric and quietly enigmatic, “Fermata” positions itself as an invitation to slow down “amidst the hectic flow of life” and attune to the subtle rhythms between substance—body, building, nature—and spirit. Light, sound, and movement are orchestrated toward this end, all calibrated to Hong Kong’s particular social frequency. 

For its 25th anniversary, the Asia Art Archive has conceived a retrospective exhibition around a deceptively simple question: What were you like at 25? For individuals and institutions alike, the quarter-life milestone invites—or, depending on one’s disposition, unsettles with—reflection: Would you recognize the desires of that earlier self? Would you choose to be that person again? As the exhibition notes, for many artists, 25 marks a watershed: a quiet epoch when a visual vocabulary begins to cohere, and idle wonders metabolize into matters of artmaking. 

Curated in successive chapters, the exhibition’s first installment brings together some of Asia’s most influential contemporary artists, including Singaporean multidisciplinary artist Ho Tzu Nyen; Taiwanese artist and performer Tehching Hsieh; Thai filmmaker Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook; and Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang. Their recent work will be shown alongside rare archival materials to trace how changes in both the broader world and their immediate communities informed the artists they have become. 

CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile) is a textile culture museum located at The Mills, a former cotton-spinning complex of Nan Fung Textiles in Tsuen Wan. Its programming traces the past into the present through explorations of color, texture, and technique—and their interweaving with Hong Kong’s social fabric. This week, stop by for “Artefacts of ‘Blue’”, a historical excavation of Indanthrene Blue, the world’s first synthetic vat dye, advertised into cultural immortality by the “Miss Happiness” persona in 1930s China: “Discover a shade of blue that is not melancholic and trace its journey through time,” reads the show’s website. 

CHAT has two more notable exhibitions on view, including “Threading Inwards”, a group show centering concerns of collective care within this paradoxical age of globalization and emotional alienation. Fourteen artists from across Asia have answered this question through a range of material manipulations, touching on themes of sorrow and parting, reunion and recycle. Elsewhere is “Snuggle and Stitch: Childhood Textiles,” a visual history of local childhood textiles from the 1930s to the 2020s, told through artisanal dolls, ready-to-wear fashion, mass-produced items, and other household artifacts. The show’s curators invite visitors to consider these objects in the context of the seismic shifts in human connection. “In 1950s Hong Kong, nearly one in every two people you’d meet was a teenager or child—swaddled in a baby sling, dressed in home-sewn clothes, or clutching a toy worn from love,” reads the exhibition description, charged with an implicit meaning: the old state of play has worn away. 

 After 13 years in Shanghai, Simon Wang’s Antenna Space has branched out to Hong Kong—and you’re invited to the housewarming. Perched on the 19th floor of Leader Centre in Wong Chuk Hang, a former light-industrial building, the space opens on March 21 with “Horizons: South,” so named for the event horizon—and the magnetic oblivion that lies just beyond. The assembled artists, however, refuse to claim real estate in the void. 

By my reading of its statement, this exhibition is a rallying cry against connectivity in its most coercive, spiritually annihilating form: empire. “We see our technical networks breaking into closed circuits, China building and exporting a global alternative, Europe planning its own civic social networks, the United States a chaotic morass held together by the thin glue of fascism and artificial intelligence,” it reads. The show’s first iteration, “Horizons,” was staged amid the post-COVID disorientation of 2023. Its follow-up arrives as the artists have learned to “sit with the finitude of dislocation and disconnection.” The result is a two-room exhibition excavating the motives of popular media, the gallery-object relationship, and the contemporary purpose of punk. 

Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre (JCCAC), a 2026 Art Basel cultural partner, will host a parallel exhibition to the fair at its L1 Gallery throughout the month. The show, titled “Le nid, La coquille” is populated by “nests” and “shells”—symbols of the spiritual dwelling tucked in an artist’s heart. 11 JCCAC resident artists are represented here—CHAN King Long, Ken, CHENG Ting Ting, HUI Tin Wan, Ashton, HUI Wan Yu, Cami, LAM Yau Sum, LAU Ching Yee, Cathleen, LAW Ka Nam, Bosco, LI Ning, NGAI Wing Lam, Ant, TSE Chun Sing, and YIU Tung Wing, Wenda—working across painting, ink, illustration, printmaking, installation, mixed media, and new media, have taken on the theme. Expressive or restrained, their distinct styles map the inexhaustible terrain of the inner world. Currently on view in the Central Courtyard, “Archives in the Nests and Shells” showcases JCCAC artists’ personal collections, adding a compelling biographical layer to the main exhibition. 

“These works, they are wounds. But they are wounds that have healed, wounds that have been encapsulated in time,” writes multimedia artist Joshua Serafin of his new exhibition, “GRIEVE THE DEPARTED WOUND,” on view at Tomorrow Maybe, a contemporary art space tucked on the fourth floor of Eaton HK. A participant in the 60th Venice Biennale, Serafin here reimagines two earlier projects—Cosmological Gangbang and Lost Ancestors—as a conversation unfolding across painting, installation, video, and scenography. The focus, he adds, is the “rhythmic relationship” between the two works’ built environments. Joshua Serafin’s practice draws on the mythology of his native Philippines and the condition of liminality to imagine spaces free of social and physical binaries—states of mind, with bodies as optional. 

Experimental art finds a natural home at Current Plans, an alternative space founded in 2020 by curator Eunice Tsang. Initially housed in a former mahjong school in Sham Shui Po, the project has since shifted to a roving curatorial model. Its latest exhibition, Imagine a “Dead Blue Whale Inside the Pocket of a Giant,” is on view through May at the Remex Centre. Conceived between Italy and Hong Kong—contexts divided by language, landscape, and, on the surface, values—the exhibition posits play as a universal cultural translator. Visitors, however, may be unfamiliar with this game. Where communication based on social conventions fails, irreverence reigns: alien alphabets, glitching gadgets, and spontaneous rituals are pressed into service. Accordingly, the exhibiting artists hail from both regions. Newly commissioned works are shown alongside pieces never before exhibited, in Asia or elsewhere. Together, they form part of Giulia Pollicita’s research project, “Italy–Hong Kong Express,” supported by the Italian Council program in collaboration with the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.