Hong Kong Art Fair ’12

Kimsooja

Asian art mar­ket is boom­ing and Hong Kong Art Fair made it clear once more. One of the biggest art events in Asia, bring­ing together 266 gal­ler­ies from 38 coun­tries around the world had some­thing for everyone.

Those, look­ing for fam­ous names could find works of XX cen­tury artists such as Matisse, Morandi, Giacometti, Baselitz, Bacon or Warhol as well as the most fam­ous con­tem­por­ary artists as Luc Tuymans, Bill Viola, Marlene Dumas, Anish Kapoor, Damien Hirst or Richard Long, and that’s just to name a few. Others, inter­ested in lesser known estab­lished artists could find their way through smal­ler galleries.

Yayoi Kusama

Art HK was an inter­na­tional art fair with no doubts, hous­ing most fam­ous gal­ler­ies from dif­fer­ent con­tin­ents. However, Asian art was still the most dom­in­ant which provided vis­it­ors with a great chance to get to know it bet­ter. That does not hap­pen much in Western art fairs or exhibitions.

Painting, draw­ing and pho­to­graphy was the most pop­u­lar medi­ums as usual, but there was a lot of large scale sculp­tures, mixed media install­a­tions and video art. However, those did not have much luck in sales and would have looked much bet­ter without a num­ber of other unre­lated works around.

Shintaro Miyake

Sotheby’s, White Cube and Gagosian are already in Hong Kong. Other influ­en­tial Western gal­ler­ies are open­ing their branches and the city is becom­ing one of the most import­ant art hubs in the world. One could see it very clearly in Art HK which was full of rich and fam­ous sign­ing con­tracts for art­works worth mil­lions of dol­lars. Major sales, how­ever, was made to Asian col­lect­ors which indic­ates a huge growth of eco­nomic wealth in the area. Moreover, due to the suc­cess and increas­ing import­ance of the event, next year Art HK will be replaced by the first Hong Kong edi­tion of Art Basel. Yes, it’s def­in­itely time for Asia.

Yoshimoto Nara

Tom Wesselmann

Gideon Rubin

Barry X Ball

Kader Attia

Piotr Ukslanski

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu

Damien Hirst

Ai Weiwei

Mao Yan

Wang Sishun

Li Tianbing

Kang — Hoon

Lee Seahyun

Susan Collis

Qin Chong

Heman Chong

Erwin Wurm

Ghada Amer

Not Vital

Evan Penny

Shanzhia Sikander

Liu Xiaodong

J. Ariadhityia Pramuhendra

Masaya Chiba

U — Ram Choe

Rafael Lozano — Hemmer

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan

Yan Pei — Ming

Luc Tuymans

Zhao Gang

Remy Markowitsch

Go Watanabe

Yan Heng

Ali Kazim

Mathew Sawyer

Li Wei

Kim Juree

Christof Mascher

Misaki Kawai

David Horvitz

Barnaby Hosking

Farhan Siki

Hu Liu

About author:

Aistė Stancikaitė
Aiste Stancikaite works with images and text to tell stories about places and people. She is interested in reality and how it transforms into multiple narratives when it's pictured. Aiste has finished B.A. degree in Fine Arts (Painting) and since then is travelling, making photo essays, writing articles and doing other creative projects. At the mom... Read further >