Galleries
5 Must-See Shows in Hong Kong During Art Basel
The editors of The Asia Pivot have selected key solo exhibitions for between-fair viewing.
The editors of The Asia Pivot have selected key solo exhibitions for between-fair viewing.
Cathy Fan & Vivienne Chow ShareShare This Article
Hong Kong Art Week is back, with Art Basel running alongside a range of satellite fairs, art auctions, museum exhibitions, and high-profile gallery shows. Below, five key solo exhibitions at galleries throughout the city that spotlight Hong Kong artists, or artists of Asian heritage, selected by the editors of Artnet Pro’s The Asia Pivot newsletter.
In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic novella, Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), a golden-haired boy returns to his home planet, Asteroid B-612, after a spiritual quest through the stars, discovering the meaning of love, belonging, and what truly matters in life. In “Asteroid J-734,” Hong Kong artist Jaffa Lam (b. 1973) presents her discoveries from a contemplative journey away from home, and as a result of her grief from a personal loss, through a constellation of recent works, including some she developed during a year-long residency in Longquan, China, in 2024.
Known for large-scale, mixed-media sculptures and installations, the Fujian-born, Hong Kong-bred Lam is one of the leading women artists of her generation. Her success, however, did not come easy. At one point, she toyed the idea of burning all the art she had made over two decades, thinking that no one wanted to buy it. Fate intervened. Axel Vervoordt began working with her, and she had her first show with the gallery in 2022. Highlights this time include her “Window” series, comprised of works made with found umbrella fabrics, via her long-term collaboration with the Hong Kong Women’s Worker Association, as well as Endless Column (2025–26), which unite materials found in Longquan and Hong Kong. The artist is also in the current Shanghai Biennale, which ends March 31. —Vivienne Chow
Born in Hong Kong in 1997, the year when Britain handed the city’s sovereignty over to China, Chan King Long, Ken is among a generation of emerging homegrown artists who are finding a foothold in the new Hong Kong. Chan has gradually cultivated a following for his mysterious and melancholic paintings, which are layered with meaning. Some of them appear to be just snapshots of random moments, but they serve as mirrors of the world we inhabit. “The world is changing so fast, like a barrelling vehicle that is saturated with tensions and conflicts on a day-to-day basis,” the artist has said. He believes his job as a painter is to “respond” to changes on the canvas, “like smoothing over cracks and tending wounds.”
In “What Hums in the Rain,” his third gallery solo exhibition with Contemporary by Angela Li, Chan presents a new body of work that invites viewers to take a break from the noises of the outside world and meditate with an inward gaze. This introspection may bring much-needed hope to this chaotic world. —V.C.
Lap-See Lam’s Asian gallery solo debut, “Bamboo Palace, Revisited,” feels somewhat like a homecoming. Born in Sweden to a Hong Kong–immigrant family, the artist has developed an oeuvre that draws inspirations from the myths and cultural symbols originated from her family’s hometown. But these are not mere aesthetic representations. Lam’s diasporic upbringing, revolving around a Chinese restaurant her family owned in Stockholm, has given her the ability to transform these symbols into powerful vehicles that examine the universal emotional burden and longing of being in a home away from home, as well as “generation loss” and mutations of memories and knowledge caused by migration.
The exhibition’s anchor piece is Floating Sea Palace, a moving image work developed from The Altersea Opera, which was presented in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. It centers on Lo Ting, a mythical hybrid human-fish being that has long been regarded as a symbol of Hong Kong’s cultural identity. In addition to symbolically bringing this Lo Ting home, by showing the work in Hong Kong, Lam presents her new take on the resilient plant of bamboo, using fragility of glass, following her presentation of elaborate bamboo scaffolding—a centuries-old craft seen as an emblem of Hong Kong—in Venice.
Developed from her residency at the International Research Center for Glass and Visual Arts in Marseille, these new hand-blown sculptures include a translucent glass raft that is layered with the emotional complexity experienced by migrants, who must put on a tenacious exterior as they drift across the world. Also on view are her neon installations. Lam is also featured in the group exhibition “Stay Connected: Supplying the Globe” at Tai Kwun Contemporary through May 31. —V.C.
This exhibition is a tribute to the legacy the artist Dinh Q. Lê (1968–2024), a key figure in shaping how the Vietnam War has been understood through art. Born in southern Vietnam in 1965, he fled the country as a child and grew up in the United States. This experience of displacement continued to inform his work. Returning to Ho Chi Minh City in the 1990s, he began to look closely at how history is constructed—through images and through storytelling, with a focus on what is left out. Lê is best known for his photo-weaving technique, in which he cut and interlaced photographic fragments into dense, textile-like surfaces. Drawing on sources from personal archives to Hollywood films, these works collapse different image worlds into one. The result is often disorienting: It becomes hard to separate fact from fiction, or personal memory from collective narrative. Beyond his own practice, Lê also played an important role in shaping Vietnam’s contemporary art scene, co-founding Sàn Art as a space for younger artists and exchange. —Cathy Fan
Zheng Zhou (b. 1969) paints with a strong sense of instinct, translating his observations of the world onto canvas in a direct and often spontaneous way. His brushstrokes, at once furtive and decisive, carry a certain urgency. Drawing on the I Ching (Book of Changes), Zheng approaches painting as a reflection on transformation and duality, echoing the layered, often contradictory nature of the world through his use of color and form.
This is Zheng’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, and it brings together a new body of recent paintings. Trained at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou in the 1990s, Zheng has long moved between figuration and abstraction. His earlier works often featured blurred, uncanny figures embedded in saturated, dreamlike environments. In this latest series, however, those figures largely dissolve. In their place, irregular blocks of color spread across the canvas, forming loose, shifting compositions. What emerges is a more open engagement with painting, less about figuration and more about rhythm. —C.F.