COVER STORY
Visitors to the Art Basel Hong Kong fair take in one of the works from New York gallery 47 Canal
Art lovers are back in force, but sales are not what they used to be A hybrid version of Art Basel Hong Kong wowed both live and digital audiences in May, but will it be enough for China to recapture its share of the global market?
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ong Kong’s art market, in line with that of the entire Greater China region, is back in business after the unexpected, pandemic-related hiatus of 2020. But while attendance and results from the ninth Art Basel Hong Kong indicated a revival of interest and plenty of renewed investment, international data shows Greater China’s share of the global art market is continuing to slowly decline. The five-day event was held at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in May, 2021, after being pushed back from its original schedule of March. Capacity was reduced, but organisers were happy to embrace their own forms of digital transformation to maintain, and even extend, the fair’s reach to both audiences and gallery staff. On the audience side, Art Basel Live ran in parallel with the physical
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HONG KONG BUSINESS | Q3 2021
event, and featured online viewing rooms and live-streamed events and experiences. Border restrictions and quarantine requirements also meant some gallery owners and artists were not able to attend as they once had done. For this, Art Basel Hong Kong came up with a novel solution. Local staff took over the physical booth duties, while foreign-based representatives were able to speak with buyers and audiences via dedicated teleconferencing stations. Adeline Ooi, Art Basel’s Asia Director said the Hybrid model allowed the event to “bring the exceptional presentations of our galleries and the exciting cultural offerings of Hong Kong to our global network of collectors and patrons, including those who may not be onsite with us in 2021 but nonetheless remain equally engaged from afar”.
Art Basel Hong Kong embraced its own forms of digital transformation to maintain, and even extend, the show’s reach to both audiences and gallery staff
A hub for deals and acquisitions While restrictions meant fewer than half of the usual number of galleries were involved with this year’s event, most participants reported strong sales from the event. Works by western artists were again popular, echoing a trend in recent years of Asian collectors competing for major lots by both blue-chip and emerging artists from the US and Europe. “The tastes of collectors in Asia have diversified a whole lot,” Ooi told the media during the Arts Basel event. “There will be those who will continue to collect in a very systematic manner, who are very Asia-focused or have a specific medium focus, and will continue to collect in that vein.” But she added that the pandemic meant that most buyers had more than a year between fairs to do their research. “So collectors who
