Art Basel Conversations | What can art fairs do for curating?
Kongkee, Ari Bayuaji and Geraldine Javier in conversation, moderated by Mami Kataoka
Date: 27 March 2026 (Friday), 12:30-13:15
Venue: Conversations Auditorium, Room N101B, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, 1 Harbour Road, Wan Chai, Hong Kong
Language: English
Curating and commerce are often framed as opposing forces – the latter assumed to dilute the conditions required for rigorous exhibition-making. Yet galleries and art fairs can also function as important sites of artistic experimentation. Art Basel Hong Kong’s Encounters sector is a case in point. Spearheaded in 2026 by Mami Kataoka, the director of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, and conceived by a collective of curators (Isabella Tam, Alia Swastika, and Hirokazu Tokuyama), Encounters unfolds across the fair’s two floors as a monumental response to the ‘five elements’, a cosmological framework widely found across Asia. In this panel, Kataoka and artists exhibiting in this year’s edition discussed the challenges and opportunities of exhibition-making in non-institutional spaces – and the productive friction it can generate.
With PRICE / VALUE / TAOTIE, Kongkee stages the collision of art, money, and desire. Extending the mythic continuum of Dragon’s Delusion, he reanimates Taotie in neon—greed refracted through Hong Kong’s capitalist skyline—by way of two neon works: PRICE OR VALUE and TAOTIE.
This work was originally commissioned by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in 2022.
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Kongkee (Kong Khong-chang), born in Malaysia in 1977 and raised in Hong Kong, is a visual artist and animation director. In 2022, his major solo exhibition “Kongkee: Warring States Cyberpunk” premiered at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and toured to Wrightwood 659 in Chicago and Tai Kwun in Hong Kong.
Performance documentation by Ray Leung and Thomson Ho.
Performance film --
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1177622946/20d6c7071c
