Observer’s Must-See Exhibitions During Art Basel Hong Kong

Louise Bourgeois, “Soft Landscape”

Hauser & Wirth

March 25 – June 21, 2025

Opening Reception: 5-7 p.m., Monday, March 24

Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, the show is the second show of the artist’s works at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong and coincides with the dynamic dialectic and interchange between landscape and the human body that Bourgeois’s translated with her intimately personal yet universal works. In visceral conversations with the essence of human existence, she explored internal, emotional landscapes rather than physical ones: recurring elements such as holes, nests, cavities, breasts and spirals in Bourgeois’s poetic code are used as symbolic biomorphic metaphors that link the human body with other natural organisms and circles. Featuring pieces from the 1960s up to her death in 2010, the show coincides with a major touring survey exhibition organized by the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, which is now on view at the Fubon Art Museum in Taipei through June 30, 2025.

“Picasso for Asia — A Conversation”

M+ Museum

March 15 – July 13, 2025

The city’s first major survey dedicated to the celebrated artist in decades, this show pairs sixty seminal works by the Spanish master with around 130 works by thirty Asian and Asian-diasporic artists from the M+ Collection and select loans, creating an unprecedented intercultural dialogue that reveals a set of resonances, echoes and parallels between Western Modernism and the modern and contemporary art of the East. The curated presentation also brings to Asia, in many instances for the first time, a selection of significant masterpieces by Picasso on loan from the Musée National Picasso-Paris, which holds the largest collection of works by Picasso in the world. The exhibition marks a unique opportunity to experience Picasso’s wide reaching influence across continents and time.

Lynne Drexler, “The Seventies”

White Cube

March 26 – May 7, 2025

For the Hong Kong debut of the vibrant painting of Ab-Ex American artist Lynne Drexler, White Cube is presenting her output from the 1970s, when the artist moved even further toward a non-representational abstraction. This resulted in a more lyrical and nuanced interplay of gradients and contrasts. Balancing more saturated tones with darker ones, these works translated a period of increasingly obfuscated sensation for Drexler when she was recovering from a mental breakdown and experienced psychosomatic color blindness. During that time, she found solace and inspiration in music. “She has four and a half decades of production, and the world only knows the ‘60s because that’s what the first shows were built on, and that’s what people have seen so far at auction,” art dealer Sukanya Rajaratnam told Observer in a recent interview. Rajaratnam, who was instrumental in the rediscovery of Drexler’s art, added that “people don’t know the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. We want to make sure those decades are covered.”

Alicja Kwade, “Pretopia”

Tai Kwun Contemporary

January 10 – April 6, 2025

For her first institutional solo exhibition in Hong Kong, Polish-born artist Alicja Kwade has staged a precarious interplay of conflicting forces that find temporary fleeting balances and metaphorically translate this in-between state of ideals and social structures in a fleeting moment when progress might lead to utopia or slip backward into chaos. Featuring nine works from different eras of the artist’s career along with a series of site-specific installations conceived for Tai Kwun Contemporary’s unique architectural structure, the artist tests possible balances and coexistence of forces in gravitationally improbable organic and inorganic structures. Playing with the logic of physics and the alchemical nature of matter, Kwade questions the deepest structure of reality, exploring scientific and philosophical concepts around perception, time and the limits of materiality.

Emma Webster, “Vapors”

Perrotin

March 25 – May 17, 2025.

Pushing the limits of figuration and abstraction in nature, Webster examines today’s perception of the landscape between sensorial reality and virtual elaboration. Most of the paintings by the British-American artist originate as digital studies of simulated environments—something that could be seen already as an extreme translation of the human desire to appropriate, objectify and instrumentalize nature. Translating these images into densely layered paintings with dramatic use of light and shadows, Webster brings them back to the sensorial realm to address the environmental crisis caused by our unbalanced relationship with nature. The works she presents in Hong Kong have been inspired by the desolate and arid landscapes of Pacific Palisades, which experienced a record-breaking dry season last year. This extreme weather ultimately contributed to the wildfires in Los Angeles that devastated the fragile ecosystem and destroyed her family’s home. Suspended in a hazy and ambiguous atmosphere, her bleak landscapes evoke the unsettling calm that follows a disaster. As a dystopic version of the classic idyllium, these ominous paintings anticipate the potential future for many natural landscapes if we do not change our relationship with the natural world.

Dominique Fung, “Beneath the Golden Canopy”

MASSIMODECARLO

March 24 – May 16, 2025

In her debut show in Hong Kong with the gallery, the Brooklyn-based artist continues her exploration of an imaginary world channeled through Hong Kong and Shanghai ancestry in a unique blend of traditional symbolism, historical references and magical atmospheres that compensate for longing and loss with a bewildering imagination. This body of work has been inspired by the controversial story and memory of Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled the empire from 1861 until her death in 1908. In the West, she was portrayed as ruthless and manipulative, while her legacy remains contested in China. Freely blending a dreamlike atmosphere of history and fantasy, fact and fiction, Fung’s paintings stage a diverse ensemble of concubines, empresses and emperors in articulated dynamic compositions that defy all the rules of perspective while linking directly to the traditional Chinese scroll format. For Fung, this historical figure becomes a pretext to explore the intersection between power, femininity and seduction, unearthing how women’s desires and existence have been overlooked, exoticized or confined to the margins of history.

“Aftershock”

PODIUM Gallery

March 22 – May 24, 2025

For the anniversary of its founding, PODIUM, a young and thriving experimental gallery in the Wong Chuk Hang neighborhood, is presenting a visionary yet dystopic show exploring the seismic reverberations of trauma and the transformative potential that lies in its wake.
Suspended in a transitional limbo between decay and renewal, or transformation and degradation, the works in the show fluctuate in a plasmatic state, as convulsed flesh and matter, subject to a continuous metamorphosis that will bring them to their next organic and alchemical status. Embracing this potential fluidity of matter, each artist in the show visualizes this boundless interplay between embodiment and disembodiment ruled by perpetual cycles of outside forces. The show features artists from the region as well as international talent, including Ivana Bašić, Sihan Guo, Ittah Yoda, Yein Lee and Diane Severin Nguyen—a testament to the gallery’s global perspective on rising stars who are considering pressing issues and questions shared by an entire generation.

Wing Po So, “Take Turns”

Para Site

March 15 – May 25, 2025

Drawing from the ancient tradition of Chinese medicine, Hong Kong artist Wing Po So explores shifting dynamics in nature, the body, materiality and their fluid interconnectedness. At the heart of this show are salvaged drawers from now-defunct traditional Chinese pharmacies in Hong Kong: their worn surfaces bear witness to cycles of preservation, decay and regeneration, becoming powerful symbolic and alchemical sites for the artist to test the fluid essence of matter in continual motion. Investigating the cyclical interplay between birth, healing, renewal and decay, the artist unveils the interconnectedness of all beings as part of a system of interdependent energies and forces. Taking over Para Site’s tenth floor, an immersive installation integrates Chinese herbs, rocks, kinetic sculptures, 3D-printed objects, sonic rhythms and more, creating an ecosystem where the boundaries between the organic and inorganic, the animate and inanimate, dissolve.