Hong Kong shows off its artsy side as overseas connoisseurs return for Art Basel, M+

Name: What to look out for at first Art Basel in Hong Kong since city lifted Covid restrictions
Uploaded: 2023-03-29T06:00:27.000Z
Duration: 3 min 9 s
Description: What to look out for at first Art Basel in Hong Kong since city lifted Covid restrictions

Global Impact is a weekly curated newsletter featuring a news topic originating in China with a significant macro impact for our newsreaders around the world

In this edition, we look back at what is dubbed ‘Hong Kong Art Week’, which also saw M+ – the city’s museum of visual culture – receiving overseas visitors for the first time

Reading Time:9 minutes

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Enid Tsui

Published: 2:00pm, 29 Mar 2023Updated: 2:33pm, 29 Mar 2023

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With a blow-up over a giant, inflatable King Tut, this year’s Hong Kong art week opened with a bang. But the discovery on March 17 that a Guangzhou manufacturer was selling replicas of Awol Erizku’s giant Art Basel Hong Kong installation quickly became a sideshow as everyone focused on the main action and whether they augured well for the city’s recovery.

With Hong Kong’s Covid-19 rules finally a thing of the past, the city’s flagship contemporary art fairs and the many galleries around town were more than ready to welcome back international and mainland visitors after three years in isolation.

Adding to a sense of nervous anticipation was the international opening of M+. In the years when the museum in West Kowloon was still being built, it was promoted heavily as the game-changer for the city’s art ecosystem, but its opening in 2021 was a low-key, all-local affair. Finally, on March 20, directors of the world’s biggest museums and other key opinion leaders of the art world were given their first tour.

Previously secure as the region’s most important art market, Hong Kong’s confidence has been badly knocked as other cities reopened their borders much earlier and new art fairs were announced for Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul, where the Centre Pompidou will open a new branch in 2025, it was announced this week.

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What to look out for at first Art Basel in Hong Kong since city lifted Covid restrictions

And among the many people who have left Hong Kong after the introduction of the National Security Law in 2020 were artists and other creative talents. The law brought in a new system of political censorship previously absent in a city that could rightly boast of having more freedom of expression than most other places in the region.

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