The Best Booths at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024, From Cut-Up Suits to Bronze Patio Chairs

Tsherin Sherpa at Rossi Rossi

Longtime Hong Kong gallery Rossi Rossi dedicated its entire booth to Nepali multimedia artist Tsherin Sherpa, who exhibited in Nepal’s inaugural pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Nearly all of the works come from Sherpa’s most recent series working with traditional carpet weavers in Nepal. It’s a bold move that pays off with a powerful presentation.

Sherpa has long reconceptualized traditional Tibetan arts to challenge fetishizations of Nepalese culture, but the carpet weaving series contains a more direct element of social practice. As Sherpa told ARTnews, the series came out of a realization that traditional Nepalese carpet weaving was becoming a dying art as artisans abandoned the craft in search of higher paying jobs outside the country. He began collaborating with local artisans to produce these new works, raising their wages and sending a portion of the sales proceeds back in the hopes of keeping the cottage industry alive.

“A whole generation in Nepal is losing its youth, as they leave the villages,” Sherpa said. “If we can actually provide them with better wages and better working conditions, then this skillset will remain.”

As gallery director Fabio Rossi aptly put it, Sherpa’s works have that unique blend of obvious beauty and conceptual rigor.

Nawin Nuthong at Bangkok CityCity Gallery

Head to Bangkok CityCity Gallery’s booth in the Discoveries section and you’ll find yourself transported inside the unusual mind of Nawin Nuthong. The Thai artist began his career as a curator, gallery founder Akapol Sudasna told ARTnews, and it was Sudasna’s encouragement that led Nuthong to shift into art-making. That curatorial background, however, comes through in this Art Basel presentation, which functions as a mini-exhibition, titled “Culture is Flux,” of his various interests and skillsets.

Spanning drawings, sculpture, silkscreen prints, paintings, and digital art, “Culture is Flux” uses symbols from pop culture, comics, meme culture, and video games to explore topics like war, cartography, national heritages, and the ethics of writing history. Many of the images that Nuthong uses and recontextualizes will be familiar to any gamer, from the Civilization V symbols in He Heard Leaf Crawl (2024) to the real-time strategy terrain map of Smiling Map (2024).

“Nuthong is exploring the idea of looking at history, and how using video game techniques and logic can allow us to re-look at history and perhaps see things that we couldn’t see before,” Sudasna said.

The works feel deeply intertwined with the visual language of 2024, which is to say a politically polarized digital world riven with irreverence and saturated with images.

Vitamin Creative Space

The booth of Guangzhou-based gallery Vitamin Creative Space is dominated by an approximately 15-foot wooden structure atop which hangs two untitled sculptures by Danish-Vietnamese conceptual artist Danh Vo. The sculptures are striking and engage with Christianity, long a motif in Vo’s work: the first is a bronze cast of a 17th-century figure of St. Catherine of Alexandria, who was martyred at 18 for spreading Christianity, and the second is a bronze cast of a 16th-century Spanish figure of Christ and Vo’s father’s hands. Nasturtium grows out of the sculptures, calling to mind both decaying empires and nature’s inevitable rebirth.

Those works are paired with a new 57-minute video work by Chinese artist Zhou Tao, The Axis of Big Data, which screened most recently at the Museum of Modern Art in February. That work, like the Vo sculptures, explore what happens when humanity and nature intersect. In the film, Zhou explores the verdant countryside outside a data center in China’s Guizhou province, the camera peripatetically sweeping over farmers, animals, tourists, and villagers, following the quiet rhythms of their lives, all while the hum of hard drives remains in the background. It’s never clear if the watchful eye is surveilling or observing, and Zhou mines the tension between the two.

Bi Rongrong at A Thousand Plateaus

For its Kabinett presentation, Chengdu-based gallery A Thousand Plateaus Art Space brought the striking new installation work A Quatrefoil Patterned Door · Reflection (2024) by Shanghai-based artist Bi Rongrong.

Trained as a traditional Chinese landscape painter, Bi scours cityscapes for ornamental patterns and architectural motifs, which she then applies to textile works, paintings, video animations, and immersive installations, in the process rendering them as abstract forms. Subtly, Bi explores the porousness of boundaries and how cultures bleed into one another.

For the Kabinett installation, Bi paired Austrian quatrefoil with traditional Chinese patterns in a variety of mediums, the most compelling of which is a three-tiered structure overlaying laser-cut stainless steel, an aluminum sheet, and suspended fabric.

“Bi combines these patterns to see the transformation between different countries and cultures—the West and the East—and how these two merge,” Yiling Wu, the gallery’s regional director, said. “The two patterns are the center of this project; her interpretations and expressions for these intercultural patterns grow together and become something new.”

Keiji Usami at Rin Art Association

Unique to Art Basel Hong Kong is the Insights sector, in which galleries present curated projects dedicated to Asian artists from 1900 to the present. Many of the presentations feel like tiny museum exhibitions, none more so than that of Japan’s Rin Art Association, which has brought an abridged version of “Big Flood,” its 2023 exhibition of work by rediscovered postwar Japanese painter Keiji Usami.

Usami, who died in 2012, was a highly regarded artist in Japan in the 1970s, for works that obliquely drew from images of protests and riots, turning human forms of running, crouching, throwing stones, and writhing into abstractions. Usami eventually recieved a major retrospective in Tokyo in 1993, before receding from public awareness to the point where the University of Tokyo threw away a major painting of his in 2017, believing it to be worthless. However, over the last five years, Usami has seen a posthumous resurgence.

For the presentation at Art Basel, Rin presents many of Usami’s final paintings, made amid a terminal cancer diagnosis and in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and and subsequent Fukushima nuclear disaster. Here, using Leonardo da Vinci’s A Deluge as a starting point, Usami depicts human forms that spiral and dissolve into more abstract shapes. The paintings are monumental—Rin will exhibit a different one each day of the fair, taking up most of the booth—and reward close attention.

Alicja Kwade at Pace

Fresh off joining Pace last October, Alicja Kwade is being feted in Hong Kong with an entire booth dedicated to new works by the Berlin-based sculptor. Solo presentations are always distinctive in the fair setting, an effect that is pronounced at a mega-gallery, whose over-sized booths are usually eclectic amalgams of their top artists. Here, the focus on a single artist allows the gallery to create space for contemplation.

Two series make up the presentation. In the center are around a dozen sculptures consisting of seemingly plastic patio chairs—they are actually cast bronze and painted white—with massive Azul Macaubas quartzite orbs in the center of each. All titled Mono Monde (2024), in each sculpture the planet-like orb sits impossibly in a different orientation: atop the chair, halfway through, or suspended just above the ground. The works seem quite humorous, even as they gesture at consumerist trash and a world falling apart.

The other works in the booth are all different arrangements of watch-hands embedded into cardboard, each depicting some length of time. The works are elegant and intricate in a minimalist mode, while pointing to the arbitrary nature of time-keeping: in most of the works, the time measuring is disrupted by large pockets of lost days or hours.

Fuyuhiko Takata at Waitingroom

Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964) has long been a jumping off point for Japanese video artist Fuyuhiko Takata, known for his semi-narrative, often gender-bending videos that he writes, directs, and stars in. In 2022, he released The Butterfly Dream, a short video work that recalls the Chinese tale “The Butterfly Dream” and referenced Ono’s piece in disorienting fashion.

That work is re-presented by Tokyo’s Waitingroom, alongside a newer work that once again references Ono. Titled Cut Suits, Takata’s new work inverts the gender and the danger at the heart of Cut Piece. In it, groups of young men gleefully cut away each other’s business suits until they are near-naked against a pink backdrop. In the installation, the cut suits are piled up in a mound in front of a rectangular LED screen, which towers like a tombstone over the sheared away masculinity. But lurking beneath the ecstasy of the men in the video lies Ono’s original, with all its uncomfortable implications about gender and agency.

Anomaly

If a gallery can make me laugh at the fair, they’re probably doing something right. After all, art doesn’t always have to be deathly serious. Tokyo’s Anomaly gallery had me laughing multiple times as I looked at the wry works of Tatzu Nishi, who is known for transforming historical monuments by constructing site-specific installations around them. In one of the works on view, The Life’s Little Worries of General Mellinet (2015), a stack of objects teeter absurdly atop Mellinet’s head. In another, Streetlight Floor Lamp, Nishi has fabricated a streetlight identical to those in Tokyo and transformed it into household object.

Other works in the booth deal with physicality. There is a large painting by Ushio, the boxer painter made famous in the 2013 documentary Cutie and the Boxer, and a series of works by multidisciplinary artist Kohei Kobayashi that straddle the line between sculpture and painting. In them, gloves are fixed to canvases; paint squeezes out from beneath them, what was painted behind known only to Kobayashi.

Tan Jing at Mangrove

The Shenzhen-based gallery Mangrove offers a full-sensory experience for those that stop by their Discoveries booth. Inside is a restaging of “Nook of a Hazy Dream,” a series of interconnected works by Guangdong-based artist Tan Jing. The series was last shown at Rockbund Art Museum, in slightly modified form, in December, and, stepping in, its clear why they chose to bring it back.

The series is based around Lap Hung, a fictionalized version of Tan’s grandfather, who migrated to China in the 1950s from Bangkok and was then unable to return to his home country for decades due to the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. A non-linear narrative featuring dialogues between Tan and Lap are interspersed with footage of the places from her grandfather’s childhood in Thailand projected onto glass plates embossed with water droplets and Begonia-patterns.

In the center of the space is Floor Tiles and Flowers (2023), consisting fields of broken floor tiles that Tan fabricated to include Southeast Asian spices as well as hanging folded fabric flowers that have been mixed with Thai talcum powder. The scents call back to the artist’s childhood with her grandfather and bring the viewer deep into Tan’s personal memories. In the RAM version in December, the tiles covered the entire floor of the installation; as viewers walked across it, the tiles broke down over time.