New Alternative Fairs Kick Off Hong Kong Art Week With Fresh Energy

The exhibition design by Hong Kong-based Beau Architects effectively abolishes traditional wall divisions between exhibitors more radically than any other fair so far. “As young gallerists, we did art fairs, and we wanted something else. We wanted something more. Instead of waiting for it, we’ve just gone out and tried to do it,” Molesworth said. (He and Cheung are the founders of PhD Art Group, one of the most dynamic and experimental galleries to emerge in the city since the pandemic.)

At PAVILLION, PhD Art Group is spotlighting an archetypically energetic composition by Korean artist Sangdon Kim, recently featured at the Sharjah Biennial, that extends his ongoing investigation into the latent fantasies embedded in everyday systems. The gallery is also exhibiting at Art Basel, where many exhibitors who took part in Supper Club are now also showing. While simultaneously managing both presentations and opening a major show at the gallery featuring an ambitious environmental installation by Zheng Mahler, the pace is demanding and at times exhausting, yet Molesworth argued it’s essential to maximize visibility during this key moment for the gallery’s artists.

As Hong Kong Art Week grows, PHD Group is far from the only emerging gallery—local or international—handling multiple presentations, and these alternative formats have made participation significantly more flexible and manageable. Paris-based Sultana, for instance, is presenting a three-person dialogue at PAVILLION between three French-based artists. The sentimentally poetic ceramic figures by Bettina Samson are staged alongside masterfully painted, psychologically intense, intimate-scale dystopian landscapes by Louis Le Kim, as well as a new work by the already institutionally recognized Paul Menhake, continuing his poetic meditation on visibility and erasure. The gallery’s director of sales and business for Asia, Kate Park, who had just arrived from Seoul the day before, noted how participation in traditional fairs has become increasingly challenging and financially risky for European galleries.

PAVILLION’s format significantly reduces logistical and installation burdens. Galleries simply need to ship works in advance, which the team then curates on-site into a cohesive exhibition, eliminating the need to manage installation upon arrival. “Our experience with Supper Club last year was very positive. That partly informed our decision to return this year through Pavilion, which we expect to be an even stronger format,” she told Observer, noting how, compared to a traditional art fair booth, it creates a more intimate and curated environment. All works are also priced accessibly under $5,000, prioritizing opportunities to engage and connect with local collectors.

Park also noted that PAVILLION’s curatorial selection, led by Jim Lam, contributes to a more cohesive exhibition environment, allowing galleries to stage more focused presentations. “PAVILLION strikes that balance, retaining a commercial dimension while feeling closer to a curated exhibition than a conventional fair booth,” she reflected. “In a city like Hong Kong, this can be strategically more effective than being one booth among hundreds at a very large fair.”

This week, Sultana is also doubling down with a solo presentation of Sophie Vanin’s lyrically nebulous still-life paintings in a café as part of ART.ABERDEEN, another independent initiative bringing together art spaces, studios, design venues, restaurants and bars along Aberdeen Street. The initiative was coordinated by the organizing team as a distributed, curated exhibition across multiple locations in the neighborhood, with no participation cost for the galleries involved and in close collaboration with local businesses to enhance mutual visibility.

Returning to PAVILLION this year is another Paris-based gallery focused on contemporary and emerging artists, Bremond Capela, with a dialogue between three of its most promising painters across different geographies: Blake Daniels, Corinna Gosmaro and Kai Yoda. Their works share a sensitivity toward the layered complexities of nature and human connection, articulated through stratified pigments and emotionally charged painterly surfaces. “The first preview day at Pavilion felt very constructive, with visitors coming through steadily and taking real time to engage. The format encouraged genuine conversations throughout the day, which is ultimately what makes these fairs valuable,” gallery partner Mathieu Capela told Observer. Already familiar with the region through collaborations with local gallery PODIUM and Indonesia’s experimental Rho Projects, Yoda’s nebulous and hazily atmospheric abstractions in particular seem to emerge from a performative ritual that connects the painterly surface to both natural and psychological environments.

For Capela, PAVILLION represents a strategic opportunity to maintain a presence during this critical week and reconnect with Asian collectors without incurring the prohibitive costs and logistical demands of the main fair. According to the Hong Kong Association of Freight Forwarding and Logistics, shipping rates between Europe and Greater China have surged by as much as 30 percent and will only worsen with rising oil prices and transport congestion caused by the Iran war.

Another highlight at PAVILLION is the presentation of two new paintings by Ross Bleckner, brought by Berlin-based Capitain Petzel. Bleckner rose swiftly in the 1980s, achieving both market and institutional recognition with his emotionally charged abstractions and becoming one of the most visible artists to emerge from the East Village scene—popular enough to be name-checked in Sex and the City. Moving within blurred fields that hover between light and shadow, his optically soft, often elegiac paintings are deeply tied to the AIDS epidemic that decimated his circle, as are his floral compositions, which draw on the tradition of vanitas to offer meditations on mortality and collective grief. After peaking during the late-1980s market boom, his work is now being reintroduced to Asian collectors through Capitain Petzel’s Shanghai outpost, where it has received a strongly positive reception. (Priced around $40,000, the works drew plenty of interest on the fair’s opening day.)

Nearby, Seoul-based gallery Sangheeut is presenting witty, text-based works by Tokyo-based Michael Rikio Ming Hee Ho, who recently had a show at Fragment in New York and is currently in residence at Hart Haus, a relatively new Hong Kong nonprofit offering affordable studio space. Shaped by a childhood rooted in Hawaiian and diasporic traditions and incorporating his own poems, Rikio Ming Hee Ho’s works oscillate between satirical and more elegiac tones, exposing the absurdity of contemporary global existence while exploring how place is felt, how language shifts and how cultural inheritance accumulates over time. His intimate, fragmentary texts read like late-night messages or unsent letters, staged against bucolic yet clearly virtual landscapes that evoke a quiet, unplaceable longing already embedded in a millennial aesthetic and the digital relational environment.

Then there’s a series of multimedia works by Prosper Legault, presented by Cologne and New York-based Ruttkowski;68. Anchoring the room are two metal towers that draw directly from Hong Kong’s vertical landscape, assembling neon, photographs and fragments of the city into ready-made structures that mirror the city’s chaotic yet vibrantly electric aesthetic. Legault is now based in Hong Kong after initially arriving to explore the scene and, serendipitously, connecting last year with the experimental platform CURRENT PLANS, which offered him a residency. Adopting a Dada-inflected collage strategy, his remix of urban debris, Chinese shop signs and posters becomes a layered cultural and anthropological inquiry into the singular semiotics of Hong Kong’s cityscape.

Beyond PAVILLION, a proliferation of alternative platforms is unfolding across the city’s districts. In addition to the ART.ABERDEEN format, another initiative this year is ArtHouse Tai Hang, debuting in the historic neighborhood known for its iconic fire dragon dance, which has evolved into a vibrant creative hub of artist studios, local eateries and contemporary cafés. Curated by Jackie Ho and conceived as a context-specific international exhibition, ArtHouse was one of the first Hong Kong Art Week events to kick off with a diffuse salon and boutique fair, or “art festival” as the organizers describe it, that unfolds across an entire neighborhood. Bringing together 50 artists, both local and international, the project takes visitors on something like a scavenger hunt between flower shops, heritage buildings and cafés—one through which many collectors appear to have found gems, given the number of red dots on the walls just days after the opening.

While all participating artists are represented by galleries, only their names are foregrounded, shifting attention back to the singularity of each practice within carefully curated, theme-based rooms and spaces. One of Tai Hang’s historic shophouses, for instance, has been transformed into a more spiritual, church- or temple-like space of reflection and contemplation, where visitors can encounter their own sense of spiritual alignment through works that are both attuned and syncretically resonant. A work by Ding Shuin inspires the mosaic-like covered windows that bathe the space in an evocative, diffused light, while Qiu Zhuo’s mysteriously alien, stone-and-glass creature stands monolithically as an altar piece, set against the more fantastical, narrative-driven compositions by Min-Jia, rooted in ancient myths and ancestral folklore. Meanwhile, in a flower shop, a beautiful composition of greenery and flowers is paired with the vibrant mushroom paintings of Liu Bin.

The artist list includes both regional and international names such as Philippe Elbe, Pauline Shaw, Stephen Thorpe, Keira Brennan Hinton, Shota Nakamura, Jo Fish, Valerio Nicolai and Chris Oh, among others, all with regional and international representation. A particular highlight is the lush, vibrantly flourishing abstractions by Yehong Mao, whose momentum surged last year at Untitled Miami with Latitude Gallery and whose work remains in high demand across markets. This focused presentation in Hong Kong precedes her upcoming exhibition in New York in June.

Last but not least, another dealer-led initiative this Hong Kong art week is Check-in SIDE SPACE, a collaborative project between Alex Chan of The Shophouse and Matt Chung, showcasing emerging artists from Asia and beyond in a five-storey 1930s heritage building in Wan Chai. The premise is a little unusual: each participating dealer is showing only works that fit in cabin luggage. Works may be disassembled, packed during transit and reassembled on site, but every element must fit within standard dimensions—making savings on shipping costs a proof of curatorial and creative acumen.

Overall, these younger, fresher alternative fair and salon models appear particularly successful in Asia, especially among younger dealers and audiences willing to explore more informal, fluid modes of engaging with art—collectively signaling a broader desire to rewrite the traditional frameworks through which art circulates, is presented and is sold. Most importantly, as Molesworth also suggested, these initiatives are, first and foremost, social gatherings around art, often including late-night openings and a party, or even a rave—bringing together a wide and diverse audience.

PAVILLION itself had already debuted successfully in Taipei this past January, where the model proved its viability, with some galleries reportedly achieving six-digit sales. The first day in Hong Kong also saw a strong turnout. “Today saw some of the best collectors in the region visiting and tomorrow we have even more who have planned to attend. Sales are off to a brisk start, and it’s been wonderful to see our alternative approach continue to resonate and find success,” Molesworth reported. Looking ahead, he shared plans to expand the platform further, with a potential edition in Seoul, aiming to test new markets while maintaining a flexible and evolving structure. “We have our partner lining up, and we’re both testing the waters with each other to see how we work together. We’re going to take it from there.”

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