Often, when I try to describe what’s so exciting about the art scenes in Hong Kong and China, I’ll say that artists here seem to be asking far different questions than those in the US, or coming up with completely out-of-left-field ways of approaching an answer. Hong Kong–based De Sarthe’s presentation, which features artists interrogating how contemporary social narratives intersect with new technology, is a good example of what I mean.
Mak2, who last year had the buzziest work in the fair’s Encounters section, returns with another intriguing piece. For the new project, Home Sweet Home Backyard (2025), the conceptual artist produced a video game where fairgoers can play as virtual gold diggers. The more people play the game, and find gold, the higher the price rises for an accompanying suite of seven triptych paintings. Those works, inspired by the video game The Sims 4, were produced by commissioning sections from artists on Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao. It’s a humorous metaphor for art’s attention economy: the more regular people pay attention, the more the art is worth, even if it’s the collectors that reap the rewards—or pay the price. There are also strange, dream-like paintings “by” Lov-Lov, an AI artist developed by artist Lin Jingjing. For the works, Lin meticulously re-created AI-generated images using paint and airbrush, calling attention to a more fluid notion of creativity, where the lines between creator, influence, and creation are far from clear.
Not in the booth, but brought by the gallery to Encounters, is LuYang’s DOKU the Creator, a sensory overload of an installation that blends a video featuring LuYang’s virtual avatar DOKU, with LEDs playing scrolling text and staging evocative of a storefront. There are works available for purchase in “blind boxes,” with 108 different pieces hidden inside, laying bare the casino-like nature of the art market. Meanwhile, the messaging across the video and LEDs draws from philosophy, Buddhism, science fiction, and futurism to question—similar to Lin—the nature of creativity, authorship, and our increasingly digitized consciousness.
