Cover ‘Good Society’ (2024) by Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings (Image: courtesy of Resilient Echoes and Para Site)
‘Good Society’ (2024) by Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings (Image: courtesy of Resilient Echoes and Para Site)
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Para Site’s curators are putting together the selections for the film sector at this year’s Art Basel to bridge the gap between canvas and screen, and demonstrate the significance of film in the context of fine art
Art Basel will see the halls of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre filled with paintings, sculptures and installations from March 28 to 30, showcasing works from 242 local and international galleries. But the city’s biggest annual art fair isn’t only about still visual art pieces—the event is divided into “sectors”, one of which focuses on film and will showcase feature films, shorts, videos and moving images created by 30 artists from around the world.
The Film sector debuted in 2014, at the second edition of the local fair, when it featured 49 films by 41 artists. In past editions, the selection was curated by Beijing-born, Zurich-, Berlin- and Beijing-based multimedia artist Li Zhenhua, who has championed film and new technologies as an art medium since the late 1990s. This year, the number of film submissions by artists who want to be featured at Art Basel has gone up to almost 100.
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Above ‘Gyro’ (2018) by Sasaoka Yuriko (Image: courtesy of the artist and PHD Group)
‘Gyro’ (2018) by Sasaoka Yuriko (Image: courtesy of the artist and PHD Group)
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This year also sees local nonprofit art space Para Site taking over the curation role, after Li stepped down. The Para Site team consists of Billy Tang, the organisation’s executive director, and three curators: Celia Ho, Jessie Kwok and Yuanyu Li. With the title In Space, It’s Always Night as inspiration, they selected films from the submissions and divided them into categories by theme: ecological interdependence between humanity and nature; resilience amid physical, mental and societal constraints and oppression; human desires and memory tracing; and humankind’s increasingly hybrid co-existence with technology. These themes are also addressed in Lisbon-born director Isadora Neves Marques’s 2022 feature film Vampires in Space, the flagship film of the section, and which will be shown at a special screening.
Compared to previous years, the curatorial direction focuses more on “the interconnection of background, and it’s interesting to see how collaborating with composers or editors [for the films] pushes them beyond their usual way of making art.”
She adds that a lot of visual artists create small-scale, independent video art to avoid the high cost of big film productions, meaning their works focus on micro, personal perspectives. “It’s important to highlight how moving image as a language can add to the high artistic language of a Hong Kong artist, and how their personal perspectives are reflecting or adding to global concerns and ongoing dialogues about these issues.”
Above ‘Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Electropore’ (2021-2022) by Jen Liu (Image: courtesy of Blindspot Gallery and the artist)
‘Pink Slime Caesar Shift: Electropore’ (2021-2022) by Jen Liu (Image: courtesy of Blindspot Gallery and the artist)
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Tang continues: “For someone like Wang Tuo, who was just awarded the prestigious Sigg Prize, moving image is bread and butter. But more often now, we see a lot of artists doing many things that aren’t exclusive to one medium.” He names Hungarian painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy and Vietnamese installation artist Sung Tieu, both known for their experimentation with video art, as examples of artists who “express complexity with different means. With the moving image works that we present, you are immersed in how they want you to experience their worlds or see a certain world. It’s about providing that right context and environment.
“The visual art world in relation to film can be much more experimental in many ways and provoke new ways to do things,” he continues. “So [fine art and film] are complementary to one another, and I think Hong Kong has been quite an important hub in the region for this, [especially with] the influence of cinema on the city.”
He admits moving image can be a difficult medium to express in a commercial art fair context. But this is exactly part of the rationale behind the collaboration between Para Site and Art Basel, and why they have created a bespoke auditorium to screen the films at the fair.
Above ‘Fossilis’ (2023) by Riar Rizaldi (Image: courtesy of the artist)
‘Fossilis’ (2023) by Riar Rizaldi (Image: courtesy of the artist)
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“It has been a longstanding dialogue from both sides,” he says—Para Site, which is one of the oldest, independent art spaces in Hong Kong, shares Art Basel’s vision of supporting and spotlighting local and international artists though exhibitions and arts programmes that bring artists across disciplines together. In the past, Para Site has had a booth at Art Basel that gave visibility to emerging local artists. So it only made sense for Para Site to take over what Li had been doing for a decade.
The Para Site team is also looking at expanding the film dialogue outside the fair by working with Nowness, a video channel that premieres short films and video work about arts, fashion and culture; and Videotage, a media art institution co-founded by famed local artist-curator Ellen Pau that focuses on Hong Kong’s digital media art culture.
Above ‘Corpo Fechado—The Devil's Work’ (2018) by Carlos Motta (Image: courtesy of the artist)
‘Corpo Fechado—The Devil's Work’ (2018) by Carlos Motta (Image: courtesy of the artist)
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Tang says, “Our motivation is to make a kind of city-wide festival with extensions that happen outside of the fair context.
“Moving image is a crucial part of bridging the different worlds, and this is an opportunity for us to go deeper into this relationship and explore the possibilities of infrastructure: how to continue to support people that work in this medium under conditions that reflect the experiences they want to give to audiences.”
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
