To me, the change is surprisingly subtle; the refinished lobby features a larger, more centrally located information desk, but otherwise feels like the same airy rectangular architecture of recent memory. During the unveiling, however, Hammer director Ann Philbin disagreed.

“It’s not subtle. It’s huge,” she told ARTnews. “To have that opening onto the street, and to have the transparency of those beautiful windows that look in at the art—to me, it’s a total gamechanger.”

The museum is now in the final phase of a gradual transformation that began more than 20 years ago, when Philbin commissioned a then-emerging Maltzan to rework the entirety of its home from the inside out. These latest renovations look at the space from the outside in, foregrounding opportunities for dramatic, large-scale works to really say to the surrounding Westwood neighborhood, Hey! We’ve got art in here. From the new sculpture terrace, Sanford Biggers’s monumental Oracle, 2021, a wise, seated figure cast in seven tons of bronze, will greet passing traffic on Wilshire and Glendon Avenue through 2024. And through late August, pedestrians can peer into the lobby windows to see Chiharu Shiota’s grand staircase installation, a meticulously woven network of 800 pounds of red yarn that feels simultaneously womb-like, cancerous, and riveting.

It’s been Philbin’s longtime goal to raise the Hammer’s profile, not just within the art world but among the museum’s neighbors. Shortly after her arrival in 1999, an early informal audit showed that most pedestrians had no idea where the Hammer was, despite standing just outside its entrance. “The truth of the matter is that we used to be almost invisible,” she said. “People thought we were part of an office building.”

The Hammer is, in fact, an extension of what was Occidental Petroleum’s 16-story corporate tower, where oil magnate Armand Hammer once presided as chair. In 1990, to house Hammer’s collection of Impressionism and Old Masters, architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed a nearly windowless block of black and white marble, accessible to this day through the tower’s ground floor. His architecture followed the centuries-old approach of treating museums as “temples,” according to Philbin—that is, rarified spaces for the contemplation of art. “It never said, museum, it never said welcome. It never said come in,” she said, also lamenting Larrabee Barnes’ cramped galleries of “bad ceilings” and “terrible lighting.”

In 1994, four years after Hammer’s death, the University of California, Los Angeles assumed care of his collection. In 2000, Maltzan drafted a master plan that reinvisioned the building as the “city’s living room,” which in short order included the addition of a theater and cafe in 2006, the completion of a sunny outdoor courtyard in 2012, and a 60-percent increase in total exhibition space. The process unfolded incrementally as fundraising would allow, with other external factors. The $10-million, 2017 overhaul of the third-floor exhibition spaces, for example, might never have happened if an unnamed artist, invited to mount a retrospective, hadn’t point blank told Philbin, “I don’t like your galleries.”

Billed as “the completion of two decades of transformation,” the Hammer’s street-level reinvention might be better described as the beginning of the end. There still remains the conversion of a former City National Bank location into a new gallery, an expansion made possible by UCLA’s $92.5-million purchase of the entire building in 2015. During the pandemic, funds to finish and connect the space to the Hammer’s lobby were diverted to the prevention of layoffs, leaving the staff intact, but the former bank in a state of patchy terrazzo flooring with missing ceiling tiles. According to Philbin, artist Rita McBride saw this as the ideal “corporate ruin” for her Particulates installation, a vertical ring of green laser beams evocative of a bank heist, on view through November. While additional fundraising for construction is underway, visitors can view the piece by exiting the museum, then taking a bit of a wander before finding the entrance to the bank.

The transparent lobby has become the prevailing trend of museum makeovers in the last decade, presented as a major feature in the overhauls of Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2016, and many more. As institutions evolved to embrace a culture of inclusivity, the idea emerged that a bright, spacious entryway is less intimidating to the general public—and therefore gets more bodies through the door. Facades, however, don’t always do all that they say they will.

Despite the museum’s announcement of a new “dramatic presence across a full city block,” passing pedestrians and motorists are unlikely to detect much of a difference. Biggers’ sculpture, which debuted in the corporate enclave of Rockefeller Center in 2021, is only visible from the north side of Glendon, while the new bank gallery is hidden from the street behind black reflective windows. The sign above the door still does not say “museum,” but rather “Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center. (The entire building is now named after the owners of brands including Fiji Water and POM Wonderful, whose $30-million 2018 donation really helped jumpstart construction.)

All of this is to say that the museum still very much looks like part of an office building—there’s no hiding the 15 floors of glass and marble rising above it—but following the goals they set for the museum 20 years ago, Philbin and Maltzan have largely already achieved what they set out to do. The Hammer today is a pillar in LA’s artistic community, having platformed countless careers since the 2010 creation of the Made in L.A. biennial, and since 2005, assembled a robust collection of contemporary works that have long since departed from Armand Hammer’s narrow vision.

(The exhibition tied to the unveiling, “Together in Time,” presents a tightly packed cross-section of the museum’s contemporary holdings, not quite chronologically or thematically, but through the lens of recent market forces; think a grid painting by Charles Gaines from 2019, the year after the 79-year-old artist joined the roster of Hauser & Wirth, or a 2019 portrait by Amoako Boafo, gifted by his local gallerists, Julie and Bennett Roberts.)

The real game changer was not the reorientation of the Hammer’s entrance, but its elimination of admission fees in 2014, which led to a 25 percent jump in attendance. Now, on any given day, the museum is full of people, often gathered in Maltzan’s airy courtyard as if it were indeed a living room. Some come to enjoy the exhibitions, while others are there for the free Wi-Fi or an idyllic place to have lunch—all of which is fine, according to Philbin. For potential museum-goers, it seems the most compelling factor is being able to afford the entrance, rather than what it looks like.

Below is a painstakingly curated list of my absolute highest recommendations.

A brigade of black SUVs pulls up in front of Chris Burden’s Urban Light (2008), where the sculpture’s glowing lamp posts are foregrounded by a tinted pink sunset and the unrelenting flashes of a dozen event photographers. Later in the night, Pashgian explains the peculiar properties of Southern California light photons, but for now, a man is shouting from across Wilshire Boulevard.

“What’s the event?” he asks to no response. “Anybody?”

Overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the seaside neighborhood of La Jolla, the newly renovated complex is essentially two different buildings joined at the hip. 

On the right, you’ll find a composite of white-stuccoed boxes, punctuated by curved windows that riff on the surrounding buildings’ Mediterranean-inspired archways. The first box was designed by celebrated modernist Irving Gill in 1916, and in later decades, more boxes were added by architects Mosher & Drew and Venturi Scott Brown & Associates (VSBA).

On the left, meanwhile, architect Annabelle Selldorf’s new expansion is roughly the same scale, but totally distinct in materiality. In lieu of stucco and curves, she chose a palette of glass walls, sandy-colored travertine, and aluminum beams joined at right angles.

All museum expansions, in a sense, are a type of rebranding, where new architecture coincides with a new public image. The two buildings’ odd union is emblematic of both the museum’s and the architect’s task: to align contemporary culture with a canonical history.       

“The goal of this project was to create a more inviting and inclusive museum with a greater connection to the community,” the architect said at the ribbon-cutting ceremony last Tuesday.  

The original Irving Gill facade at MCASD’s new La Jolla flagship by Selldorf Architects.

When Selldorf joined the project in 2014, the MCASD had issues to resolve, primarily the lack of space for its 5,600-piece collection. But the building was also an iconic bit of architecture that had perplexed visitors for years. Its cartoonishly fat columns, designed in 1996 by the beloved postmodernists Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, obscured the front door in a way that was both a practical and symbolic problem. 

“A museum can feel somewhat hard for people to enter in the first place, and then we hid the entrance,” MCASD Board Chair Paul Jacobs explained in his remarks.  

Despite the outcry from Venturi Scott Brown fans, Selldorf replaced the columns with an entrance that, she said, “represents a true welcome for everyone.” 

Its glass walls are unobscured by a column-less aluminum brise-soleil, and the ticket counter is always visible from the outside. She and her team added 46,400 square feet of new build, effectively doubling the museum’s footprint while quadrupling its exhibition space. Skirting height restrictions on new construction, the existing auditorium was repurposed as a 20-foot-tall, 7,000-square-foot gallery.      

“If this isn’t museum sized, I don’t know what is,” Selldorf said as she led a tour of the building.

A Building With Views To Match The Art

Installation view of the Cohn Gallery inside MCASD’s new La Jolla flagship by Selldorf Architects.

A favorite of gallerists David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and other high-profile members of the art world, Selldorf Architects operates with what’s best described as an elegant pragmatism. 

The MCASD’s new galleries possess clear circulation paths and a minimalist’s grandeur, where natural light fills generously proportioned, open spaces. Tall, thin windows frame exterior landmarks — individual palm trees, bell towers, and towering pines — alongside top-notch examples from the museum’s collection.

Roughly organized by era, there’s a triangular gallery of Color Field painters including Rothko, Morris, and Motherwell, and an enormous trapezoidal gallery for Light and Space artists like Larry Bell and Peter Alexander. (Most galleries are normal rectangles, but these were pinched where the new construction connected to the old.) 

Rather than construct a new traditional auditorium, Selldorf added a more current “flexible events space,” a hallmark of contemporary museum architecture that provides a blank slate for more varied public programming. Here, that includes a luxurious floor-to-ceiling view of the ocean.  

The museum’s new luxurious Big Little Lies-esque views are not in fact “distractions from the art, but complementary,” Selldorf said twice during the museum preview, perhaps anticipating criticism. 

“For all of you who live here, the incredible light of Southern California and the incredible view of the Pacific Ocean is something you may take for granted,” the New York-based architect said. “We were thrilled to make it part and parcel of the experience. I think it will contribute to you remembering where you are, and what you have seen.” 

For the most part, the historically relevant architecture of the original building was left untouched, providing an interesting side-by-side study of how much the shape and culture of museums has changed. The interior has no demarcations between the old and new, though there is a distinct sensation of entering another era in the original space, a time when museums were perhaps considered less destinations than rarified containers for art. 

On this older side, the relatively low-slung, windowless galleries with gray-and-white terrazzo floors form a warren that’s decidedly confusing to navigate. And the original VSBA lobby, still adorned on the ceiling with the architects’ metal-and-neon fins, is intact, but will likely be challenging to program. It still reads very much like a lobby, only without an entrance. 

The MCASD Is Adopting Curatorial Changes To Match The New Architecture

Niki de Saint Phalle during a shooting session at Impasse Ronsin, Paris, 1962.

The museum approached Selldorf Architects in 2014 seeking “a new architecture” that would “reach our full potential as a community resource for culture and education,” Kathryn Kanjo, MCASD’s director and CEO, said during her walkthrough of the building. 

Her sentiments and Selldorf’s reflected the institutional reckoning that’s been going on for a decade or more, as museums have acknowledged their own exclusivity and lack of representation. Corrective measures are architectural as well as curatorial. Honoring its proximity to the U.S.-Mexico-border, MCASD emphasizes its commitment to showing and collecting artists in the region. Its first year of programming also emphasizes solo shows of women artists, starting with Niki de Saint Phalle, followed by Alexis Smith and Celia Alvarez Muñoz.

The now-headlining “Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s” is a sprawling survey of the late San Diego resident, co-presented with The Menil Collection, a Houston museum that houses the art collection of oil tycoons John and Dominique de Menil. The show fills the enormous former auditorium gallery with Nanas, Saint Phalle’s sculptures of archetypal women in defiant poses, and large-scale Tirs, or “shooting paintings,” goopy assemblages where the artist buried bags of paint in globs of plaster and shot them with a rifle. The most fragile pieces took years to secure on loan from European institutions, according to Menil senior curator Michelle White

“A lot of these works which are being shown in the United States for the first time may not come back,” she said during the exhibition preview. “We feel very lucky to have been able to bring together this group of work.” 

In the former VSBA lobby, a suite of works by various artists responding to the social and political tension on the San Diego-Tijuana border unfortunately recedes behind the space’s columns. Elsewhere, flanked by soaring galleries devoted to the movements of Pop Art and Hard-edge painting, the wall text in a modest mezzanine describes works from a group of Latinx artists “from the broader Americas,” made from the “1970s onward” as engaging in a “a range of issues” —these span Felipe Almada’s altar of religious and secular objects, including a figurine of Bart Simpson, to the surrealist portraiture of Daniela Gallois. 

I do wonder: As we retrofit art history with the underrepresented, will we categorize them as we did in the past, based on specific movements of formal exploration? Or will they be grouped by shared politics of representation, and broadly defined ethnic categories?

Robert Irwin, 1°2°3°4°, 1997.

As values evolve, the way that the art and architecture of the present will be perceived by the future is anyone’s guess. When VSBA renovated the museum in 1996, critical of the previous Mosher & Drew overhaul, they described their own intervention — cartoon columns and all — as a restoration of Gill’s original vision that would be “more inviting for visitors.” Two decades later, Selldorf removed those columns citing the exact same reason, completing the cycle of modern to postmodern and back again. 

Trumping MCASD’s exquisite new building, and even its Primetime Emmy-caliber views, the museum’s must-see crown jewel remains the 1997 installation “1º2º3º4º” by San Diego’s own Robert Irwin. 

It’s a simple premise: three squares cut from the brown-tinted glass of a gallery facing the beach, resulting in an extraordinary effect on the viewer’s perception. The squares frame landmarks in the distance, somehow bringing them closer, while simultaneously making the sky bluer, as the ocean breeze and smell of salt permeate the gallery. 

Selldorf was right—the windows here are extremely memorable. 

“Personal, global, societal, mundane, or profound,” the survey read. “Everything is valid. Just write down quickly any thoughts that come to your head.” The dozens of responses that Chang received went into the latest iteration of Milk Debt, an ongoing video project based on collective fear—and by extension, fear’s frequent companions of dread, despair, and uncertainty.

In May, with a scheduled solo exhibition postponed by the pandemic, Chang and the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California, streamed a preview of the new piece online. The 10-minute clip featured a Zoom call with an unidentified blonde performer who, opening her palm-leaf printed robe, attaches a mechanical milk pump to each of her bare breasts.

As the pump’s swift, rhythmic contractions mimic the sound of panicked wheezing, she reads Chang’s scripted collection of Angelenos’ fears, the words scrolling on the bottom of the screen: “Volcanoes. Bloody Mary. My cat scratching me and the cut getting infected,” she reads.

The pumping slows, and trivial concerns escalate to the existential. “They will not build the tools to overcome dark times,” she continues. “There is no end in sight.”

Milk Debt headlines Chang’s rescheduled solo exhibition of the same name, which opened this week at the 18th Street Arts Center. The full version of the piece appears as a multichannel installation of nine different women from different parts of the world, reciting fears gathered from their local communities as milk is suctioned from their breasts.

“I wanted to think about the affective states of people who occupy a particular geographic place,” said Chang, who began collecting fears for Milk Debt in Hong Kong in 2019, at the very start of the city’s tumultuous extradition protests. In that first iteration, she shot a young woman pumping breast milk on an overpass, reading mounting sentiments of civic upheaval as demonstrators streamed down the road below. The project has continued in Los Angeles and along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, with more recent additions filmed via Zoom to observe social distancing.

Patty Chang, Milk Debt (still), 2020.

Alongside location-specific concerns, the Milk Debt performers speak of recurring universal fears—economic precarity, the threat of illness, and myriad other forms of violence. Their pumping of milk—a nurturing act that can signify the often invisible labor of women—also stands in as a symbol of humans’ pillaging of the planet, with the project having been initially inspired by Chang’s own consuming anxieties over climate change.

Milk Debt’s “fluids come to stand in for the extraction of water, oil, and other resources that the Earth provides,” said Anuradha Vikram, the show’s curator, noting that some performers were filmed near the Los Angeles River and Los Angeles Aqueduct. The work’s title comes from the Chinese Buddhist concept of an insurmountable debt owed to one’s mother for having nursed at her breast, and, amid the ongoing rising temperatures and inextinguishable fires throughout California, the artist was reminded of the enormous debt we continue to incur with the planet.

“Themes of drought and wildfire kept recurring during the making of the work, which alongside political unrest has kept the different geographies of the project connected to one another in haunting and beautiful ways,” Vikram added. “I feel that Milk Debt is a very urgent body of work that will connect with people on a gut level.”

Patty Chang, Milk Debt (still), 2020.

While a show fixated on the topic of fear seems expertly tailored to our era of multivalent, impending doom, Chang’s interdisciplinary practice of performance, video, photography, and sculpture has exhumed the private, vulnerable depths of the human experience for decades.

“Her practice has always struck me as fearless” in its insistence on confronting and verbalizing the worst of our emotions, said Nancy Lim, a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art who organized another survey of Chang’s work: “Que Sera Sera,” a two-venue exhibition on view now at San Francisco’s Friends Indeed and Cushion Works galleries through November 6. Themes of loss and grief weigh heavily in the featured works that Chang made from 2001 to 2017, including videos and photographs that allude to the declining years and ultimate passing of her elderly father.

The 2013 two-channel video that lends that survey its name, Invocations and Que Sera Sera, invites viewers into the actual hospital room where her father lay dying. As Chang bounces and sings to her infant son next to the hospital bed, in split screen, her mother reads a list from an iPad invoking the emotional turmoil of his final days: “Invocation of a fracture. Invocation of humiliation. […] Invocation of inappropriate laughing or crying.”

“I’ve always dealt with certain anxieties, undercurrents of ugly or minor feelings,” Chang said, citing poet Cathy Park Hong’s term for the persistent and gnawing malaise of the immigrant experience.

Patty Chang, Invocations and Que Sera Sera (still), 2013.

Chang is Chinese-American, born and raised in the Bay Area. After graduating from the University of California, San Diego in 1994, she began her career when she moved to New York and engaged in its alternative art scene. Defying the purported ideals of the female body, including the supposed submissiveness of the Asian female body, her early works incorporated private bodily functions and wincing simulations of self-harm that recall the contentious “blood-and-guts” work of 1970s feminists. In the 1996 performance, Gong Li With the Wind, she gorged on beans until she defecated. And in the 1998 video Shaved (At Loss), she shaves her pubic hair while blindfolded, periodically rinsing her razor in a glass of Perrier.

In the 1998 video Melons (At Loss), Chang recalls an aunt lost to breast cancer while slicing a dull knife through the tip of her bra, exposing a cantaloupe in lieu of a breast. As she masochistically squishes and eats it with her fingers, her actions overshadow the true sentiments of the piece. Over the years, however, the artist has continually refined a sense of balance, easing the transgressive barriers that had previously shielded that deeper sentimentality from view.

“The works of the past 15 to 20 years chart an emotional expanse,” Lim said. Rather than elicit the temporary, piercing shocks of Chang’s earlier pieces, her later works like Invocations have the power to blanket viewers under the crushing weight of grief.

Installation view of “Patty Chang: Milk Debt,” 2020, at 18th Street Arts Center.

“Que Sera Sera” surveys the shift in Chang’s practice towards grander, more poetic narratives by revisiting works from “The Wandering Lake,” the artist’s 2017 Queens Museum solo exhibition.  This includes the “Letdown” series, which highlights the surreal affinities between the human body and various bodies of water, that Chang photographed along Uzbekistan’s shrinking Aral Sea in 2014, shortly after the birth of her son. Prohibited from taking pictures of the Soviet-era irrigation sites sucking the area dry, she shot her own “sympathetic loss of flow”—her own breast milk emptied into random saucers, tea cups, and fish tins at the end of every meal.

“There’s something superhuman about the body producing this fluid,” Chang said, circling back to Milk Debt. Lactation itself is its own affective state, she explains, as it releases oxytocin, a kind of anti-fear chemical that sends nurturing waves of euphoria and empathy through the body. In Milk Debt, in their chemically-induced nurturing state, “The performers in some ways channel these lists,” she said. “They read [these fears], absorb them, and spit them out, channeling those individual, personal states of being into public speech, a collective language of understanding.”

Below the surface layers of ugly feelings and absurdist gestures, collective understanding is the recurring sentiment that runs through Chang’s expansive body of work. Performance functions as emotional release for both artist and viewer, a defanging of universal anxieties as they’re spoken aloud. In her performative metaphors that highlight the far-reaching, unlikely connections we share with each other and with the Earth, she reminds us that no one undergoes these anxieties alone.

Installation view of “David Altmejd The Vibrating Man” at White Cube, Hong Kong. Click to enlarge.

© DAVID ALTMEJD/PHOTO: © WHITE CUBE (KITMAN LEE)

In the finite space of densely populated Hong Kong Island, there’s nowhere to build but up. Where other cities have gallery rows, this definitively vertical metropolis has gallery towers, where dealers are linked to their neighbors via stairwells and high-speed elevators.

In Central, the city’s financial district at the northern of the island, the number of blue-chip galleries has been growing year after year. Gagosian took up residence in the Pedder Building in 2011, and Pace opened at the nearby Entertainment building in 2014. The completion of the H Queens tower brought Hauser & Wirth, Zwirner, and a second Pace to the neighborhood in 2018. This year, Lévy Gorvy joined the mix, inaugurating its first space in Asia at the base of the St. George’s Building.

These galleries are conveniently stacked near Art Basel Hong Kong, making it relatively easy to see them all of it in one afternoon. Below, three shows not to miss—all with work by artists who are artists showing in Hong Kong for the first time.

1. “David Altmejd: The Vibrating Man” at White Cube

Presumably it’s the titular man who appears as both as a full-sized sculpture and a series of busts throughout the gallery’s two floors, his features having undergone a Cubist treatment and multiplied all over his body. The additional eyes and clusters of crystals embedded into his skin suggest either a spiritual ascension or nervous undoing; the multiple cigarettes he holds and the plumes of opaque smoke he exhales, plus the disembodied hands clawing grooves into the gallery wall, suggest the latter condition is more likely.

2. “Julio Le Parc: Light — Mirror” at Perrotin

Mobiles, paintings, and soothing projections onto the ceiling survey the impressive array of different media that the celebrated kinetic artist has used to explore themes of color, motion, and light. According to Instagram, the show’s most popular work is the selfie-friendly installation Espace à pénétrer avec trame et miroir courbe (Variation du labyrinthe de 1963), 2019, a maze of mirrors and curved stripes that distorts and disorients.

Louise Bourgeois, Untitled, 1998–2014. Hologram, 13 x 11 inches.

PHOTO: MATTHEW SCHREIBER/© THE EASTON FOUNDATION/VAGA AT ARS, NY/COURTESY THE EASTON FOUNDATION AND HAUSER & WIRTH

3. “Louise Bourgeois: My Own Voice Wakes Me Up” at Hauser & Wirth

The usual gut-wrenching sentiments that Bourgeois was so adept at expressing—the phrase “EXTREME TENSION!” on paper, flanked by two hands trailing bloody fingerprints on either side, for example—are all here in her some of her trademark mediums, like drawings, paintings, and soft sculpture. But there are also less familiar inclusions, like holograms, which take the form of household images engulfed in red lighting, and very realistic-looking arms with pulsing veins, clutching and grabbing each other that are carved from pink marble.

Works by Iván Navarro at the booth of Gallery Hyundai at Art Central Hong Kong 2019.

JANELLE ZARA FOR ARTNEWS

Visitors to this year’s Art Central Hong Kong fair, now in its fifth edition, are greeted by a wall of Instagram-worthy Iván Navarro works constructed from rows of colored fluorescent lights, sending viewers into the Chilean artist’s infinite-feeling neon tunnels as soon as they walk in. The other side of the wall, however, is decidedly more serene. Among the works on view behind the Navarro piece is Minjung Kim’s Red Mountain (2018), a watercolor monochrome with its colors diffusing softly across mulberry Hanji paper.

Both pieces were exhibited at the fair, which runs through Sunday at the Central Waterfront, courtesy of the Seoul-based Gallery Hyundai, which brought with it a spread of work by both Korean and international artists—a photograph of Pyongyang by Thomas Struth, a painted resin and plaster collage by Kwak Duck-Jun, and a baroque wall-mounted Murano glass sculpture by Fred Wilson are among its offerings. It’s a typical booth at the fair, bringing together work by artists based in the Asia-Pacific region and those far beyond it to remarkable effect.

André Marfaing’s Août 72-40 (1972) sold at the booth of Phoshorus & Carbon at the 2019 edition of Art Central Hong Kong.

JANELLE ZARA FOR ARTNEWS

With 75 percent of its 107 exhibitors hailing from the Asia Pacific, Art Central places a stronger emphasis on the region than the Art Basel Hong Kong fair, located just up the street. Dealers at Art Central, however, said that attendees’ passion for artists of local renown equaled their fervor for those who had achieved international fame.

On Thursday, Ji Won Lee, of the South Korean gallery Phosphorus & Carbon, said she had already sold Août 72-40, a 1972 canvas by the late French painter André Marfaing. Although her gallery specializes in the avant-garde that formed during the 1970s in Daegu, where her gallery is based, she said that her booth illustrates a dialogue between French and Korean artists. Whereas Marfaing aggressively spread his oil paint across the canvas and left each stroke visible, Hyong-keun applied blocks of paint to linen, allowing it to blur and bleed at the edges.

Fiumano Clase, a London-based gallery with a second location in Gothenburg, Sweden, reported no sales, but gallery cofounder Andrés Clase said there was “strong interest” in works by the Hungarian painter Dénes Maróti, who, for one canvas on view at the fair, set blurry bathers against the still blues of water and sky. Clase said that he’s shown at the fair for the past four editions, and each time he’s done it with the same approach. “We tend to show the artists that are core to our gallery, rather than trying to pander to the market,” he says. Thus far, he said, the fair has been an excellent starting point for conversations. “We always like to meet new people who may become collectors—not immediately, but a little bit down the line.”

Work by Raúl de Nieves in “Glow Like That.”

JANELLE ZARA FOR ARTNEWS

Across the harbor from the expo center that houses Art Basel Hong Kong, a new cultural hub is in the works: Victoria Dockside, a 3-million-square-foot behemoth of a luxury development that is outfitted with offices, retail spaces, and art and design venues. Spearheading the project is businessman and collector Adrian Cheng, the creator of the K11 brand, which has been building shopping malls-cum-art centers throughout China.

Cheng’s grandest museum-retail complex yet, K11 Musea, is scheduled to open within Victoria Dockside in the fall, and his K11 Art Foundation is currently inaugurating the district with a group show called “Glow Like That” that’s been curated by the foundation’s artistic director, Venus Lau, on the 21st floor of K11 Atelier, the area’s business tower.

“Glow Like That” presents the work of 16 artists experimenting with how light interacts with various materials. Cast onto the dangling strings of glass beads of Raúl de Nieves’s shamanic costumes, it sparkles brilliantly; filtered through Lantian Xie’s Salvator Mundi (2018), a replica of the eponymous Leonardo painting that’s been mounted onto a window, it signifies a kind of holiness.

A Larry Bell piece in “Glow Like That.”

JANELLE ZARA FOR ARTNEWS

The space high up in the skyscraper proved to be an ideal venue to talk about light. Surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass and temporarily clad in reflective metal sheeting, it is flooded with it.

Including a wide array of media, the show illustrates how the perception—and use—of light varies by cultural context. Chen Wei’s Trouble #17033 (2017) borrowed the LED boxes of Hong Kong storefront signage; facing his pieces away from viewers, they light the reflective floors and walls with flashing colors. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Light and Space veterans De Wain Valentine and Larry Bell offered sculptures concerned with natural light. Bell’s material of choice is laminated glass, arranged upright in a freestanding quartet called The Tall Star (2019), Valentine’s is cobalt blue cast polyester resin. The latter’s 1975/2015 Column Blue is a prism that bends white light into rainbows and warps the towers of the city’s skyline. Also on hand from Los Angeles is Kelly Akashi, whose glass sculptures coated in dichroic film reflect light as an iridescent sheen.

While its subject is light, “Glow Like That” might be best viewed at night, not only to better experience Chen Zhou’s Blue Hole, a 2017 film based on the hopes and dreams of young girls as expressed on WeChat whose projection is a bit faint during the day, but also to see the glow of the crowded city, with scrolling signs flashing and water shimmering.

“Glow Like That” is on view through May 13.

Yukinori Yanagi’s Wandering Position – Pgonomyrmex7 (1997) at Blum & Poe.

SARAH DOUGLAS/ARTNEWS

How much time does it take to sell an artwork at an art fair, never mind 10 of them? According to one gallery, zero minutes and zero seconds.

At 2 p.m. on Wednesday, precisely as Art Basel Hong Kong opened its doors to its first VIP guests, a publicist for Los Angeles’s David Kordansky Gallery sent an email to press announcing some “exciting sales updates on behalf of David Kordansky Gallery for the first day of Art Basel Hong Kong.” The first day literally hadn’t begun and, according to the email, Kordansky’s sales included a parabolic lens by Fred Eversley for $250,000, a Rashid Johnson for $210,000, a Jonas Wood for $175,000, a Matthew Brannon for $48,000, another Jonas Wood for $120,000, a Calvin Marcus for $38,000, an Ivan Morley for $36,000, a Will Boone for $35,000, and a Lauren Halsey for $30,000. (All prices are in U.S. dollars, unless noted.)

How could it be?

The crowd this year at Art Basel Hong Kong was “instantaneous,” Kordansky’s Kurt Mueller told ARTnews, and “the energy very, very high.”

“We were prepared,” Mueller explained. “There were some things on hold that we’ve confirmed.”

It raises the old question, well known to market journalists, of what exactly counts as a sale made at a fair. Galleries send out previews to clients. Does a confirmation from a potential buyer who might not even be at the fair count as a sale made at the fair? As Bill Clinton might put it, it depends on what the meaning of the word “at” is…

Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Elvis (1962) at White Cube.

SARAH DOUGLAS/ARTNEWS

This is the seventh edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, a fair that began under different ownership (and a different name) in 2008. This year brings 242 galleries from 35 countries to the show, which runs through Sunday. At day’s end—arguably a more reasonable time to determine what sold at a fair—Art Basel reported that sales included a significant work by Andy Warhol at White Cube for $2.85 million and a painting by George Condo at Almine Rech Gallery for a price in the range of $1.2 million to $1.4 million. David Zwirner sold its entire booth on the first VIP day, including four new sculptures by Carol Bove for $400,000 to $500,000 each.

Perhaps the best indication of this fair’s evolution is that Paris- and Salzburg-based dealer Thaddaeus Ropac can now bring Warhol’s 30 Colored Maos (Reversal Series), 1980, and not seem to be pandering to a cliched conception of regional taste. Whereas, back in 2010, every other gallery from the West seemed to have a Warhol Mao, or a grab-bag of flashy eye-candy works, Ropac’s Maos looked like an organic addition to his presentation of work from the late 1970s and early ’80s, by artists like Georg Baselitz and Sigmar Polke.

“We did think about it,” Ropac said, discussing his decision to include the piece. “We hesitated. We did bring a Mao to the fair many years ago. But now it’s understood in a different context. The quality of this fair is now on par with the great European fairs. It is highly sophisticated.”

There’s an interesting backstory to 30 Colored Maos, which is priced at $8.75 million. Commissioned by Warhol’s Swiss dealer, Bruno Bischofberger, for an exhibition at his Zurich gallery in 1980, the piece was on display not much later in Daniel Templon’s gallery in Paris, and was stolen. In June 2007, it turned up again at Sotheby’s London, consigned by the Art Loss Register on behalf of insurers, where it sold for £1.25 million. (A Sotheby’s specialist contacted ALR after noticing gaps in the painting’s provenance when it was brought in.)

Henry Taylor, King & Queen (2013) at Blum & Poe.

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Also in the category of Warhols with interesting backstories would be Campbell’s Elvis (1962), the piece that sold at White Cube for $2.85 million. A merger of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup can and Elvis themes, the small silkscreen on canvas has a who’s-who provenance: former owners include Surrealist Salvador Dalí, casino magnate Steve Wynn, and longtime Gagosian Los Angeles director and eagle-eyed collector Bob Shapazian. When Shapazian’s terrific collection went up for sale at Christie’s in 2010, after his death, none other than White Cube founder Jay Jopling picked up the painting for $1.5 million.

Warhol being a mainstay of most high-end fairs, there were other pieces by him on offer. Acquavella has Five Deaths on Turquoise, from 1963, a 30-by-30-inch scene of a crashed, overturned car, priced at $15 million. The picture went for $9.8 million at Christie’s in May 2015; it made $7.3 million at Sotheby’s New York in November 2013.

And Gagosian has Warhol flowers from 1964 for $7.5 million. A fun fact about Gagosian’s just-opened exhibition “Cézanne, Morandi, and Sanyu” at the gallery’s Pedder Building space, curated by Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi: not one piece is for sale. The artist wanted “no commercial overtones,” Gagosian director Andrew Fabricant told ARTnews.

For a well-capitalized gallery like Gagosian, such exhibitions are a way of flexing muscle in a relatively new market—and getting loans that prove you can go head-to-head with the auction houses. If you dropped by, you might have noticed the gallery has Cézanne’s Arbres et maisons au bord de l’eau (1892–93), a stunning landscape that sold in November at Sotheby’s New York for $11.1 million that had been in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Duane Hanson, Flea Market Lady, 1990, at Gagosian.

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Speaking of flexing muscle, Gagosian is vying for the most-photographed artwork in the fair with Duane Hanson’s Flea Market Lady (1990). Facing the aisle, the hyper-realistic life-size bronze sculpture is of a paunchy late-middle-age woman in a yellow visor and a baby blue Florida T-shirt hawking her wares (including shoes and clothing and a straw hat), not unlike a dealer at an art fair. Gagosian has it on offer for $750,000, but you may remember seeing it at New York’s Independent fair in November 2014, presented by the art and bookseller Karma, which priced it, back then, at $400,000. Maybe in all its trashy brilliance it might remind one, in the Hong Kong context, of U.S.–China trade relations?

“It seemed appropriate for an art fair,” Karma proprietor Brendan Dugan told ARTnews of the work back in 2014. “Duane lived in Florida, and Florida is definitely a place where you see a lot of America.”

As Enid Tsui observed in the South China Morning Post today, this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong is not defined by huge-ticket pieces. There is no $35 million de Kooning, as there was at Lévy Gorvy’s booth last year. This time around, Tsui writes, “prices around the $50,000 mark [are] less rare than before, a reflection perhaps of sentiment about the global economy.”

Among the bigger-ticket artworks, though, are some Picassos. Almine Rech, for instance, is displaying the painter’s striking Femme assise de la robe verte (1961), priced at $11 million. As it happens, Mainland China’s biggest-ever presentation of Picasso’s work is coming up—opening June 15 at the UCCA in Beijing is the not-so-subtly titled “Birth of a Genius,” comprising 103 works, no fewer than 30 of them paintings, from the Musée Picasso in Paris.

And what fair these days would be complete without a handful of Basquiats? Acquavella has two, including the bright yellow Untitled (Venus 2000 B.C.) from 1982 (the year of the $110.5 million painting sold at auction two years ago to Yusaku Maezawa), priced at $6 million. The painting was at auction at Phillips New York in May 2017, where it sold for $2.6 million.

Pablo Picasso’s Femme au chapeau, Buste (1961) at Almine Rech.

JANELLE ZARA

Around the corner from Acquavella, Van de Weghe has Ape (1984) priced at $4 million (a reappearance from its booth at Art Basel in Miami in December) and another Basquiat, the large and bright yellow Onion Gum (1983) at $18 million. (Which is something of a price jump: the work sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 2012 for $7.4 million, then came up again at the same house in May 2016 and made $6.6 million.)

Pace Gallery, which has operated a location in Beijing since 2008, in addition to spaces in New York, London, Geneva, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Palo Alto, sold two-thirds of its booth on opening day, including a large painting from 2012 by Zhang Xiaogang, which went to a Chinese foundation for $1 million.

“While the focus is to increase our artists’ presence in Asia, the work that’s being shown and the collectors who are attending are far more global and integrated than ever before,” said Pace VP Adam Sheffer, who had previously done the fair with Cheim & Read, where he was a partner before joining Pace. It is no longer the situation, he said, that this is a fair galleries “write off. It is now where you make a profit.”

Mainland Chinese collectors were on hand, such as Li Lin, Yang Bin, and Qiao Zhibing, who just opened his Tanks project in Shanghai—a museum in disused oil tanks. There were also numerous members of the board of the UCCA in Beijing. Others included Adrian Cheng, who opened the most recent of his K11 Art Foundation spaces in Hong Kong earlier this week.

Blum & Poe sold Henry Taylor’s large 2013 painting Queen & King for $850,000 shortly after the fair opened. The gallery also sold a piece by 60-year-old Japanese artist Yukinori Yanagi, Wandering Position – Pgonomyrmex7 (1997), which the artist made by using a red crayon to follow the wanderings of an ant. It went for $65,000; the gallery recently began representing the artist.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Ape (1984) at Van de Weghe.

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Newcomers to the fair include Paula Cooper, Regen Projects, and Matthew Marks, the latter showing a selection of paintings and sculptures by Kenneth Price, a 2017 Katharina Fritsch sculpture of a strawberry in cobalt blue, and a floral diptych of enamel paint on aluminum by Gary Hume, whose solo exhibition at the gallery’s L.A. space closes this Friday.

“Hands down, this is the best fair in Asia right now—every year just gets bigger and bigger in terms of the audiences and quality,” said Roshini Vadehra of the New Delhi–based Vadehra Art Gallery, whose works, including those by conceptual artist and photographer Shilpa Gupta that question national borders, are shown alongside didactic introductions. “People are unfamiliar with Indian artists, and are too shy to ask questions,” Vadehra said.

The relative obscurity of artists from regions outside the celebrated mainstream art world means that some dealers have to work that much harder for the attention of collectors. “I believe the struggle here is perhaps about outreach,” Art Basel Hong Kong’s director, Adeline Ooi, said. “If you explore the sort of programs and activities that a lot of Asian galleries do, I think they also take on an educational role where the commercial also becomes a little bit of a nonprofit.”

For some, participation can literally be a nonprofit affair. Taipei-based dealer Chi-Wen Huang annually takes a loss for her participation in the fair, but continues to present her booths as curated group exhibitions every year. Art Basel Hong Kong, she said, provides a major platform of visibility for her artists. The sexually and politically provocative themes of her exhibition this year, titled “Enka ! Platform for Change,” for example, would not have a venue in Mainland China’s conservative climate.

Lubna Chowdhary, Certain Times V (2019) at Jhaveri Contemporary.

JANELLE ZARA

Like Tsui in the South China Morning Post, Meli Angkapradipta of Jakarta’s Nadi Gallery also questioned the strength of the current global economy. Having shown at the fair longer than it’s been part of the Art Basel brand, she’s noticed that her sales have been in decline in recent years, but like Huang, continues to return for the sake of global recognition for her artists. “Indonesian artists have good potential, and I believe that internationally, they should know about us,” she said.

After showing in the Galleries sector during previous years, Manila-based gallery 1335/Mabini presented works by Jill Paz—mannerist-style images laser-cut onto overlapping sheets of cardboard—in Discoveries, the sector devoted to newly commissioned works by solo emerging artists. Rather than showing several artists in the main fair, according to gallery associate Marie-Theres Steingassner, Discoveries proves to be a more strategic platform. “The artist really has the opportunity to explain herself, unlike in a Galleries booth where it’s not so easy to reach out,” she said.

Another gem is the display of ceramic sculptures by Lubna Chowdhary in Mumbai-based Jhaveri Contemporary’s Discoveries booth: these are collages of brightly colored architectural ceramic cutouts leaning on the booth’s perimeter that suggest fictional skylines. This is Jhaveri Contemporary’s third year in the sector. “We’re giving people an opportunity to get to know us, the work, the program,” said owner Priya Jhaveri. The art fair is a long game, she added, “or that’s what I tell myself.”