BaselAttempting to chase every art event during Art Basel Hong Kong is an impossible task. In many ways, this impossibility functions as a metaphor for Hong Kong itself: no fragment can stand in for the whole of this “hyperobject,” nor can one split oneself into countless parts to assemble a totalizing impression of the city. It is precisely this unknowability that reminds visitors not to treat their art pilgrimage as mere labour, but rather to attune themselves to the diffuse creativity embedded within Hong Kong’s urban fabric—before, during, and beyond the fair—and to grasp the emotional substratum sustaining its contemporary art ecology.

To regard Hong Kong solely as a global city risks flattening its specificity as a “place.” In the context of ongoing deglobalization, however, Hong Kong has been compelled—perhaps unexpectedly—to reconsider its own locality. However reluctant or contingent this process may be, artists and practitioners in the city respond in ways that are distinctly “Hong Kong”: ironic, melancholic, cautious, and quietly insistent. What follows gathers observations from a series of exhibitions and events that engage with this sense of the local.

Ghosts and Gods: A Glimpse of Local Modernity

Outside the Central district orbiting the fair, Wong Chuk Hang has emerged as one of the liveliest art hubs this season. According to the digital map produced by the Hong Kong Art Gallery Association, clusters of spaces across Kowloon, Central, and particularly the Southern District point to their structural importance within Hong Kong’s art ecology.

Among them, the Octone Foundation, founded in 2022 and housed on the 33rd floor of a converted industrial building, presents the exhibition GHOSTLY, GODLY / Mortal World, curated by Wan Fung. Featuring works by Simon Liu, Cici Wu, Tang Kwok-hin, Ha Bik-chuen, and the collective On Kino, the exhibition approaches Hong Kong’s “local modernity” through the lens of hauntology. It examines how vernacular beliefs and mythologies permeate everyday life, generating layered forms of locality.

Simon Liu’s Splits in Two constructs a ritualistic field through moving image and light, merging personal memory with local history. Tang Kwok-hin’s Habitus operates as a hybrid between exhibition and studio, where fragments accumulated over two decades of practice form a living environment continuously activated during the exhibition. His video work Good Fortune documents a decennial Taoist jiao ritual in Kam Tin, foregrounding a religious tradition that has become inseparable from contemporary Hong Kong life.

Particularly notable is Ha Bik-chuen, both an artist and a key figure in archiving Hong Kong’s exhibition history. Alongside previously unseen works, archival materials from around 1997 situate artistic production within a complex historical threshold. Meanwhile, Cici Wu employs lanterns, ink, and paper craft to reflect on “the disappearance of book history and its spectral return.” On Kino revisits pulp ghost-story magazines circulating in Hong Kong during the 1980s and 1990s, reframing them as a lens through which to understand the city’s cultural psyche.

Within Self-Organized Community Networks

A different allegory of locality unfolds at Current Plans, an independent space founded in 2020 that supports interdisciplinary practices and knowledge exchange. Beyond exhibitions, it hosts dance parties, cooking sessions, experimental performances, and residencies, grounded in what it describes as a “playful and interactive spirit.”

On March 27, Current Plans co-organized a discussion with ArtReview China titled Autonomous Futures: Gathering of Self-Organized Art Networks. Moderated by co-founder Eunice Tsang, the event brought together practitioners to reflect on sustaining independent initiatives under pressure.

What began as an outdoor conversation was abruptly interrupted by rain, forcing participants indoors before they eventually returned outside—umbrellas in hand—to continue. This moment echoed artist Yim Sui Fong’s reflections on the collective Tiantai School, co-founded in 2016 with artist Law Yuk-mui and scholar Frank Vigneron. Emphasizing the importance of collectivity, Yim suggested that “being together” outweighs any fixed outcome. The discussion itself became a temporary pedagogical space, mirroring the ethos it described.

Ve(ry) Nice: Making Art in a Pizza Shop

Running concurrently at Current Plans, the exhibition IMAGINE A DEAD BLUE WHALE INSIDE THE POCKET OF A GIANT, curated by Giulia Pollicita and Eunice Tsang, brings together nine artists from Italy and Hong Kong to explore dialogues across language, history, and systems.

Across the harbour in Tsim Sha Tsui, another project similarly bridges Italy and Hong Kong—this time in a far less conventional venue. Ve(ry)nice, staged in an Italian-owned pizzeria, unfolds with humour tinged by quiet melancholy. Its casual setting disrupts the subdued atmosphere that often pervades the city during the fair season.

Operating as a pop-up, Ve(ry)nice inserts contemporary art into everyday life while coinciding with the forthcoming Venice Biennale. Its curatorial strategy seeks to “demystify” dominant narratives, proposing instead a mode of engagement that is spontaneous, light, and agile.

In Lau Wai Lee’s Bella, Ciao Bella (2026), inspired by Chiang Chi-kwong’s Cantonese rendition of Santa Lucia, audiences are invited to learn Bella Ciao—the Italian protest song revived through the series La Casa de Papel. Elsewhere, Tang Ka-yan’s Notes on the Wor(l)d—On the Go (2026) proposes walking in Venice as a method for rethinking Hong Kong, while Ng Ka Yu’s nowatleast (2015/2026) meditates on the ubiquitous live seafood tanks that define the city’s visual culture.

Writing Hong Kong as a “Strange Fairy Tale”

On the western edge of Hong Kong Island, Hart Haus continues its support of emerging and established artists through studio programmes and exhibitions. Currently on view are solo presentations by Lee Yuk Ki and Tsui Ho Lam.

In Tsui’s Inverted Eyelashes, soap-based sculptures imprint and distort images associated with the male gaze, reframing “failure” as a queer strategy. Lee Yuk Ki’s Double Blue: Hong Kong’s Alternative Fairy Tale (Chapter One), meanwhile, centres on topophilia—the affective bond between people and place. Through experimental animation, she transforms the city into a speculative “fairy tale,” where beauty is shadowed by unease.

For Lee, locality is shaped through movement, memory, and perception. Her work assembles fragments of urban experience into narratives that probe identity, culture, and belonging. In this sense, fairy tales, ghost stories, and myths become mirrors of reality—analogous to the fleeting, theatrical temporality produced by the dense constellation of events surrounding Art Basel Hong Kong.

Ultimately, these narratives articulate a form of love for the city. And perhaps, once momentarily released from the pressures of the real, we may find ourselves falling—again—between ghosts and reality, between self and other, into the elusive condition that is Hong Kong.

Girl’s Shit: Trichiasis, Hou Lam Tsui, 2026