These portraits surround the centrepiece of the booth, a seven-panel painting, Beloved (2024), in which traditional floral garlands that have significant cultural implications—they mark ceremonious occasions such as weddings and funerals—spell out the work’s title. The word “beloved” is commonly used in Sufi songs and poetry; Khatri uses this poetic connection to highlight the association between beauty and the sacred. 

Japanese gallery Waitingroom presents solo booth exhibition Cut Pieces, featuring video works by Tokyo-based artist Fuyuhiko Takata. The aesthetics and narratives of his cinematic works evoke myths, fairytales and fantasy worlds, all the while recalling and referencing significant art historical figures, ranging from Yoko Ono to Marcel Duchamp. He transforms his apartment into intricate homemade sets, and directs, narrates and even acts in the films himself. Through his work, he strives to playfully question established notions of gender, identity, power, nation and sexuality in both contemporary Japanese society and the world at large. 

Two of the artist’s most recent works, The Butterfly Dream (2022) and Cut Suits (2023), will be shown at the booth: the former was inspired by The Dream of a Butterfly, the famed episode in Chinese classic text Zhuangzi, in which the protagonist dreams he is a butterfly, leading him to question his usual reality. In his version, Takata creates a scene in which a mythical hybrid butterfly-chimera creature snips away at a sleeping young man’s clothing, questioning the rigid, conventional idea of masculinity.

Cut Suits is its sequel: further probing the concept of toxic masculinity, it features six businessmen snipping away at each other’s suits, ironically recalling Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), an iconic performance and feminist work of art. A butterfly-scissors sculpture that features in the first film will also be on view at the booth.

Taiwanese-American artist Antonia Kuo is best known for her photochemical paintings, employing processes unique to her practice in which she layers photochemistry—chemical reactions caused by light—and dyes on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper. Her work merges painting and photography to yield an aesthetic influenced in part by her Taiwanese mother’s Chinese ink painting practice.

At the fair, Chapter NY will showcase Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, a multimedia presentation featuring a series of multi-panel wall works and two sculptures on artist-fabricated plinths. The multi-panel wall pieces represent a new hybrid body of work in which Kuo’s photochemical paintings merge with silver gelatin photographs, mounted sculptural reliefs and powder-coated aluminium panels to create multipart compositions that intrinsically document change and reveal transformation. Kuo’s sculptures mimic elements of machinery and serve as recordings of lost forms.

Mumbai-based gallery Tarq is set to showcase artist Sameer Kulavoor’s works at the fair this year, building upon Edifice Complex, the artist’s 2023 solo show at the gallery. Inspired by witnessing India’s rapid urban transformation since the 1990s, resulting from economic liberalisation and the internet boom, the artist explores his deep connection with cities and their multilayered identities, exploring the theme of hyper-development in megacities like Mumbai, including in this presentation—which will undoubtedly resonate with Hongkongers. 

The artist is known for his series of progressive drawings accompanied by videos which come together to form moving images that recall flipbooks. Through this combination, Kulavoor reveals the transient and temporal nature of contemporary urban structures and charts the evolution of architecture. 

Two large-scale works form the booth’s centrepiece. Timelapses (2022) consists of sequential drawings that reflect Kulavoor’s refined understanding of colour and materiality while providing a perspective on the aforementioned short-lived, transformative nature inherent to contemporary architecture. With That Escalated Fast (2023) and Burning Bridges (2023), Kulavoor draws parallels between the persisting architectural evolution and progress, and probes how most Asian cities are plagued by overpopulation and constant redevelopment. 

The presentation by Mongolian artist Jantsankhorol Erdenebayar, who goes by Jantsa, is one of the most anticipated presentations of the fair. The sculptor is set to present his body of work titled Middle Child at Flowers Gallery. Drawing from his heritage, Erdenebayar uses Mongolian folklore, proverbs, and his own ancestral ties and personal beliefs to create assemblage-like sculptures that hint at medieval relics, with their raw, rustic aesthetic. 

He uses found, often natural objects from the local landscape, such as goat horn and discarded wood—items that reference nomadic culture and highlight issues of mass consumption and the scarcity of resources facing an increasingly globalised Mongolian economy and society.

Fun fact: Erdenebayar hails from an artistic lineage: he represented Mongolia at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, while his mother, Munkhtsetseg Jalkhaajav (Mugi), followed suit in 2022. 

Fine Arts, Sydney, which is an Art Basel newcomer, is set to present a large new sculpture by Auckland-based Korean artist Yona Lee. Lee is known for the range of scales she works in: her sculptural installations occupy everything from tabletops to entire museum spaces. They are typically composed of unique combinations of quotidian objects such as lamps, tables and chairs. 

Although ambiguous in interpretation, Lee’s works share a domestic aesthetic consistency that references urban infrastructure and  public, commercial and domestic space, questioning the boundaries between public and private spheres. Her work for Art Basel Hong Kong, In Transit (2024), will function as both a sculpture and social space, and is composed of electric lights, a clock, a daybed, a mop, a sun umbrella, a bench, a table and chairs. 

London-based Taiwanese artist Steph Huang will be showcasing a solo presentation at Public Gallery’s booth, featuring a nostalgic installation consisting of glass-blown, wooden and metal sculptures with plenty of Hong Kong references that are sure to resonate locally. The installation sets the scene of a generic Asian restaurant-marketplace, and features works such as a set of wooden panel paintings, within which are found postcards from the 1970s depicting the now closed and capsized Jumbo Kingdom restaurant, and a freestanding metal basin filled with copper fortune cookies, inscribed with the text “The Fortune You Seek Is In Another Cookie”.

The body of work builds on the artist’s solo exhibitions at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2022) and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2022), focusing on spaces ranging from restaurants and marketplaces to gambling dens, and exploring the intersection of traditional and colonial legacies. Huang worked as a chef for a few years and has a particular interest in food culture and histories. In taking restaurants like Jumbo Kingdom as sites of inquiry, she examines how certain objects and symbols prevalent in the food industry carry visual and material narratives of nationalism and ideology. 

For Culture is Flux, his new body of work to be presented at Art Basel Hong Kong, Thai artist Nawin Nuthong takes the Cold War and nuclear arms race as a point of departure, exploring their impact on countries other than the superpowers involved. The collection spans a wide range of media including paintings, hand-pulled screen-print on paper and aluminium canvases, sculptures and video works. Consistent with his practice, the works pulls from pop cultural references such as video games, films and comics, as well as myths and legends. 

The title of the presentation was conceived while thinking about our current cultural climate: Nuthong probes the ethics of how history is recorded, and questions how commercialisation shapes our culture, specifically in regard to how tourist consumption has commodified authentic practices, rituals and artefacts. 

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