Hong Kong’s art market has been in a protracted downturn since 2021, but international gallerists continue to rely on the region as a gateway to business in mainland China and the wider Asian market — and have long memories.
“The speculative bubble burst, post Covid, but if you look back to when Art Basel first started in Hong Kong [in 2013], there was no interest in western art, it was a wasteland,” says the leading gallerist David Zwirner. Now, as the fair is set to open its 2026 edition, he finds, “Hong Kong is a bona fide city for visual arts, still with an openness to the rest of the region.” He cites the number of commercial galleries who have opened there since — including his own in 2018 — as well as “a world class museum in M+ and a new wave of a very young, very informed, optimistic collectors.”
Untitled (1964) by Joan Mitchell, on display at the David Zwirner booth at Art Basel Hong Kong © Estate of Joan Mitchell. Courtesy David Zwirner
Nonetheless, he and other big-name gallerists are playing it safe for this year’s fair, leaning on their secondary market programme of older or deceased artists to meet the market’s more careful mood. Zwirner’s blue-chip fare includes works by the abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell, the leading painter Gerhard Richter and Yayoi Kusama, “a mainstay in Hong Kong”, he says.
