ART + AUCTION 'Power Issue', December 2015

The bios and essays in Art+Auction’s guide to notable players in the art world will be rolled out on ARTINFO over the course of the next two weeks. Here, we present Part Three. Click here for an introduction to the entire series. Click here for previously published installments. Check back daily for new articles.

Magnus Renfrew * Auctioneer In July 2014, Renfrew took the title deputy chairman and director of fine arts in Hong Kong for Bonhams, the house for which he initiated sales of contemporary Chinese art in 2006. In the interim he served as the founding director of the Hong Kong International Art Fair (Art HK) and oversaw its development from 2007 to 2011, when it was acquired by MCH Group, parent company of Art Basel. He then directed the first two editions of Art Basel Hong Kong, in 2013 and 2014. In 2013 Renfrew was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and he has been instrumental in positioning Hong Kong as a center for modern and contemporary art in Asia. At Bonhams, Renfrew now draws on his deep knowledge of the gallery and collector network and the overall Asian market while overseeing regional business strategies as well as the Classical, modern, and contemporary Asian art departments. // AUCTION STRATEGIES

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 1 HONG KONG ECONOMIC JOURNAL 'How to trade the new golden age of art', 18 November 2015

The 2008 financial crisis prompted investors to include alternative investment in their portfolio to diversify risk.

As a platform for alternative investment, the art market is experiencing a new golden age previously thought impossible.

According to the European Fine Art Foundation Art Market Report 2015, sales in the global art market hit a record €51 billion (HK$427 billion) last year.

Investing is sometimes referred to as an irrational behavior and art itself often appears subjective.

But not many realize that art investment can be a rational game.

What should investors consider before they bet on art?

Compared with other forms of alternative investment, art investment stands out in terms of its potential return on investment (ROI).

Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) by Picasso, for example, was sold for US$179 million (HK$1.4 billion) at an auction in May, five times more than it fetched (US$31.9 million) in 1997.

Based on the experience of collector and art critic Paul Serfaty, his ROI ranges from one to 300 times and the average over 20 years is eight times his investment.

Serfaty sells from his collection but he says he collects art not for the sake of investment but for his genuine interest in art.

“Everyone in the art world would advise you not to see art as an investment because it is a highly subjective new asset class which is subject to fashion,” he says.

“It can’t be recommended as a pure financial investment.”

Art market vs wealth distribution

There is a close link between market performance and global wealth distribution, Serfaty says.

He cites the art market in the United Kingdom between 1860 and 1914 as an example.

A new generation of collectors who made their fortune from manufacturing and trading emerged and started collecting art.

Art historian Gerald Reitlinger refers this period as “golden age of the living painter”.

Serfaty says his ROI benefited from the rise of Chinese contemporary art.

Moving to Hong Kong in 1988, he described China’s art market in those days as mainly dominated by foreign buyers until it had a dramatic turn at the millennium.

“The Chinese contemporary art market is unique. A considerable amount of cultural heritage was destroyed and almost all art forms had been turned into tools for propaganda during the Cultural Revolution,” he says.

“There was no capital and limited scholarship before the rise of the Chinese economy. It was only when a new generation of Chinese collectors emerged that their strong appetite for Chinese contemporary art heated up the market.”

Quality is king

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 2 The de Sarthe Gallery exhibits artworks by Chinese art master Zao Wouki and emerging artist Wang Guofeng, among many others.

Founder Pascal de Sarthe believes that the golden rule of collecting art is “quality first” because talented artists can lead the trend.

“If the secret recipe to real estate investment is location, location and location, art investment is all about quality,” he says.

“You should always buy the best quality that you can afford and identify talented artists before they gain fame.”

Art collecting requires patience.

Take the Japanese Gutai Group: their artworks had been widely criticized when they first exhibited in the United States half a century ago.

Dore Ashton, commentator of The New York Times even wrote that in some ways, the paintings “so imitative of the formless movements of living that they might be called rather dull representational works”.

But now Gutai Group is widely popular. Their works were shown at the Guggenheim Museum in 2013. Keishizoku by Kazuo Shiraga sold for US$4 million at a New York auction.

Diversifying for auctions

Magnus Renfrew, deputy chairman and director of fine arts for Asia of international auction house Bonhams and former director of Art Basel, Asia stressed the importance of engaging with a new generation of collectors.

To specifically target this area of the market, Bonhams hosted its inaugural auction dedicated to prints, photographs and works on Nov. 14.

“There have been sales dedicated to these media in London and New York for many years yet in Asia they have not, up until now, been given the attention they deserve,” he said.

“We want to apply international standards of practice to the promotion of these media. They can often provide a very accessible entry point into collecting and a good way to engage with new collectors. We have decided to make this sale truly global in content as collectors are now buying beyond their own national or regional boundaries.”

Last month, French auction house Artcurial hosted its inaugural auction in Hong Kong.

Sales included a range of categories such as comics, furniture and decorative art, modern and contemporary art and collectors’ cars.

Revenue from comics was the highest among the four categories. An Asian collector bought the Tintin story The Blue Lotus by Belgian cartoonist Hergé for US$1.24 million.

This is the first in a two-part series on art investment. The article appeared in the Hong Kong Private Banking Journal on Nov. 18.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 3 WALLPAPER 'Art for all: Bonhams Hong Kong stages affordable art auction', 13 November 2015

BY CATHERINE SHAW

If Hong Kong-based art specialist Magnus Renfrew has his way, the old fashioned chat-up line inviting someone to ‘come up and see my etchings’ is about to experience something of a revival.

Renfrew is credited with effectively jump-starting Asia’s regional contemporary art market with his Art HK fair that morphed into Art Basel Hong Kong in 2012. In his new role as deputy chairman and director of fine arts for Asia at Bonhams Hong Kong, he is introducing a new category of auctions in the city, designed to demonstrate that buying art at an auction does not necessarily require a limitless credit card.

The upcoming inaugural auction of 100 prints, photographs and ‘works on paper’ is the sort of affordable art Renfrew believes will appeal to a new generation keen to start buying art but who find art fairs and galleries intimidating.

‘An auction house offers a more relaxed environment and compared to galleries, estimated prices are on show,' he says. ‘We have deliberately included works by recognised artists like Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol at a very affordable price to attract people who may not have bought art before.’

Prices at the auction range from HK$8,000 to HK$700,00 while one of Hirst’s works is listed at an estimated at HK$55,000.

Standouts include a graphic Black Loops & Curves No. 3 etching by Sol Lewitt and Shanghai-born photographer Ho Fan’s iconic Approaching Shadow, an original vintage gelatin silver print that perfectly captures Hong Kong street life and culture during the 1950s.

Prints and photographs don’t usually feature on the city’s white-hot speculative art market but with Hong Kong’s M+ museum of visual culture having snapped up a more recent archival print of the same photograph, that too may soon change.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 4 NEW YORK TIMES 'Art Basel Shows How Far Hong Kong Has Come', 13 March 2015

By JOYCE LAU

HONG KONG — Collectors and museum directors from around the world had the chance on Friday to deal discreetly with the 223 galleries participating in the third Art Basel in Hong Kong fair.

The private viewing was the quiet before the storm on Saturday night, when the event kicks off officially with a Champagne-soaked vernissage that has become Hong Kong’s art party of the year. An estimated 65,000 visitors will descend on the fair before it closes on Tuesday.

The popularity of the annual Art Basel in Hong Kong is testament to how rapidly this city’s art market has grown, and how far it still has to go.

One of the fair’s big draws — the Encounters section, with large-scale installations by international artists — is a hit with the public precisely because Hong Kong still does not have a world-class contemporary art museum. The proposed M+ museum, in the state-funded West Kowloon Cultural District, will not open until 2018.

Hong Kong’s annual art fair rose from the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis, when local entrepreneurs opened ART HK. That fledgling show, which drew on the strengths of the booming Chinese and Southeast Asian markets, quickly caught the attention of overseas buyers. MCH Group, the Swiss art giant that runs the Art Basel fairs in Switzerland and Miami Beach, bought a majority stake in ART HK in 2011 and renamed it in 2013, bringing it under the Art Basel umbrella.

Magnus Renfrew, a co-founder of ART HK who is considered a pivotal figure in developing Hong Kong’s art market, oversaw the fair from 2008 to 2014. After a half-year search for his successor, and with just two months to go before this year’s fair, MCH announced on Dec. 30 that the job would go to Adeline Ooi, an Art Basel executive specializing in the Southeast Asian market.

Hong Kong’s local art scene is less established than Tokyo’s, and less vibrant than Beijing’s. But as a tax-free, English-speaking commercial center with few government restrictions, it is an ideal place to buy and sell art. In terms of sales, it is the third-largest art market in the world after New York and London.

One important aspect is Hong Kong’s lack of censorship. “In Southeast Asia, religion is an issue when it comes to images dealing with nudity or sexuality,” Ms. Ooi said by telephone from Sydney, Australia, one of many stops on a promotional trip across the Asia-Pacific region. At the Singapore Biennale art fair in 2011, she said, certain works were taken down.

“In Hong Kong, we have liberties we would not have in China,” she said.

One example is M+. The museum-in-progress has made its mark with a collection that includes works by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, as well as photographs from the deadly June 4, 1989, crackdown in Beijing — images that would not likely be shown at a similar state-funded museum in mainland China.

“Hong Kong is a city that’s not afraid of foreigners or foreign ideas,” Ms. Ooi said. “It’s not afraid of anything.”

A change in schedule this year to March from May, to avoid clashes with other international art events, has brought more high-profile Western galleries to Art Basel in Hong Kong.

But what is noteworthy is the ascent of Asian galleries. Leo Xu Projects of Shanghai, which opened in 2011, spent two years in the Discoveries sector, which is for emerging, smaller galleries. This year, it is in the Galleries sector, next to big names from New York, London and Paris.

According to Chi-Won Yoon, chief executive of UBS Asia-Pacific, 40 percent of the company’s art acquisition budget is now dedicated to the Asia-Pacific region. UBS is the main corporate sponsor of Art Basel in Hong Kong, which Mr. Yoon described as having “a certain energy that is different from

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 6 the other fairs.”

The focus is on encouraging young Asian collectors. Art Basel in Hong Kong is expanding its Junior Art Hub, developing a mobile app called Planet Art and holding educational seminars at the University of Hong Kong.

Thanks to the annual fair, mid-March has now turned into Hong Kong Art Week. There will be 150 events around town, including free screenings of 40 films at the Hong Kong Arts Centre.

The old posse from ART HK has announced a rival art fair called Art Central, which will run at the same time as Art Basel in Hong Kong. In its inaugural year, Art Central will host 70 galleries at a newly commissioned space on the downtown waterfront, plus talks and seminars at The Asia Society.

Most Hong Kong galleries now time their big openings for March. Pearl Lam, an eccentric, cutting- edge gallerist, opened a second Hong Kong space this month at SoHo 189 with a solo show by the Chinese artist Ren Ri. SoHo 189, a building in the quickly gentrifying Soho area, also acts as the home for Gallery Huit and Leo Gallery.

Patrick Foret, Art Basel’s head of sponsorship, said that Hong Kong’s fair could aspire to be like Miami’s, which draws together “creative industries, fashion and art.”

Para Site, one of the city’s most established alternative art institutions, just opened a larger new space in Quarry Bay, in Eastern Hong Kong.

Also in Eastern Hong Kong is Chai Wan Mei, a loose series of parties and open houses in the artsy industrial neighborhood of Chai Wan, where many artists live and have studios. The Chai Wan Nights party has become the hot, sweaty alternative to Art Basel’s air-conditioned cocktail receptions.

“Chai Wan is a real eye-opener,” Ms. Ooi said. “Visitors don’t expect art in warehouse spaces in Hong Kong.”

Wilson Shieh, who has been an artist in Hong Kong for 20 years, has watched the local art scene develop from basically nothing.

“When we graduated from art school, we didn’t even think of becoming full-time artists,” he said. “When I started, I couldn’t have imagined that we would have an art scene like this. In the ‘90s, Hong Kong was just a stopping-off point for collectors heading to Beijing.”

Mr. Shieh considers the city’s annual art fair to be a major boon to local artists. “It’s been eight years now that we’ve had a platform, an opportunity, to show ourselves to the world,” he said.

“Visitors are curious — some even come to my studio in Fotan,” he said, referring to another art community in the outlying New Territories. “I think Hong Kong’s golden era is yet to come.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 7 TIME OUT HONG KONG 'Q&A: Adeline Ooi - Asia Director of Art Basel', 9 March 2015

She’s got big shoes to fill but new Asia director of Art Basel, Adeline Ooi, tells Ysabelle Cheung that she’s ready to take the continent’s art boom in her stride

When Basel announced that Magnus Renfrew was stepping down from his role as Asia director last year, the question of who would replace him was tinged with trepidation – the stakes were high. It wasn’t so much who ‘would’ but also who ‘could’. In Hong Kong’s burgeoning arts industry, every player is essential in their role – artist, curator, gallerist, critic – and to remove just one from that structure would be tantamount to a jenga collapse.

Which is why Basel made a smart move in selecting Adeline Ooi, one of their own. The Malaysia- born (where she was based up until now) curator is already familiar with the fair, having been the Southeast Asia VIP relations manager for the past two years, and she brings with her a strong background in curation and gallery know-how. More importantly, as an art lover with her finger firmly on the pulse of an aggressively growing market, she snugly fits the Basel equilibrium of creativity and commerce, one that has made the fair so successful over the past 45 years. We chat with her about the market, vision and Basel just before the fair descends on Hong Kong for the third year...

Adeline, we remember you first came to Hong Kong in 2003 to work with the Fringe Club. What was your impression of it at the time? I knew very little about Hong Kong then. I remember I was in awe of the cultural scene as there were so many people who came to see the shows at the Fringe and the people that I talked to were generally interested in art. That was a huge difference to most people I would come across in Malaysia.

And what’s your impression now? The gallery scene here is active, with regular openings and activities. There is a strong community of collectors and local supporters, as well as the presence of institutions and non-profits – these are key factors that indicate a dynamic scene. But every art scene is not without its challenges. Space and rent is always a challenge in Hong Kong. That said, it is a community of resilient and passionate people. I am also very excited about M+ and can’t wait for the building to be ready.

There’s a lot of talk about there not being enough support for local artists in comparison to support for international. What’s your take on this? Hong Kong’s cultural infrastructure is growing in a positive way. Events such as Art Basel, Art Gallery Week and various others throughout the art calendar provide platforms to showcase and highlight local and international talents. These events also tell us that there is a solid gallery scene that is operating on the ground as the Hong Kong galleries are usually quite well represented. I have also learned about the younger generations of Hong Kong-based artists through local galleries (for example, Gallery Exit and Edouard Malingue Gallery) from my years of coming here regularly, and this is a positive sign. I am certain I belong to a wider group of people interested in the Hong Kong scene and I look forward to seeing more support becoming available to local artists as their work is exposed to wider audiences.

A few female artists in Hong Kong have mentioned that the glass ceiling is still intact. What’s your opinion on this? Sure, the ‘white boys’ club’ label still has resonance but I think the situation has changed a lot. There are female leaders around the world. Consider the powerful women in the art world who are not artists within the Asia Pacific region alone, from Sheikha Hoor of Sharjah Art Foundation to the influential female gallery owners across Asia. I would say that women have carved quite a strong territory for themselves. We also have a number of major female artists being presented at Basel this year: Cao Fei, Yayoi Kusama, Mariko Mori, Pinaree Sanpitak and Shahzia Sikander, just to name a few. Fighting the good cause for gender equality is an ongoing process but I would say women stand a better chance at equality in the art world in general.

Art from different Asian regions is often categorised singularly as ‘Asian art’. How have you responded to this? Asia is a slippery term in that it is difficult to define. Asia is so vast. It basically stretches as far west

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 8 as Turkey and goes all the way east towards New Zealand. That’s a lot of geographical distance to cover with civilisations that date back thousands of years. How respective art scenes have developed is a result of histories and cultural heritage, influences of socio-political conditions, religious beliefs as well as traditions that have shaped our respective societies. The differences are quite clear. But at the same time, I am struck by the similarities. Sometimes I see connections in our culture, sometimes it’s in our history and sometimes it’s in the way we approach foreigners, or in the way that we are non-confrontational. I am constantly fascinated by these shared nuances. Rapid development is also something that most Asian countries share. Having been involved in the art scene for only 15 years, which is not a long time for most people, I feel like I have experienced three different lifetimes.

When were you first truly moved by art? There are a few vivid moments but I’m not sure if I can call them my ‘first’. One of them was Rebecca Horn’s piano hanging upside down at the Tate [in London]. I remember the exact feeling of keys ‘crashing’ down on me. It struck me in the deepest possible way ever and I felt strangely ‘cleansed’ by the sounds. I think ultimately one’s connection to works of art is subjective. A lot of it is dependent on time, place and state of mind.

How do you think Asia’s market will develop over the next few years? Asia’s art scenes are developing at a rapid pace. This will provide artists and galleries with more opportunities to show works to different groups of audience – local, regional and global, and on different platforms. I am looking forward to seeing more opportunities for emerging artists from Asia to present their works. It is a great time to be working in Asia. I feel like this is our time to shine and I am very excited to see how we will develop.

Finally, are you excited to be joining the Basel team as Asia director? Absolutely! I think what sets Art Basel apart is its focus on quality and making meaningful connections between the different sectors of the art community. I wouldn’t be working in the art world if I didn’t have a strong love for art and for people wanting to bring these sectors of the community together.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 9 IL SOLE 24 ORE 'Magnus Renfrew lascia la direzione di Art Basel Hong Kong', 24 July 2014

Magnus Renfrew lascia la direzione di Art Basel Hong Kong

A settembre tornerà da Bonhams Magnus Renfrew lascia la direzione di Art Basel Hong Kong per ritornare da Bonhams. Sarà vice- presidente per l'Asia e direttore dei dipartimenti di arte classica, moderna e contemporanea a partire da settembre. Renfrew è stato il direttore fondatore della fiera Art HK - Hong Kong International Art Fair e ha seguito il suo straordinario sviluppo fino all'acquisizione da parte di Art Basel nel 2011. Prima ancora è stato Head of Exhibitions della galleria di Pearl Lam a Shanghai ed esperto da Bonhams dove ha collaborato a mettere in piedi la prima asta di arte contemporanea asiatica a Londra nel 2006.

"Sono entusiasta di tornare da Bonhams per assumere questa nuova posizione - ha detto Renfrew - e apprezzo l'opportunità di poter portare avanti l'attività della casa d'aste in più rapida crescita nel mercato dell'arte in più rapido sviluppo nel mondo."

Renfrew opererà dalla sede di Bonhams a Hong Kong al 20° piano di One Pacific Place dove la casa d'aste ha appena inaugurato una nuovissima sala d'aste appositamente creata per lo scopo (la prima a Hong Kong), attrezzata con le tecnologie più avanzate.

Silvia Anna Barrilà

2014-07-24

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 10 HONG KONG TATLER 'Magnus Renfrew Moves from Art Basel to Bonhams', 23 July 2014

Magnus Renfrew Moves from Art Basel to Bonhams The head of the city’s biggest art fair makes his move over to the purveyor of global fine art and collectibles

By Hong Kong Tatler on Jul 23, 2014

A definite advocate for Hong Kong’s blossoming art scene, Magnus Renfrew was the founding direct of Art HK in 2008 and oversaw its development and acquisition by MCH Group in 2011, which resulted in the fair being rebranded as Art Basel Hong Kong. Since then, Renfrew has successfully generated significant growth in the art world in Asia.

This coming September, Renfrew will make his move over to Bonhams to take on the role of deputy chairman and director of fine arts in Asia. The return to the auction house he was once a part of will definitely be a homecoming of sorts and a chance to really drive the Asian business forward.

In his new role, Renfrew will be responsible for defining the strategy for Bonhams in Asia in relation to fine arts and he will sit on the board of Bonhams Asia, reporting to Bonhams Group co-chairman and CEO, Malcolm Barber.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 11 BLOOMBERG 'Art Basel Asia Director Renfrew to join Bonhams Asia', 22 July 2014

Art Basel Asia Director Magnus Renfrew will join Bonhams as deputy chairman Asia and director of Fine Arts in September, he said by telephone today.

“This is a very exciting time to be involved in the Asian art market and building up an Asian collector base,” said Renfrew, 38, who will be responsible for boosting Bonhams’ classical, modern and contemporary Asian art offerings.

Renfrew oversaw Art Basel’s Hong Kong fairs in 2013 and 2014. The company, which runs international art fairs in Basel, Miami and Hong Kong, said it has not appointed his successor in an e- mail response.

Renfrew will be returning to Bonhams where he worked for seven years and helped set up the auction house’s first London Contemporary Asian Art sale in 2006.

He was the founding director of ART HK, which was acquired by Art Basel’s parent company MCH Group in 2011.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 12 APOLLO MAGAZINE 'Magnus Renfrew to leave Basel for Bonhams Asia', 22 July 2014

Maggie Gray

Magnus Renfrew will step down as director of Art Basel in Hong Kong at the end of August, to join Bonhams as their Deputy Chairman, Asia and Director of Fine Arts, Asia. Renfrew was the founding director of Art HK, which launched in 2008 and was subsequently acquired by MCH Group (the parent company of Art Basel) in 2011. We spoke to him this morning about his new role and the future of the art market in Asia.

Congratulations on your new appointment. How do you feel about leaving Art Basel? It’s been a real privilege to work on something right from its inception, and together with a team to have built a fair that is widely regarded as one of the most important in the world – certainly the leading art fair in Asia. I felt that I’d achieved what we set out to achieve and more.

It’s rare that you have the opportunity to really build something in your career, so I’m lucky to have that opportunity, again, at Bonhams. The prospect of moving there to help drive their business in Asia is very exciting.

What will be your immediate responsibilities in the position? And your long term goals? I’m responsible for the overall strategy pertaining to the departments of classical, modern and contemporary art from Asia. One of the important things that we’ll be doing is developing the collector base. It’s something that I’ve been working on for the last few years at Art Basel, which placed real importance on audience development. There’s a huge amount of work to be done. The first priority is to get the right team in place.

Are there specific challenges/opportunities facing auction houses in HK, as opposed to international fairs? The art world is a cultural ecology and all aspects of it are intertwined. I think the importance of collectors from Asia is expanding at an accelerating rate – and that’s true for all collecting disciplines, not only those within the region. It’s an exciting prospect, to help to build that audience.

You were heavily involved in the first sale of Contemporary Asian Art in London in June 2006. How have things changed; have you seen Western and Eastern markets come together since then? Things have changed dramatically, particularly the gallery system in Asia. Galleries aren’t just buying works directly from artists and then selling them on at a markup – they are taking a much more representational role. Artists also understand the importance of the system. In a sense the market has become more sophisticated.

There has also been an incredible increase in interest in collecting modern and contemporary art from Asia. It’s not just on an East-West axis. There are collectors from Indonesia buying art from Japan, for example, and many other examples of cross-cultural and transnational collecting within Asia itself. But there has also been a dramatic increase in sales of art from the West to collectors in Asia – and I think that is a very exciting opportunity.

Will Hong Kong play a central role in the development of the Asian art market? Absolutely. It’s already the third largest auction market after New York and London. Its importance as a meeting point for the international art world has been cemented by Art Basel’s arrival, and I think it is only going to develop further as the market does. The market tends to follow the money, and the greatest creation of wealth at the moment is in Asia.

What developments should we look out for in Hong Kong in the next few years? When you really think about Hong Kong, one of the things that defines it culturally is its extremely strong gallery scene. Very few other places offer such diversity – and that’s only going to get more and more significant as time goes on. You also now have people like Pace, Gagosian, White Cube, Ben Brown, Simon Lee, Pearl Lam…all doing really interesting shows and helping to develop the collector base. And of course, the arrival of M+ in West Kowloon will be another major boost to the cultural ecology of Hong Kong when it opens in 2017/2018.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 14 ART REVIEW 'Magnus Renfrew leaves Art Basel Hong Kong for Bonhams', 22 July 2014

Founding director of Art HK heads up Asia division

Art Basel Asia director Magnus Renfrew will join Bonhams auction house as deputy chairman Asia and director of fine arts in September, it has been announced. Renfew was the founding fair director of ART HK in 2008, before seeing its acquisition by MCH Group (the parent company of Art Basel) in 2011 and steering its first two editions as Art Basel in Hong Kong in 2013 and 2014. He was previously head of exhibitions for Pearl Lam’s Contrasts Gallery in Shanghai and prior to that an auction house specialist with Bonhams where he was instrumental in setting up their first sale of Contemporary Asian Art in London in June 2006. Renfrew will head up Bonhams brand new saleroom in Hong Kong on the 20th floor of One Pacific Place.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 15 ARTASIAPACIFIC 'Magnus Renfrew appointed Bonhams Deputy Chairman, Asia and Director of Fine Arts, Asia', 22 July 2014

On July 22, Bonhams announced the appointment of Magnus Renfrew as deputy chairman, Asia, and director of fine arts, Asia. Assuming his role in September, Renfrew will spearhead the renowned auction house’s strategy relating to fine arts and supervise its Classical, Modern and Contemporary Art departments in Asia. Renfrew will also sit on the board of Bonhams Asia.

Renfrew was previously the director of Art Basel Asia, and a member of the executive committee of Art Basel, and was responsible for the participation of Asian galleries and collectors in all iterations of the fair. In 2008, he was the founding fair director of ART HK—the Hong Kong International Art Fair—which was subsequently acquired by Art Basel’s parent company, MCH, in 2011. Two years later, in 2013, Renfrew helmed the successful inaugural edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong.

Excited about his return to Bonhams, where he first worked as a specialist in London in 2006, Renfrew told ArtAsiaPacific by phone that he is eager to bring about changes to Bonhams in Asia: “It has been an incredible experience working on the fair, from the very beginning to its status now as one of the leading fairs in the world. I feel I’ve achieved all that I set out to achieve, it’s on a solid footing now. Going to Bonhams will be a new challenge. The art market in Asia is at an interesting moment and there’s a real opportunity for me to make significant contribution and impact there.” When asked about what he plans to implement when he joins the auction house this autumn, he continued: "I’ll be working hard to build the team. It’s about doing the right thing. Bonhams are straight shooters, which will be a real change for Asia.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 16 ARTNEWS 'Marc Spiegler Seeks Asia Expert for New Basel Hong Kong Director', 22 July 2014

Art Basel Director Marc Spiegler said in a phone interview today that despite the impending departure of Art Basel’s Director Asia, Magnus Renfrew (who started the fair as Art HK in 2008), Art Basel Hong Kong attendees can expect better editions, if only due to its new March dates.

In recent years, the fair’s May dates made it tricky for dealers who wanted to be at the New York auctions, Frieze New York or the Venice Biennale, to say nothing of Hong Kong’s brutal weather at that time, he said. “We just closed applications for next year,” he said. “And we had many new galleries who have never done the show before, or who did it once or twice in the early years and are now doing it again, because we have the March dates.”

As for Renfrew’s replacement, Spiegler said that instead of looking for a specific background—”I was a freelance journalist before I came to this job!”—his top concern is that the new Asia director be first and foremost an expert in the region, and its diverse artistic scenes. “For example, the Japanese and Korean scenes are close to each other, but as a rule the scenes in Asia are not interwoven,” he said. “It’s not a continent you can speed read.”

“Magnus was the one whose vision built Art HK into a fair that was relatively easily transformed into an Art Basel show, so today’s show is a result first of his vision working alone and then in working with Art Basel. But in comparison with his role three years ago, his departure doesn’t leave the same void,” Spiegler said.

“It’s a very young fair,” he added. “It’s only been under the Art Basel name for two years and Art HK started in 2008 so this is not a fair with the same long history that Miami Beach and Basel have. Given that, I think it’s very quickly defined itself as the premier fair in the region, a world-class fair that balances its diverse cultures.” Copyright 2016, ARTnews Ltd, 40 W 25th Street, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10010. All rights reserved.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 17 ARTNEWS 'Art Basel Hong Kong's Magnus Renfrew to Bonhams', July 22 2014

Magnus Renfrew, Art Basel’s Director Asia, overseeing its Hong Kong fair, announced that he is leaving the company to join Bonhams as deputy chairman Asia and director of fine arts, according to Bloomberg.

Renfrew—the founding director who led the Art HK fair for all five of its iterations from 2008 to 2012, before it was acquired by the Basel mothership—told the wire service, “This is a very exciting time to be involved in the Asian art market and building up an Asian collector base.”

Copyright 2016, ARTnews Ltd, 40 W 25th Street, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10010. All rights reserved.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 18 ARTINFO.COM 'Magnus Renfrew to move from Art Basel to Bonhams as Deputy Chairman Asia in September', 22 July 2014

MAGNUS RENFREW TO MOVE FROM ART BASEL TO BONHAMS AS DEPUTY CHAIRMAN ASIA IN SEP

BY Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop | July 22, 2014

Magnus Renfrew, who has been heading Art Basel in Hong Kong, is moving to Bonhams in September to take on the role of deputy chairman, Asia and director of fine arts, Asia.

For Renfrew, this is a return to the auction house where he had been instrumental in setting up their first sale of contemporary Asian art in London in June 2006.

In his new position he will be responsible for defining the strategy for Bonhams in Asia relating to fine arts and overseeing the classical, modern, and contemporary art departments in the region. Renfrew will sit on the board of Bonhams Asia and will report directly to Malcolm Barber, co- chairman of Bonhams Group and CEO Hong Kong Board.

“Magnus has an exceptional reputation and network within the international art world. He has played an instrumental role in the development of the art market in Asia over the past decade and we look forward to working with him to drive forward Bonhams’ business in Asia,” Robert Brooks, co-chairman of Bonhams said in a press statement.

Talking to Blouin Artinfo about his Bonhams' appointment, Renfrew noted that "whilst it is a homecoming of sorts, Bonhams has developed significantly since I left in 2006."

"Asia is going to be a key focus on generating growth for the business and it is a hugely exciting opportunity for me to drive that forward. The art market and collector-base in Asia has been developing at a remarkable pace over the last few years and we are at a moment where all the indicators are that this is accelerating,“ he said.

He noted that while Bonhams is already actively recruiting to build the specialist teams in Hong Kong, “ensuring that we have the right team in place is priority number one.”

Renfrew was the founding director of ART HK in 2008 and oversaw its development and acquisition by MCH Group (the parent company of Art Basel) in 2011. He had previously been head of exhibitions for Pearl Lam’s Contrasts Gallery in Shanghai.

Following Bonhams announcement, Marc Spiegler, director Art Basel, also issued a statement indicating that Art Basel is now “actively seeking” a successor to Renfrew,” to whom he leaves an excellent legacy,” as the two editions under the Art Basel name, combined with next year's move to a March date, “have led to first-time applications by many leading Western galleries for the 2015 edition."

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 19 ARTNET.COM 'Magnus Renfrew drops Art Basel for Bonhams', 22 July 2014

By Alexander Forbes

Art Basel Hong Kong director Magnus Renfrew is leaving the Swiss mega-fair to rejoin Bonhams, the auction house announced on Tuesday. He will assume the role of deputy chairman Asia and director of Fine Arts beginning in September.

"I am excited to be returning to Bonhams to take up this new position and relish the opportunity to drive forward the business for the fastest growing auction house in the most rapidly developing art market in the world." Renfrew said in a statement.

Renfrew previously served as a contemporary art specialist for Bonhams for seven years before being named the founding director of ArtHK in 2008. That fair was purchased by Art Basel holding company, MCH Group, in 2011.

Bonham's co-chairman Robert Brooks commented in the announcement: "We are delighted to welcome Magnus back to Bonhams in this newly created role. Magnus has an exceptional reputation and network within the international art world. He has played an instrumental role in the development of the art market in Asia over the past decade and we look forward to working with him to drive forward Bonhams' business in Asia."

The move is a blow for Art Basel Hong Kong, which many said seemed to truly be gaining its feet in its second edition this past May. It's also particularly challenging considering the two months less turn-around time the fair has for 2015, having moved their dates to March going forward.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 20 TIMES OF INDIA 'Art Basel Hong Kong retains Asian flavor: Magnus Renfrew', 15 May 2014

Neelam Raaj | TNN | May 15, 2014, 03.01 PM IST

2008, ART + AUCTION Magazine described him as one of 15 Individuals "without whom the art world would not spin on its axis". In both 2010 and 2012, ART REVIEW in its 'Power 100' issue named him as one of the 100 most influential figures in international art. Magnus Renfrew's place in the power lists is probably well-earned for he transformed what was then a 'cultural desert' into Asia art's hub. Renfrew, who founded ART HK and now directs the Hong Kong edition of Art Basel, spoke to Neelam Raaj on how the fair, which has over $1 billion worth of art on sale this year, has balanced the local and the global.

After Art Basel acquired the Hong Kong fair, and everyone thought this would be just a copy of the Basel and Miami fairs. How did you manage to retain the Asian flavor of the fair?

When we were initially in talks with Art Basel about the acquisition of Art HK that was actually the shortest conversation we had - about the positioning of the fair. I thought I would have to push harder but when I spoke about the need for a 50% representation from Asia and the Asia Pacific region, they said, 'Yes, of course'. That was one of the fears a lot of people had — that it was going to become a copy paste version of Art Basel in Basel or Miami. But it has managed to retain its Asian flavor and focus.

There seem to be quite a few new regional art fairs coming up. India itself has gone from one to five just in the last two years. Is there a glut?

Art fairs are an exceptional opportunity to engage with art. Some will say museums and biennales make a better way to engage with contemporary art over a longer period but in the absence of those, art fairs perform both a cultural as well as a commercial function. People come to look and learn about art as well as buy art. From the gallery perspective, it is getting increasingly difficult to go to so many art fairs. It's become kind of a travelling circus. I think there is going to be a shakedown. People will have to make strategic decisions about which markets they want to engage with and which art fairs best access those markets. We've very fortunate with Basel, Miami and HK — all our fairs serve a wide constituency as we attract collectors from each of those regions and from across the world.

You don't see Art Stage Singapore and the India Art Fair as competition?

People often talk about our competitors in Asia but that's not how we see it. People start buying at one fair and then come to us. The more people that are introduced to collecting, the better it is for all of us. The representation of Indian galleries at ART Basel Hong Kong has been rising in the last two years. Have you made a conscious effort to attract them?

One of the reasons why we were able to attract Indian galleries was that Shireen Gandhy from Gallery Chemould (in Mumbai) was on our selection committee. She raised our awareness about what's happening on the Indian art scene and also encouraged Indian galleries to apply. She has been an ambassador for us in a way. Delhi Art Gallery came to ART HK Basel for the first time last year and has a booth again this year, showing modernists like Akbar Padamsee and M F Husain. Isn't that a different direction for a fair that is known for showing contemporary work?

We've always wanted to position the fair as a modern and contemporary fair. I think that initially we built up a strong participation of western modern galleries but hadn't made much headway with persuading galleries from Asia with strong modern or historical material to come here. That's one of the things we'd like to focus on. It provides context for contemporary — people can see that's this work hasn't just sprung fully formed. Modern work really helps to ground the contemporary and the contemporary invigorates the modern. The Indian and Chinese art markets are compared, and the comparison is often unfavourable since India hasn't seen the same kind of boom that China has. Will it ever touch those heights?

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 24

There was a significant boom in 2007-08 but the downturn really negatively impacted the Indian market. However, the moderns are still doing very well. In the contemporary market, it takes time to rebuild trust. As with other art scenes in Asia, it is important for there to be benchmarks for evaluation other than the market. Curatorial and critical acclaim are crucial to building a sense of confidence. Often when you have a new market — India or China—and things are auction driven, there can be irrational exuberance and people may not one have the grounding of curatorial and critical acclaim which helps them understand which artists are going to be interesting in the long term. That's fundamentally important. As time goes on, these values are going to be widely recognized. This is certainly already the case in the Chinese contemporary market. People are looking to see beyond the latest auction star.

What's your advice to a first-time art buyer?

Ask lots of questions. You learn about art by seeing art in context. It's very difficult to understand where an artist is coming from by seeing a single work in isolation, so if you see a work that you like, ask the gallery if they have images of other works by the same artist that you can compare and contrast with. The other thing is to find out about the background of the artist — where the artist studied and whether he or she has had any solo shows in non-commercial spaces.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 25 BLOOMBERG 'HK is the Only Truly Global Art Fair: Renfrew', 15 May 2014

(video)

May 15 (Bloomberg) –- Art Basel Asia Director Magnus Renfrew discusses this year’s Art Basel’s Asia show, the works on display and the future of the fair with Zeb Eckert on Bloomberg Television’s “On The Move Asia.” (Source: Bloomberg)

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 26 XINHUA 'Art Basel Hong Kong opens', 14 May 2014

HONG KONG, May 14 (Xinhua) -- The second edition of Art Basel Hong Kong kicked off here Wednesday.

A total of 245 premier galleries from 39 countries and regions are taking part in the world renowned art show this year.

Apart from showcasing artworks at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center, the organizer features for the first time in Hong Kong a special program -- Film, which is held in the Hong Kong Arts Center.

Curated by Chinese Mainland multi-media artist Li Zhenhua, Film is a sector dedicated to film by and about artists. Works by 41 artists are screened at the Hong Kong Arts Center, including those presented by international artists such as Takashi Ishida, Dinh Q. Le and Hong Kong artists Kwan Sheung Chi and Christopher Doyle.

Li said at a press conference that more crossovers between film and artwork were seen after the year 2000, and he believed that there were an abundance of exchange and development of ideas between filmmakers and artists.

The art show is also exhibiting German artist Carsten Nicolai's big-scale outdoor installation artwork Alpha Pulse from May 15 to 17, when light pattern will pulsate in a synchronized frequency across the entire facade of Hong Kong's iconic 490-meter high International Commerce Center on the Kowloon harbor front. Like a lighthouse, the building will send its pulses into the city, reaching out to members of the public.

Magnus Renfrew, director of Asia's Art Basel, said it was their aim to extend and share artworks with a wide range of people and showcasing Alpha Pulse was the first step. They are planning to do more outdoor exhibitions in the coming years, he added.

Hong Kong's Chief Secretary for Administration Carrie Lam was also among the guests officiating at the opening ceremony of Art Basel Hong Kong.

The show is open to public from May 15 to 17.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 27 CHINA POST 'Art Basel puts spotlight on cultural hub of Hong Kong', 12 May 2014

By David Watkins and Aaron Tam, AFP May 12, 2014, 12:03 am TWN

HONG KONG--Hong Kong's tallest building will transform into a glowing art installation this week, a beacon showing off the city's ambition to be recognized as a major cultural hub with its second Art Basel fair.

With its knack for bringing in a global mix of wealthy buyers, artists, gallerists, VIPs and celebrities, the five-day show is the catalyst to a champagne-soaked itinerary of art fairs, exhibitions and happenings.

German artist Carsten Nicolai was commissioned by Art Basel to turn the 118-story International Commerce Centre (ICC) on the Kowloon peninsula into a glowing installation called "(alpha) Pulse," one of many art events scheduled around the fair's opening.

Along with an installation by British artist Tracey Emin illuminating the city's historic Peninsula hotel, such displays are a flashy signal of intent by Hong Kong, the world's third-biggest auction market behind New York and London.

Hong Kong Art Basel, which begins Wednesday at the city's harborfront convention center, will this year bring together 245 participating galleries — half coming from Asia and Asia-Pacific.

"One of the biggest contributions that we're able to make is to raise the profile of Hong Kong above and beyond being a center for finance and retail," Art Basel director for Asia Magnus Renfrew told AFP.

"Because we are an event of this scale, we've really been able to help generate discussion around art in the city," he said, adding that he sees "huge" growth potential in the Asian art scene.

"The art market tends to follow the money and the greatest creation of wealth at the moment is in Asia," Renfrew said.

Beyond Basel

The city's "art week" beyond the fair will also include the unveiling of an outdoor sculpture studded with 8,000 Swarovski crystals by London duo Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard.

Provocative U.S. performance artist Ryan McNamara — whose previous works have included singing songs while buried to his neck in a forest and licking Louis Vuitton bags at the brand's New York boutique — will also carry out his latest work.

The five-day event also enables the city's own artists to be highlighted on a number of different platforms.

Renfrew said that Art Basel would direct its VIPs to more than 150 art events, giving greater exposure to the local scene.

Nadim Abbas's mixed-media installations have led to recent shows in New York, Singapore and London and his "Apocalypse Postponed" piece for the fair's pop-up bar will be unveiled this week.

Lee Kit is another local star, whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, video and installation and was selected to represent Hong Kong at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

"By building up awareness, excitement and opportunities around art in the city, (Art Basel) can also help lead to the increased support of the field in general," said Claire Hsu of the Asia Art Archive, a locally based non-profit group documenting the recent history of contemporary art in the region.

"How the community leverages this energy for the rest of the year is the key."

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 28 WALL STREET JOURNAL 'Art Basel Lights Up Hong Kong' 9 May 2014

By JASON CHOW skyline.

But for several days this month, the opposite view across Victoria Harbour will be grabbing the attention. Two artists are taking over major landmark buildings in Kowloon, using them as backdrops for large-scale light installations.

The first began Thursday with British artist Tracy Emin’s work “My Heart Is With You Always” emblazoning the 30-story tower of the Peninsula Hotel, which is sponsoring the piece. Inspired by her series of works rendering her own handwriting in neon, the installation is splashing the title’s words with laser lights on the building for 10 days from 7 p.m. to midnight.

And next week, German artist Carsten Nicolai, whose specialty is light and sound installations, will take control of the International Commerce Centre, the city’s tallest building. About two kilometers from the Peninsula in West Kowloon, it is visible from most points around the harbor. Mr. Nicolai’s work, commissioned by Art Basel Hong Kong, will make use of the lighted facade of the 118-story, 490-meter building—commonly called the ICC—during next week’s fair.

In an interview from his Berlin studio, Mr. Nicolai called the ICC the city’s “most striking and impressive tower.”

While the Peninsula sought out Ms. Emin, Mr. Nicolai and the Art Basel team pitched their art idea to the ICC’s management (the building is owned by Sun Hung Kai Properties ), who proved keen on the idea of surrendering control of the lights that line the tower’s length. Typically, they are programmed with seasonal displays and text to promote the observation deck.

Mr. Nicolai’s installation, “alpha pulse,” will flash for two hours over three nights, starting May 15. Rather than installing his own lights, the artist said he will simply reprogram the existing ones to pulse rhythmically. A student of the effect of frequencies on humans, Mr. Nicolai said the lights are programmed to pulse at a low frequency to elicit “more relaxing stimulations” among viewers.

The artist’s trademark is minimalist plays of light and sound. To accompany his Hong Kong installation, he designed a phone app that acts as the soundtrack. It will allow viewers to synchronize the pulsing lights with Mr. Nicolai’s hourlong electronic track simply by holding their phones up toward the tower. (The app works via the camera.)

Mr. Nicolai said he has never worked with a screen as large as the ICC, but the building—designed by American architecture firm Kohn Pederson Fox—didn’t pose problems. “The biggest challenge was the synchronicity with the sound and light,” he said. “The app was quite technical. We had a long time to brainstorm.”

Magnus Renfrew, the director of Art Basel Hong Kong, said he long thought the tower, with its rectangular face, would be an ideal canvas and targeted Mr. Nicolai as the artist for the gig. “We were looking to use the tower as a platform,” Mr. Renfrew said. “Carsten jumped out as the person for the job.”

Mr. Nicolai’s work comes just a year after Hong Kong was smitten by its last major public-art installation. “Rubber Duck,” a large inflated yellow duck by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman, sat in the harbor for six weeks, stirring a frenzy among tourists and locals, who packed the site daily to take photos.

“It’s not catchy like that big duck, but it can still have a sublime interaction with the city,” Mr. Nicolai said. “I hope to stimulate people. This work isn’t for Art Basel—it is for all of Hong Kong.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 29

WALL STREET JOURNAL 'Art Basel Returns to Hong Kong', 8 May 2014

Art Basel Hong Kong Searches for Identity By JASON CHOW May 9, 2014 6:00 am HKT

Art Basel made a splashy entrance in Hong Kong last year with its first fair in the city. Now, the Hong Kong edition of the global art franchise that’s synonymous with glitzy parties and the global jet-set crowd is searching for an identity.

Art Basel Hong Kong, which kicks off May 15, is the third entry to the Art Basel calendar after Basel, Switzerland, and Miami Beach. The Swiss and U.S. shows are fixtures on the wealthy collector’s calendar: The Basel fair, which takes place in early June, has become a hub for established European collectors wanting to snag a Hirst or Picasso; Miami Beach, scheduled in December, not only attracts deep-pocketed buyers but also serves as a warm escape for celebrity party-goers—Kim Kardashian, Kanye West and Demi Moore were just a few of those who attended last year.

But the Hong Kong fair hasn’t yet attracted the A-list like Miami Beach, and the type of rich collectors who gather in Switzerland have yet to amass for a competitive buying spree in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong fair’s calling card has yet to be determined.

Timing is part of its identity crisis. The four-day event falls in the middle of a very crowded art calendar, just a week after the Frieze Art Fair in New York and a month before the Art Basel show in Switzerland. Fair organizers, facing complaints from Western galleries and collectors that the May time slot makes it difficult for them to attend the Hong Kong event, have already responded by shifting the date of next year’s show to March.

Organizers also say they are trying best for the fair to reflect geography: More than half of the 245 galleries participating at Art Basel Hong Kong are from Asia. Most of the expected 65,000 attendees are from within the region, and many are young and recently minted wealthy collectors from second- and third-tier cities in China, Indonesia and other rising economies.

“Each fair develops its own identity,” said Magnus Renfrew, director of the Hong Kong fair. “This fair represents an emerging market, not a mature one. They’re learning very fast here, but it’s still learning.”

As a result, the buying behavior differs in Asia. Compared with the other Art Basel fairs, where established collectors line up at the entrance to be first into the show and so secure a desired Old Master painting, the buying is less frenzied in Hong Kong.

“The pace of the activity here is much more measured,” said Nick Simunovic, Hong Kong director of Gagosian Gallery. “In Miami or Basel, you do so much more on the first day. Here, it’s not a feast or famine approach where 90% of the business is done on the first day.”

Mr. Simunovic said collectors’ tastes are global—what clients are seeking to buy in Hong Kong is similar to that sought by buyers in New York. Asian collectors who have already bought works of Asia’s top contemporary and modern artists in recent years are now looking for earlier works of those same artists, hoping to create a deeper understanding of their oeuvre, Mr. Renfrew said.

“The art fair ends up being a place to learn about art in the absence of a major institution and gallery,” he said.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 31

CHINA DAILY 'HK developing into impressive Asian arts hub: The Grand Bauhinia Medal may be in order for Art Basel's Magnus Renfrew', 8 May 2014

Timothy Chui

The Grand Bauhinia Medal may be in order for Art Basel’s Magnus Renfrew — who has been instrumental in transforming Hong Kong from a place once dubbed by the media a “cultural wasteland” into an increasingly impressive Asian arts hub.

Next week will see the start of no less than a half dozen official art events and several other lesser- known confabs, all benefiting from efforts Renfrew helped to initiate.

The momentum increased after auction houses began attracting attention to Asian art and seven years since Renfrew started the HK Art Fair. This was bought up by Art Basel in 2012 and has now reached a fevered pace. The Hong Kong Tourism Board has rebranded May as Hong Kong’s Arts Month — taking over Le French May’s near cultural monopoly of the month.

The Asia International Arts and Antiques Fair will also run concurrently, as well as the Chai Wan Mei Arts Festival, the Asia Contemporary Art Show’s spring edition and the Hong Kong Arts Centre Open House. At the same time, art lovers will be able to enjoy the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Fair, auction house Christie’s Spring Auctions exhibition and an Art Gallery Night open house by 40 galleries.

Even the Savannah College of Art and Design campus in Sham Shui Po is planning to encourage Art Basel revelers into visiting the school by renting buses to ferry guests.

The four-day Art Basel begins on May 15 and will draw 245 galleries from 39 territories and countries. It is the second year the Hong Kong International Art Fair has operated under the international Art Basel umbrella. It will be the first time the Hong Kong leg has been sponsored by UBS, the Swiss bank which also supports Art Basel’s Miami Beach and Basel Switzerland shows.

More than 700 galleries signed up for the event yet only a lucky few will be showcased at the event. More than half of participating galleries are from Asia.

“There was a gap in the market for a major international art fair for Asia and there was a sense that all of the art fairs were quite similar — with offerings from mostly Western galleries,’’ Magnus Renfrew said. “We wanted a different direction for this fair and we built the fair on our own terms,” he added.

The fairs that came before were organized by local gallery associations, rife with politics as to who was in and who was not. Renfrew envisioned something that adopted international standards in terms of selectivity. This year’s show, arguably Asia’s most important art date, will also see a premier program of more than 30 films and video works, replicating Art Basel Miami Beach’s successful sojourn into cinema art.

Bringing all this together has taken a lot of effort from Renfrew and his dedicated team.

Art aficionados will find themselves hard-pressed to cover all Hong Kong has to offer this month, a feat requiring near omnipresence. This is a quality Renfrew has been exhibiting in organizing his show. He is on the road 80 percent of the time in the first quarter ahead of the Hong Kong show. The rest of the year is not without endless meetings with galleries, artists, sponsors and Art Basel’s leadership.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 33 Between his grueling schedule and the continued success of Art Basel Hong Kong, recognition of Renfrew is long overdue. [email protected]

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 34

JAPAN TIMES 'Art Basel makes a difference in Asia', 7 May 2014

Art Basel makes a difference in Asia BY EDAN CORKILL STAFF WRITER

It’s still not uncommon to hear Japanese art bureaucrats and administrators speaking dreamily about Tokyo one day becoming the regional art hub — the “show window,” as one local museum director put it to me last year, through which the art of Asia can be presented to the rest of the world.

You have to wonder if they’ve visited Hong Kong recently. It’s been a few years now since the Chinese Special Administrative Region became the third-largest art auction market in the world — thanks largely to Christie’s and Sotheby’s having set up their regional operations there. But even more significant than those two votes of confidence was the announcement in 2011 that MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel) Ltd. — better known as the organizer of the two most prominent commercial art fairs in the world, Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach — had purchased Art HK, a precocious independent fair that was then only 3 years old.

Art Basel in Hong Kong, as the fair was re-branded, was first held last year, and the Swiss experience and global connections served as a pair of booster jets. When Art HK started out, in 2008, it had 100 galleries and nearly 20,000 visitors; in 2013 the new fair brought in 245 galleries and 60,000 visitors.

Magnus Renfrew, the British director who was retained from Art HK, stopped by Tokyo recently in the lead up to this year’s Art Basel in Hong Kong, which will be held next week. He told The Japan Times about what it means to have Art Basel on board.

“Really we’ve got the best of both worlds — the experience of having made Art HK from the ground up, but also the incredible resources of Art Basel. It is the leading art fair organizer in the world. We’ve been able to apply their learnings to the fair in HK to create something quite special,” he said.

How special? Well, to begin with, he touched on what he called “VIP” clients — that is the cream of the global art collecting class: “We have now access to Art Basel’s VIP database, and they, or we, have one of the best address books in the business. Whereas with Art HK we had one VIP relations manager based in HK, we now have 24 around the world whose job it is to try to direct VIP traffic to the fair, so I think it is a great combination of both.”

As far as galleries are concerned, whether or not to participate in an art fair is fairly simple: Will your expected at-fair, or, at least, immediate-post-fair sales cover the cost of participation (which this year at Hong Kong ranges from $535 to $695 per sq. meter, with most booths being between 50 and 180 sq. meters)?

The answer, in many cases, appears to be a resounding “yes.” Perhaps a reflection of the purchasing power of all those VIP customers is the fact that this year, around 500 galleries, not only from around Asia but around the world, applied to participate at Art Basel in Hong Kong.

And when you have that many applicants, you can afford to be selective. In fact, Renfrew explained, it pays to be selective. He was unabashed in describing what is, in effect, an extraordinarily elitist gathering.

A select group of trustworthy gallery directors — the “selection committee” — is tasked with determining which of their colleagues will be granted access to this kingdom of riches.

What sort of galleries do they look for?

“We’re looking for galleries that have strong programming, that are not overwhelmed by commercial pragmatism. They really are showing artists that are producing interesting work rather than work that is created to satisfy an audience,” he said.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 35 As with last year, 245 of the 500 ended up making the cut, with the loose target of 50 percent “local” (meaning from the Asia-Pacific region) participation being met.

Renfrew added that the 245 gallery figure represents a decrease on the number of galleries included in Art HK (in 2012, when there were 265). He explained, somewhat tellingly, that “you’re only as strong as the weakest link. The last 10, 15, 20 galleries you let in really determines the overall perception of the quality of the fair.”

Thus, assuming Renfrew and his team wanted to achieve a 50-percent local participation rate, it would seem likely that they could only find 122 commercial galleries in the Asia-Pacific region they thought worthy of participation.

That said, there might have been others that decided not to apply in the first place. If so, rest assured it wasn’t through want of Renfrew’s trying. He explained that he actively courts galleries that he thinks “should” be at the fair. This year, he proudly reported, he was able to win over a longtime holdout, Gallery Koyanagi, the grande dame of Japan’s contemporary art world. The gallery is planning to show its star photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, and others.

In all, 21 galleries will make the trip from Japan. Among the artists shown, photographer Nobuyoshi Araki will be included by Taka Ishii Gallery, painter Hideaki Kawashima by Tomio Koyama Gallery, painter O Jun by Mizuma Art Gallery, Tsuyoshi Ozawa by Misa Shin Gallery, and painter Masaya Chiba by ShugoArts. Those galleries will be joined by art-world heavyweights such as U.S.-based David Zwirner and Hammer Galleries, as well as some 31 others from mainland China, including Long March Space and ShanghArt Gallery.

Japanese participation also extends to a special section called Encounters, by which large-scale sculptural and installation pieces (“institutional-scale” works) will be displayed throughout the venue. It has been curated by Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, chief curator Yuko Hasegawa.

Renfrew explained that these and other curated sections, which are composed of works provided by participating galleries, help place the exhibits by Asian artists in the big picture — that is, the global, historical art context.

To an extent this is also where the art fair can best complement what has, to date, been the most prominent venue of the art boom that has visited Asia in the last decade, and that is the auction houses.

Asia’s new art collectors have seen in the auction process a “transparency,” Renfrew explained. “The idea that if someone is willing to put their hand up for a bid there is a reassurance that you are paying the appropriate price for something because there are other people that are willing to pay it.”

Nowadays, though, Asia’s collectors are starting to recognize a different kind of affirmation — that provided by fairs such as Art Basel in Hong Kong. Visitors know that participating galleries have already received “the Art Basel imprimatur,” Renfrew said. “You buy from one of the galleries that you know has been through this rigorous selection process, that there is a certain level of quality and interest.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 36

TAIPEI TIMES 'A diplomat in director's clothing', 27 April 2014

A diplomat in director’s clothing

Magnus Renfrew, director of Art Basel in Hong Kong, spoke to the ‘Taipei Times’ last month about the fair he did much to build, Asia’s auction market, changing collector habits and his thoughts on China’s increased muscle-flexing over the territory

By Noah Buchan / Staff reporter

Magnus Renfrew says he’s in “collector mode” — which probably explains his haggard-looking countenance when he greets me on a Friday morning last month at a coffee shop in Taipei’s Far Eastern Plaza hotel. Dressed semi-formally in a navy blue suit and cuff links, the Asia director of Art Basel tells me that he spent the previous night wining Taiwanese collectors and gallerists, having already spent the previous few weeks doing the same in London, New York, Shanghai, Beijing and Berlin. The next day he’s off to Sydney, Australia, and from there will spend the next few weeks wooing collectors in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Chengdu.

“Between January and May, I’m on the road probably 70 to 80 percent of the time,” he says.

Renfrew is concluding the second part of his yearly “cycle.” Having dispensed with the gallery organization — 245 chosen, he says, from over 500 applicants — he’s now flying around the world to shore up the collectors that are the fair’s bread and butter. And if media reports of last year’s inaugural fair and my own personal correspondence with Taiwan-based galleries are anything to go by, Renfrew’s incessant travel will almost certainly pay off.

But Renfrew wasn’t starting from scratch. Before signing on with Art Basel, arguably the world’s most prestigious art fair brand with versions in Basel and Miami, he had already gained a reputation in art circles as a successful operator, founding and directing the Hong Kong International Art Fair (Art HK), drawing considerable attention to Hong Kong, a place that much of the art world viewed as insignificant when compared to Shanghai and Beijing.

The fair runs from May 15 to May 18 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center.

POWER 100

In the same year ArtHK merged with Art Basel, ArtReview, which compiles an annual list of the art world’s most powerful curators, gallerists, fair directors, collectors and artists, ranked him 16th on its “Power 100” (he shared the accolade with two others from the Art Basel brand).

Ten minutes into the interview, it becomes readily apparent why Renfrew has pulled this off. Sure, he has the requisite degree in art history from an elite university, and yes, he has considerable experience with art fairs. But his true talent lies in his diplomatic vocal delivery. Similar to a Chatham House academic or State Department spokesperson, he chooses his words carefully, often umming and ahhing his way through a sentence rather than stringing it together with the requisite nouns and verbs. He’s adept at deflecting the tougher questions by rephrasing them into those that he’s comfortable answering, which consistently takes on a positive spin.

But Renfrew has also been lucky, both because attention from European and US collectors are focused on Asia, and also due to the wealth generated in this part of the world.

“The art market tends to follow the money and the greatest wealth creation is in Asia at the moment,” he says. And, he adds, there is room for growth, at least within the gallery, biennial and art fair scene.

It is also fortuitous that China’s enormous auction market has been floundering. A report in last month’s Blouin Art+Auction attributes the “precipitous drop” — from US$8 billion in 2011 to half that the following year — to buyer nonpayment and a proliferation of forgeries, which has driven

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 37 potential buyers away from China’s overheated and opaque auction market.

‘CULTURAL ECOLOGY’

Over the same period, Asia’s art fairs have consistently seen a rise in attendance, something Renfrew attributes to the fact that they offer programs that add to the “cultural ecology.”

“The auction houses take their cut and the consignor takes their cut. It doesn’t really help to make the art world go round,” he says.

Still, Renfrew says that auction houses have served a valuable purpose in that they have driven much of the awareness about Asia’s contemporary art over the past two decades. One consequence of this, however, is “the absence of a framework for curatorial or critical evaluation of art works. Without a very strong institutional framework or museum scene … the market has moved in to become the benchmark. So whatever is expensive is deemed to be good which is kind of a reverse way around of things.”

He adds that collectors are taking greater interest in contemporary art galleries.

“A lot of collectors are very encouraging of the younger galleries and they want the younger galleries to succeed and that’s certainly a dynamic I see here in Taiwan, and elsewhere as well,” he says, adding that galleries are the foundation of this cultural ecology because they have contact with curators and critics, and pay the artists, who may also employ studio assistants.

And as the Asian art market becomes more mature, he says, European and North American collector tastes have become more sophisticated. Renfrew says, in the context of China, the days of collecting kitschy “images of pandas, Mao, the color red” are largely over, as collectors seek more localized works by artists — whether performance artists from Myanmar, South Korean video artists or Indonesian installation artists.

“It’s not enough to have work by a big-name artist. It has to be the right subject matter, the right date, the right medium and also collectors are beginning to buy much more with their eye, rather than their ears,” he says.

SETTING A STANDARD

Mention Art Basel in Hong Kong to many Taiwanese gallerists, and their eyes glaze over with reverence. One local gallerist who applied for a booth this year but didn’t get in, beseeched me to ask Renfrew what they had done wrong. Renfrew says the fair’s standards are clear.

“Galleries are evaluated on the basis of their overall programming,” he said. “It’s not good enough to have some good artists and then have a lot of work that is very easy to sell because it’s commercially pragmatic. Those kinds of galleries don’t get into the gallery sector. And that has helped us kind of re-frame people’s thinking to a certain extent.”

Renfrew gives TKG+ and Project Fulfill Art Space as examples of two of the eight Taiwan-based galleries that will show work (an increase from five last year) because “they’ve got very conceptually driven programs and they are passionate about what they do,” he says.

He adds that he is “looking to encourage galleries that promote practice rather than selling objects,” with work done by artists who have something important to say, “rather than … just seeking approval or catering to [the market].”

Even before taking the helm of Art Basel in Hong Kong, Renfrew had set a standard that other fairs in Asia have since sought to emulate. Asia’s oldest art fair, Art Taipei, for example, overhauled its entry requirements in 2011, the net effect of which was that far fewer local galleries were able to participate, marginalizing several local galleries and the artists they represent.

Richard Chang (張學孔), the convener of last year’s Art Taipei, told me that considerable bad blood was spilled as the changes were being implemented three years ago, with some galleries opting out of the Taiwan Art Gallery Association, which runs Art Taipei, because they felt that their needs weren’t being properly served.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 38 It is a complaint that has been launched against Renfrew’s fair. A Guardian report last year quoted some Hong Kong art world types who were concerned that, with only 26 Hong Kong galleries participating in the fair’s first year, with many of those such as White Cube and Gagosian foreign imports, the territory’s art scene had become a “post-colonial venture for importing western art in to Asia.”

Renfrew remains unapologetic, saying that international art galleries make a “significant investment and contribution to the local art scene in terms of providing opportunities to have great shows.”

“It’s about quality,” he says. “It doesn’t matter where the artists are from, whether they are local or international. It just has to be work of a certain caliber, and I think it’s just a circumstance of life that we live in a competitive environment and that not everyone can be an artist.”

NEUTRAL TERRITORY?

Renfrew partially attributes the success of the fair’s first edition to its location. In addition to favorable tax laws and an international financial elite, he calls Hong Kong “neutral territory.”

“We … are not subject to the same kind of local political pressure as some other art fairs that are very much rooted in their own country.”

Perhaps not, but what of China’s increased muscle flexing over the former British territory and the possible censorship this might entail? I raise this with Renfrew in the context of a 2011 article in ArtAsiaPacific titled Art and Censorship in Singapore: Catch 22?, which suggested that Art Stage Singapore was being hobbled by the island state’s censors. Is Renfrew concerned that the same might happen in Hong Kong?

“Freedom of expression is protected under the Basic Law of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong constitution … you can show whatever you like,” he says with a certain degree of impatience. When my body language suggested this was a pretty lame response, he added: “We are not going to self- censor.”

This may be somewhat disingenuous because the very laws that are said to protect freedom of speech, were used last week to stop the construction of a privately-run museum dedicated to the violent crackdown on China’s Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests.

Renfrew, however, remains bullish and foresees no threats of censorship to contemporary art.

“We want to be a global art fair for Asia on Asia’s doorstep and on Asia’s terms. Nothing would make me happier than for people to come to the fair in Hong Kong, discover great Taiwanese artists and strong galleries in Taiwan and come and visit Taiwan and fall in love with artists in Taiwan,” he said.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 39

LOS ANGELES CONFIDENTIAL 'Art Basel Hong Kong Enchants Again', 12 May 2014

by sue hostetler

It’s a new cultural revolution as Art Basel Hong Kong 2 takes Asia by storm.

In just a few short years, Hong Kong has been transformed from a city that many considered a cultural desert to the fourth-largest global market for contemporary art, according to Artprice, an art market information source, with more than $130 million sold in 2013, partially due to record-setting auctions and the rise of billionaire art collectors in China. As recently as 2008, there were no major art fairs, but the visionaries behind the powerful Art Basel shows in Switzerland and Miami Beach helped push the cultural renaissance forward last year when they debuted Art Basel in Hong Kong.

This second annual art fair in Asia—which opens May 15 and features a slate of 245 of the world’s most influential galleries from 39 countries—will help add even more international credibility and exposure to the Asian art market. “Every fair has its own mission and vision,” says show director Magnus Renfrew. “Art Basel in Hong Kong aspires to provide a fair for Asia of global stature and the highest quality while retaining its unique regional flavor. Hong Kong has long been regarded as the portal connecting the East and the West. It is a major financial hub and as such is designed to allow for more professional and efficient transactions.”

This year’s show will continue the strong programming that is a hallmark of the two other Art Basel shows. The Discoveries sector, which is dedicated to solo and two-person exhibitions by emerging artists, is shaping up to be particularly exceptional. A $25,000 prize will be awarded to one of nearly 30 participants of this sector at the end of the week, a unique element of ABHK that is not seen at other fairs. Much preshow buzz has surrounded the funky Irish gallery Mother’s Tankstation and its presentation of the work of Sydney based artist Noel McKenna, whose figurative pieces contemplate the human condition and make him one to watch in Discoveries.

Also creating excitement is the Encounters sector—featuring large-scale sculptural and installation pieces—curated by Japan’s Yuko Hasegawa of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. “Last year Yuko’s selection spurred a compelling discourse around contrasting generational and cultural approaches to artistic practices,” says Renfrew. “I have confidence that her program this year will again present ambitious works that act as conversation points throughout the exhibition halls.”

And one of Miami’s most beloved events—the Film sector—will debut in Hong Kong this year, developed by Chinese multimedia artist and curator Li Zhenhua and hosted in partnership with the Hong Kong Arts Centre.

Such collaborations with local institutions help Art Basel recognize, support, and promote the exploding contemporary art scene in Hong Kong. Not only is the government pouring billions of dollars into developing a cultural district in West Kowloon, but the new M+, an ambitious Herzog & de Meuron–designed museum slated for completion in 2017, further illustrates Hong Kong’s commitment to its future support of the visual arts. But maybe the most significant indicator is the number of respected western galleries, like Gagosian, White Cube, and Lehmann Maupin, which have opened Hong Kong outposts in the past few years. These dealers, along with influential homegrown stalwarts such as 10 Chancery Lane, Galerie Ora-Ora, and Pearl Lam, are instrumental in developing and nurturing the careers of artists and collections in the region.

According to Renfrew, these relationships with the local galleries and institutions (including Asia Art Archive, Para/Site, the Asia Society, and Spring Workshop) are imperative to Art Basel Hong Kong as they create a show “grounded in the city.” “We want to promote long-term arts infrastructure development and encourage associated programming across the city,” says Renfrew. “The growth of Hong Kong’s museum sector and contemporary arts education will truly impact the larger discourse in the city, and that is something that we aim—through long-term partnerships—to cultivate.”

The fair’s impact and thematic reach are sure to be much broader than just the Asian region. One needs to look no further than the talks planned as part of the Conversations and Salon programs. A discussion titled the “Global Art World/Making Biennials” will feature luminaries Juliana Engberg,

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 40 artistic director of the 2014 Biennale of Sydney and artistic director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art; Eungie Joo, curator of the 2015 Sharjah Biennial; and Jessica Morgan, artistic director of the 10th Gwangju Biennale and the Daskalopoulos curator of international art at Tate Modern—moderated by Hou Hanru, artistic director at Maxxi Museum in Rome. “This is a conversation that has real international relevancy, reflecting the transitional reality of today’s art world,” explains Renfrew. Programming such as this, coupled with a rapidly maturing Asian art market and the resurgence of Chinese art exhibitions across the US, will undoubtedly help draw record numbers of highly informed collectors to the fair this month.

With so much anticipation building around the fair, what does Renfrew most look forward to? “The highlight is exposing new audiences to the depth of work from the broader Asian region and being part of that experience of discovery when collectors come to know artists they have not yet seen… or when curators have an opportunity to join in dialogue with artists whose work they have long followed.” Art Basel in Hong Kong takes place May 15–18; visit artbasel.com/en/Hong-Kong

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 41

ARTINFO.COM 'Magnus Renfrew on Art Basel in Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific Art Scene', 24 April 2014

BY Nicholas Forrest

When BLOUIN ARTINFO sat down with Magnus Renfrew, Art Basel’s Director Asia, to discuss the 2014 edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong, he was five weeks into a round-the-world trip visiting collectors and gallerists. He had already visited Berlin, Paris, London, Shanghai, Beijing, New York, and Taipei when he met with BLOUIN ARTINFO in Sydney, and was preparing to head to Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore followed by Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and Chengdu.

Returning to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre from May 15 to 18 for its second edition under the Art Basel umbrella, Art Basel in Hong Kong 2014 will feature 245 of the world’s leading galleries as well as the work of more than 3000 artists, ranging from young emerging talents to the Modern masters of Asia and the West. Continuing the fair’s commitment to the region, 50 percent of galleries presented at the show have exhibition spaces in Asia and the Asia-Pacific.

Renfrew’s tireless efforts to forge relationships with gallerists and collectors all over the world is evidence of his commitment to the fair and reflects his ambition to take what is currently regarded as the leading art fair in the Asia and Asia Pacific regions and establish it as an internationally significant event as well as a stop-off for the global art community. See what Renfrew had to say about Art Basel in Hong Kong as well as the Asia Pacific art scene in the interview below.

The current talking point is the change of dates from May to March. Could you talk a bit about the reason behind the change and the logistics involved?

The complexities of securing a change of dates are easily underestimated but there’s probably only about five days a year that the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre doesn’t have something, either an event or a conference, being built up, broken down, or taking place. So to effect this change, the management of the HKCEC has had to negotiate with nine different events to move, and each one of those events is plugged into its own global industry calendar.

While the May dates had worked fine for the contemporary art scene in Asia and for the collectors in Asia, it had been problematic for some of the Western galleries in terms of the congested nature of the calendar, particularly the proximity to New York Auction Week and Art Basel in Switzerland. Whilst there is no time that is completely free from clashes, March gives us a much better opportunity to attract a stronger audience from the US and Europe.

What are your plans for the future of Art Basel Hong Kong? Do you have any particular ambitions or goals?

There are certain things that we are on the right track with; the basic sectors are along the right lines, but we would love to have more historical content from Asia. Art Basel has always been known as a modern and contemporary fair, and whilst we have a very strong presence of modern and post- war art from the West, there is still a lot more to do to build up that representation from Asia and the Asia Pacific. We would love more of those presentations, most probably through the Insights sector. But we are making some headway in that area, and it’s still early days.

We also want to establish Art Basel in Hong Kong as a fair of truly global standing with mainstream attendance from collectors from all over the world, and with greater numbers from Europe and the United States than we currently have. Our ambition is to take what is currently regarded as the leading art fair in the Asia and Asia Pacific regions and establish it as one of the important art fairs on a global level, as well as a stop-off for the global art community. We are not aiming to create a niche Asian fair, but rather a global art fair for Asia that contextualizes Asia within the global art scene.

Have you noticed any developing trends that interest you?

South East Asia and Indonesia are interesting. There is also great work being produced in China that is outside the Western perception of what constitutes Chinese contemporary art. I think that some people still associate Chinese contemporary art with work that was produced for the auctions in the

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 42 2006-2008 period – smiley faces, the color red, pandas, Chairman Mao – when actually there is much more interesting work than that being produced that engages with the reality of what it is like to live in China today and the great changes that China is going through. Elsewhere in South East Asia – in Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar – there are some very interesting artists, a number of whom are working in the medium of performance, which is something I would personally like to see a lot more of at the fair.

Will you continue to aim to have 50% representation of galleries with spaces in Asia and the Asia- Pacific?

Something that we started facing about two or three years ago, when galleries began to establish branches in different parts of the world, was that people often argue over the definition of an Asian gallery. So we don’t say Asian galleries, we say galleries with spaces in Asia, because those galleries are undoubtedly making an important contribution to the local cultural ecologies in which they are located – they provide artists with opportunities to see work from different parts of the world, for example, and they provide global standards of practice in terms of artist representation for artists from those particular locations as well. It was a really interesting moment in time when this became an issue three years ago; it was a sign of the times of the globalization of the art world. It is funny that you have moments like that when you are trying to pigeon-hole things, and what worked the year before no longer works. It’s interesting that there has been this kind of a shift. It is our aim to continue to have 50% representation of galleries with spaces in Asia and the Asia-Pacific.

Are there any regions you would like to see better represented by galleries at Art Basel in Hong Kong?

We would like to have the broadest and most diverse presentation from all over Asia – from as far west as Turkey and as far east as New Zealand, and everywhere in-between. It would be great to have more work from the ‘stans, and we are delighted that we have the first gallery participating from Azerbaijan this year. So there is a lot more to be done in terms of the breadth of coverage, but it’s a fascinating process.

Are there any particular mediums that collectors are focusing on?

We have spent quite a lot of time thinking about this, but I don’t think the market works like that. Everyone is an individual and tastes are very diverse within countries – as diverse as individuals. The way it does tend to work relates to the different stages of collecting. In my experience it is pretty much the same anywhere in the world. You tend to buy work, when you are starting out, that is conservative in nature and from your own country. And then as time goes on and you develop more confidence and knowledge you often then progress to buying contemporary work, but usually again from your own country. But once you have started buying contemporary art from your own country it is not such a big leap to buying contemporary art from elsewhere in the world. And we’re seeing that pay out in China – those collectors who were early to start buying contemporary Chinese art are not just as happy buying contemporary art from elsewhere in the world.

What makes Hong Kong the best place location for an art fair in Asia?

There are so many different reasons. The shared history with the West means that is a place where English is commonly spoken and people feel very comfortable being there. There is probably nowhere in the world where people from Asia and the West feel quite so equally at home. Also of great importance is the geographical location. When you are looking at trying to create a major international hub fair you have to look at the natural catchment area of that location and Hong Kong has one of the widest catchment areas of anywhere in the world; it’s a natural nexus. The fact that there is no tax on the import and export of art as well as no sales tax makes the city even more attractive.

For an art fair like this to be a success it was important for us to engage with all of the different constituencies around the region; no single domestic market is big enough. What you tend to find is that those art fairs that are located in a particular country tend to take on the identity of that country to an extent. But in Hong Kong we have a place that whilst it is part of China is also regarded as neutral territory, meaning that we can have an internationalism, which has been a positive thing.

Anything else you would like to add?

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 43

One of the interesting dynamics is that people are seeing the importance of buying from galleries rather than buying from auctions. Knowledge and connoisseurship are also becoming increasingly valued and respected with collectors moving beyond buying the big brand names. People are still very competitive of course, but there is now also a sense of competition to be the first person to discover a young artist’s work, and that is a positive dynamic.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 44

TELEGRAPH 'Hong Kong art: a new creative star rises in the east', 19 April 2014

Michelle Jana Chan, destination expert

In the heart of Hong Kong’s SoHo district, one of the city’s hottest pieces of real estate is not being turned into a bank or block of apartments. Instead, the former Police Married Quarters, renamed PMQ, is becoming a hub of design studios, ateliers and pop-ups. It will inevitably draw tourists, too, as resident artists and artisans sell their cutting-edge fashion, handmade jewellery, crafted ceramics and one-of-a-kind accessories.

Subsidised studios for artists are nothing short of astonishing in a city where the skyrocketing cost of real estate is increasingly pushing out small businesses in favour of big chains. Yet PMQ is not an exception but part of a pattern – and policy – in this town, one of the most congested patches on the planet.

Empty or abandoned buildings, some of them legacies of the colonial period, are being converted into hotbeds of art and culture. The Asia Society Hong Kong Center, for example, opened two years ago in a 19th-century British Army explosives magazine. It now hosts art exhibitions, panel discussions and cultural talks.

Out in the New Territories – as manufacturing shifts west across the border into mainland China – disused factories are being transformed into lofts and workshops. One industrial space, Fotanian, holds annual open-house weekends to foster exchange between the public and the hundreds of artists who have taken over this dilapidated building. One local sculptor, Jimmy Lau, told me that the low rents were key to their work.

“Artists need space,” he says, “and that has been hard to find in Hong Kong. Fotanian has helped us be more aggressive about getting the public interested in our work and achieving our goals.”

Last year, Fotanian welcomed as many as 20,000 visitors over its four open days, proving there is a keen interest in Hong Kong’s home-grown art scene.

PMQ is becoming a hub of design studios

There will be much more to explore in this city over the next few years, with the opening of the West Kowloon Cultural District (WKCD), a £2 billion project that will be home to 17 performance venues and museums, and a 23ha park fronting Victoria Harbour.

The government here is clearly not on a tight budget. The project is headed by Michael Lynch, the man who rejuvenated London’s Southbank Centre and is credited with turning around the Sydney Opera House in his native Australia. He has now landed one of the most coveted jobs in the art world.

“There has not yet been a museum that looks at the world from the vantage point of Asia,” he says, “and the world needs that. We want to bring back some of the magic of the past before Hong Kong focuses only on shopping and food. WKCD will restore some balance to the city.”

While WKCD’s first phase will be completed in 2015, it will be two more years before the launch of the dazzling contemporary art museum M+, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The museum has already received enough headline-grabbing donations (including nearly 1,500 pieces from one collector) to crown it the world’s leading institution for contemporary Chinese art.

“Since the [1997] handover [when sovereignty transferred from the UK to China], Hong Kong is no longer a place of transition but somewhere people call home,” says Lars Nittve, executive director of M+, who was also the founding director of Tate Modern. “There is increasing interest here in identity, questions of culture and symbolic institutions. People are longing for something in Asia that can match the big museums of the world.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 45 Hong Kong is on something of an art high. The city is currently the world’s third-largest art auction market after London and New York. Last year, Art Basel – which stages the most important modern and contemporary art fairs in the world – opened in Hong Kong. It will be taking place again next month .

“We believe the most successful, vibrant art centres are outward-looking and embrace international differences,” says the fair’s Asia director, Magnus Renfrew. “Exactly like Hong Kong.”

The WKCD project will fortify the city’s position. But until it opens there is plenty in Hong Kong, such as Fotanian and PMQ, to lure tourists with a penchant for art. World-class galleries, including White Cube, the Gagosian and Simon Lee, have recently opened new exhibition spaces here too. The auctioneer Sotheby’s has an impressive new gallery – on the fifth floor of a shopping mall.

AMMO restaurant at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center

Unusually, Hong Kong has come to art through the market, rather than the other way around, but that should not deter anyone from exploring the city’s creative side.

Not that there should be any concern about ticket sales or public interest, especially when it comes to WKCD. The district is being built slap-bang next to a railway station that, when it opens next year, will halve the journey time between Hong Kong and the mainland to 48 minutes. Forty million travellers are expected to use the station every year – enough passing trade to outperform any of the blockbuster shows in Europe or the US.

“Like Tate Modern, M+ may be a museum that surprises everybody,” Nittve says. “It will certainly raise the bar for museums in this part of the world.”

Essentials

When to go

The weather is usually at its best in Hong Kong from mid-September through February.

Art Basel Hong Kong (artbasel.com/en/hong-kong) takes place at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center from May 15-18 2014. The film sector will comprise a three-day programme at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, and will be free of charge. Its Conversations programme of morning talks will also be free.

The HK Affordable Art Fair (affordableartfair.com/hongkong/) was held in March and will run again in May 2015.

Other festivals in 2014 include the Cheung Chau Bun Festival (May 3-7) and Dragon Boat Carnival (June 2).

Every year in January, Fotanian Open Studio Programme (fotanian.org) welcomes the public over several consecutive weekends.

Flying time and time difference

Approximately 12 hours 30 minutes from the UK. GMT +8 hours.

Getting there

British Airways has two daily non-stop flights from Heathrow. Cathay Pacific has five daily flights from Heathrow. Virgin Atlantic operates one daily non-stop flight from Heathrow.

Package

CTS Horizons (020 7868 5590; ctshorizons.com) has a four-night break with two nights at the Mandarin Oriental and two nights at the Island Shangri-La (from £1,455 per person, including flights with British Airways). It is also offering a four-night break in the four-star Metropark Causeway Bay (from £895 per person, including breakfast and flights with British Airways).

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 46

Where to stay

Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong (0800 2828 3838; mandarinoriental.com/hongkong) is well located for some of Hong Kong’s best new galleries. Rooms start from £371.

As the official hotel for Art Basel 2014, it has an array of art-themed events during the fair. The Art Stay package (May 14-19) includes a harbour-view room with breakfast, unlimited access to the fair and Collectors’ Lounge, and champagne on arrival (from £499 per night).

Island Shangri-La (0800 028 3337; shangri-la.com) sits between the Asia Society Hong Kong Center and Sotheby’s gallery in Pacific Place. Rooms start from £271 including tax and service charge.

Fountain art at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel

Where to eat and drink

Duddell’s (Levels 3 & 4, Shanghai Tang Mansion, 1 Duddell Street, Central; 00852 2525 9191; duddells.co)

This one-Michelin-star restaurant serves excellent Cantonese fare. One floor up is a lounge with leafy outdoor terrace serving all-day dim sum and cocktails. Modern and contemporary art exhibitions take place throughout the restaurant, and recently included a project by Ai Weiwei.

Chachawan (206 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan; 2549 0020; facebook.com/chachawan.hongkong)

In the heart of Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan neighbourhood, this Isaan Thai eatery serves green papaya salad, Wagyu beef salad and salt-crusted sea bass with lemon grass. Next door is 208 Duecento Otto for cocktails; a few doors down is the popular Cat Street Gallery.

Mandarin Grill + Bar (5 Connaught Road, Central; 2825 4004; mandarinoriental.com/hongkong/fine- dining/mandarin-grill-and-bar/)

The Mandarin Oriental’s Michelin-starred restaurant will feature an “Art Menu” around Art Basel (May 5-18 2014), including a “Create Your Own Jackson Pollock” dish. There will also be art-inspired cocktails in the M bar on the 25th floor of the hotel.

AMMO (9 Justice Drive, Admiralty; 2537 9888; ammo.com.hk)

Nestled amid the buildings of the Asia Society Hong Kong Center, this slick dining venue provides a perfect pause after seeing the Center’s latest exhibition.

Inside track

A clutch of commercial art galleries can be found in the Pedder Building, including the pioneering Hanart TZ, celebrating its 30th anniversary, Pearl Lam and Ben Brown Fine Arts. On Hollywood Road, the go-to strip for anyone looking for affordable art and antiques, the irresistible Mandy d’Abo runs the Cat Street Gallery. Nearby, PMQ (pmq.org.hk) opened its doors on April 10.

Liang Yi Museum (181-199 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan; liangyimuseum.com) opened in February 2014 with a well-curated selection of Chinese antique furniture from the Ming and Qing dynasties.

The M+ Neon Project, running from March 21-June 29, is an online, multi-platform, interactive project exploring Hong Kong’s neon signage.

What to avoid

Using public transport at peak rush hour. It is also tough to find taxis at those times of day.

Currency

HK$12.74 to £1

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 47

Visas/vaccinations

British passport holders can stay up to 90 days without the need for a tourist visa. There are no required vaccinations.

Further information

The Discover Hong Kong City Walks App (discoverhongkong.com/uk; @discoverhk) guides visitors through four walks, including one called Adventure in Architecture (a GPS-enabled offline map is also available).

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 48 PRESTIGE HONG KONG 'Fair Fever', 7 April 2014

FAIR FEVER

Five influential figures on the burgeoning local art scene tell us about what Art Basel in Hong Kong next month means to them

BY PAYAL UTTAM ON APRIL 7, 2014, INTERVIEWS

JOHNSON CHANG Curator and director of Hanart TZ Gallery

“I try to take part in all the major Hong Kong events, since I have a local gallery. Art Basel certainly has brought an international buzz with its programme that parallels what it does in Europe and America. It’s brought more Western clients and major international art to Hong Kong, which is very important for the audiences and also for opening up the market.

“It’s a new experience to be given so much art that you can’t even see the whole show. This sense of overspilling of culture is good shock therapy for Hong Kong. It gets the adrenaline moving.”

What to expect this year: “We’re doing Gu Wenda. We’ve been talking about doing something for a long time. His first major Asian show was in Hanart at Hong Kong Arts Centre in 1990 so we’re going to have a gallery show, the art fair exhibition and a special project space in the Encounters section of the fair.”

YANA PEEL CEO of Intelligence Squared Group

“I’ve been involved in buying art for museums and bringing art to public spaces for over a decade since I left Goldman Sachs, so for me Art Basel was always part of my cultural road map.

“Of course, being involved with the art fair before its Art Basel days, we very much looked at the fair as an important platform for discussion and debate in a community that has so few opportunities to bring people together like this. It’s been a great pleasure to work with Magnus Renfrew [Art Basel director Asia] and Marc Spiegler [Art Basel director] to see how, around Intelligence Squared, Art Basel is bringing much more discussion and conversation salon dialogue into the programme, so that it’s not just about selling art. It’s also about educating the public and debating the most important issues of the day in a non-commercial context.”

What to expect this year: “Our annual after-party is a celebration of Intelligence Squared and Asia Art Archive speakers. It’s been amazing to see that grow from 300 people in our home to 1,000 people on a floating Chinese restaurant. This year, my husband Stephen and I will be commissioning a new work by Ryan McNamara (winner of Performa this year, performance art’s most coveted prize), for a premiere at the Chai Wan Mei party on Friday, May 16.

WILLIAM LIM Collector

“Art Basel has really activated the Hong Kong art scene. The calibre of the work that’s being displayed at the fair really influences local collectors so that they start to look at art in an international context and they probably go beyond thinking what looks pretty on the wall. The fair also brings a lot of international collectors to the city and I think they’re definitely very inspiring for the local collecting base.

“Of course, the part I like most is looking at the art and having an opportunity to see all these galleries bringing in their best work. A lot of the international galleries, after being in Hong Kong, are keen to explore working with local artists. And because galleries are starting to explore Hong Kong artists, then collectors begin to look at their work, so I think it’s really a snowball effect. All of a sudden there’s a lot of attention placed on Hong Kong artists, which I think is the best thing any artist can expect.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 49

What to expect this year: “I’m planning a book launch during the fair for a book on my collection featuring about 40 Hong Kong artists, published by Hatje Cantz from Germany. It’ll probably be a very special book as it features a lot of the Hong Kong artists and conversations with key people in the art scene including Yung Ma and Tobias Berger from M+, Magnus from the fair and Alice Mong from the Asia Society.”

MIMI BROWN Founder of Spring Workshop nonprofit art space

“When I travel and speak about Hong Kong, I find people are always intrigued. It’s a place of increasing promise for artists. News of our burgeoning cultural scene is getting around, and I do think our arts landscape will continue to grow and unfold in exciting, unforeseen ways. The presence of the fair has been a boon to the local scene, providing both a benchmark event for our arts year and also a platform for our Hong Kong artists to gain a wider audience.

“Art Basel creates a nexus where artists and art lovers from around the world cross paths with our local artists and art lovers. This means the audience that comes to Spring is rich and diverse and makes all sorts of useful and interesting connections both among themselves and for Spring. We thrive on this sort of engaged international exchange – and so does Hong Kong.”

What to expect this year: “Spring has invited Christodoulos Panayiotou for a two-month residency. He’ll conduct research on the concentration of artificial flower factories in the Pearl River Delta region. Panayiotou has also invited his fellow artist Philip Wiegard, who will engage in the production of handmade wallpaper with Hong Kong children aged 13-15 using an old artisanal technique. The new work produced by Panayiotou and the handmade wallpaper created by Wiegard and local children will be exhibited at Spring during the fair this year.”

NADIM ABBAS Artist

“During Art Basel there are a lot of people from overseas coming into town, and these people are bound to be curious about what’s happening in the local art scene.

“I’ve been engaged in projects at the fair for a number of years now, starting in 2011 with the site- specific work, Marine Lover, an 18-metrelong artificial coral reef sandwiched between booths.

“The most fun part of last year’s fair was working with Arto Lindsay on his Paper Rain parade. He was inspiring, a living legend. My contribution to the parade consisted of an assortment of red and white high-density foam costumes resembling the barricades that line the borders of construction sites or protest rallies. Performers wearing the barricades started by participating in the movement of the parade from Central Piers to the waterfront promenade, and then at certain key points disrupted the flow.”

What to expect this year: "My plan for the Absolut art bar this year is to construct a post-apocalyptic bunker-like environment informed by my love of science fiction. This is the first time that I’ve worked on something of such scope and magnitude. I’ve had the honour of putting together a group of enormously talented individuals to work on various aspects of the project. This includes spatial design with the team at Laab, an ambient soundscape by Steve Hui, animations by Wong Ping, performances by Atomic Bubbles, Eric Wong, Wilson Tsang, Shane Aspegren and more.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 50 FORBES 'Art Basel Comes To Asia, Bringing Galleries, Artists, Collectors - And Money', 22 July 2013

Donald Frazier

Centerpiece of a new campaign to lure high-end tourists to Hong Kong for art, at the expense of ‘famously corrupt’ Beijing auction houses.

For a few days earlier this summer, Hong Kong became the epicenter of the contemporary art world as collectors, gallerists, investors, curators, art-lovers and curious onlookers flocked here, brimming with the joy and heightened awareness that happens whenever art, the craving for it, and money collide.

Replacing an earlier art fair, Art Basel/Hong Kong brought the world-class dealers, deep-pocketed buyers, professional management, and raw aesthetic energy that have made events in Basel and Miami vastly influential and lucrative. It inspired a full battery of follow-on events, from gallery shows, lectures, parties, meetings, restaurant openings –even a six-story-high floating duck that quickly became the sensation of Victoria Harbor. And it drew crowds, with more than 60,000 paid attendees and thousands of others who came just for the scene.

But the fair is only the latest salvo in a multi-pronged campaign to make this city, better known for high finance than for high culture, into the East Asian capital of art. They want the brainspace, the eyeballs, and pocketbooks of tourists, culture mavens, and perhaps most important, the new fortunes that have made China one of the richest art markets in the world.

London's Victoria Miro was one of the many high profile Western galleries to take part in Art Basel/Hong Kong. Other elements include the development of a massive $2.8 billion, 100 acre arts district centered on a new high-profile museum, a welcome mat for global galleries, new work spaces to foster striving young artists – always a shortage in one of the highest-rent cities in the world – and lots of publicity for the amenities well-heeled art collectors crave, such as swanky hotels and a new host of celebrity- chef restaurants.

“We need to catch up, to develop an ecosystem this city has not had,” one of its key players said. Lars Nittve, new head of the politically-fraught West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, claims a strong art market needs more than Hong Kong’s famously lucrative high-end auctions. He hopes the new museum of contemporary art he’s planning, the M+, will teach the people of Hong Kong and other East Asians about this fast-moving, sometimes-obscure field. The more they know about it, he says, the more they will demand it and pay for it.

Plenty of fair-goers paid for it in Hong Kong. Total sales can’t be known – the fair rents floor space to private sellers – but a number of the 245 exhibitors sold much of what they put on the block, from more than 3,000 artists from masters to tyros. Melbourne’s Dianne Tanzer Gallery, for example, found a buyer for everything. “This is a great venue for us,” manager Bettina Garnier said, praising the Art Basel team’s expertise in mounting a show that makes people want to buy.

Organizers point to high-end sales too as a sign of the event’s commercial potential. For example, renowned Japanese gallerist Hidenori Ota sold a triptych from 1960s pop icon Yayoi Kusama for $2 million at joint booth with London-based Victoria Miro. Destination off-site galleries such as Pearl Lam and Gagosian posted record numbers of visitors during the show – not a surprise when, for Gagosian, the lure is a special exhibit of more than a dozen paintings by 1980s bad-boy street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat that’s so valuable it warranted four security guards.

Art Basel made such a splash that even the incumbent grand auction houses paid notice. Christie’s local branch, its most profitable in the world, added many dozens of entry-priced works to the blockbusters that always go under the gavel at its annual spring auction, held concurrently at the Hong Kong Exhibition Center. “An art fair setting is critical to the entire ecosystem,” Jonathan Stone, global head of Asian art, said. “For many collectors it’s their first glimpse of a particular new artist – a way to create a relationship.” A relationship, he might have added, that’s all to the benefit of Christie’s once the artist becomes a star.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 57 On the show floor, the bustling Art Basel scene was the opposite of the hushed, genteel Christie’s auction next door. Art students mingled with clutches of tourists; sophisticates in ironical black eyeglasses rubbed shoulders with note-taking dealers and gallery consultants. Collectors checked exhibits off in their guidebooks. And everywhere, would-be art fans jostled with smartphone cameras for that perfect shot to prove they were there, posing in front of offerings such as a garden of bones rendered in chrome, or leather fetish gear fashioned into a hanging cathedral.

Add-on events sprawled all over the city, from an exhibit of large-scale experimental works and a tidal flat compound for oversized sculpture, to art-driven symposia and think-fests at every cultural non-profit in town.

The hype even spilled over to the Kowloon waterfront where, they said, more than two million people over ten days turned out to see the duck that quickly became the unofficial mascot of the show. “Spreading Joy around the World,” a six-story-high version of a child’s bathtub toy, was supposed to be just one of the fair’s many jumbo inflatable sculptures. Once it survived a mysterious deflation, it became the center of a round-the-clock party.

Off the streets, the champagne flowed at a series of galas and openings that feted billionaire collectors. “We see many of the same people who come out for our fairs in Miami and Switzerland,” Magnus Renfrew, managing director for Asia, said. “But now that we’re a lot easier to get to, this event can connect them with more Asian galleries and artists.” More than half the galleries taking part, he noted, are from Asia.

Officials such as Anthony Lau, executive director of Hong Kong’s tourism board, hope the fair will have staying power. China’s newly-wealthy collectors, he said, can easily return to visit the new local branches of global galleries that came for the event such as New York’s Lehmann Maupin– a welcome development in a city with a historically undistinguished gallery scene.

Galleries like these can play a critical role in helping fine art become a big business in Hong Kong by helping to establish marketplace values. “It’s the interaction between three elements – auctions, galleries, and art fairs – that makes for a vigorous marketplace,” according to Jeff Rabin, co-founder of global art adviser Artvest Partners. Hong Kong’s auction scene, he said, rewards successful artists but cannot develop new ones. “It needs the complete ecosystem.”

The Asian art ecosystem needs Hong Kong. The Mainland’s auction scene, widely disparaged here for blatant, endemic corruption, can’t do the job. Its largest auction house, Poly Auctions, is a unit of the People’s Liberation Army; Beijing-based attorney Nancy Murphy says it’s mainly a vehicle for money-laundering and payoff schemes that hinge on spurious and falsely-inflated values for artworks. The result: listed prices that say nothing about what collectors actually pay.

All of this was acceptable to Chinese tycoons as long as they could burnish their fortunes with high- end art works bought in New York and London via private jet. But over the last ten years China’s burgeoning middle class made it the largest art market in the world — despite falling behind the United States on a recent decline of 24 percent, still a hefty $13.9 billion, or 25 percent of the $56 billion global market. And the art itself was evolving too: according to curator and consultant David Eliot, it has rapidly shifted its aim to the tastes of new Chinese buyers, who are far more likely to shop on Central’s Pedder Street than on Mayfair’s Cork Street. Hong Kong saw its chance.

And not a minute too soon, according to Johnson Chang. Founder of its edgy Hanart TZ gallery and mentor to dozens of young artists, he admires the Western model of the gallery that nurtures their careers over the long run. “We see that concept slowly taking hold here,” he said. A splashy Art Basel showcase every year, he said, will reward the galleries that build and keep new talent.

But the city must do more, he added, and new officially-supported art spaces aren’t enough. “A district where artists can afford to live can become a destination on its own, supporting galleries, fringe theatres, and interesting new shops and restaurants, all of which will attract tourists.” This city’s ban on informal outdoor displays of art for sale, a fixture in New York and Paris, does not help.

Perhaps they will be allowed in the upcoming West Kowloon Cultural District, a tract of reclaimed land tapped for development as an arts district for many years. Stymied by everything from an overly-grandiose initial plan by Sir Norman Foster to the global economic slowdown in 2008, it had become a political football, and a revolving door for executives before Nittve, founding director of

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 58 London’s Tate Modern, was appointed.

Planned as an edifice without a collection, the M+ gained a surprising but welcome credibility when Uli Sigg, Swiss media executive and long-time China connoisseur, donated 1,500 works valued at $163 million. Now Pritzker Prize-winner Herzog & de Meuron is designing the $642 million museum, due to break ground later this year; more than 15 performance venues will follow.

As bait for high-end tourists, it’s following in the steps of several world-class chefs who have opened high-visibility restaurants here over the last few years. Joel Robuchon, Alain Ducasse, and Nobu Matsuhisa were first, but the pace has picked up with new entries from Mario Batali, Michael White, and the one of the hottest celebrity chefs in the world, New York émigré Matt Abergal, over the last 18 months.

One new restaurant has even positioned itself as a salon for the city’s nascent contemporary art scene. Veteran restaurateur Alan Lo hopes Duddell’s high-end cuisine, free-wheeling programs and “fearlessly curated” art shows can lure both monied connoisseurs and another crowd known more for talking about art than for picking up the check, the artists themselves.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 59

LE MONDE 'Art contemporain: Hongkong adoube dans la cour des grands', 5 June 2013

Par Roxana Azimi et Florence de Changy

Hongkong, envoyées spéciales. Il n'aura fallu que cinq ans à Hongkong pour passer d'un no man's land artistique à l'une des "grandes places" du marché de l'art contemporain. Consécration ultime, Art Basel, "la" référence dans le secteur, a choisi l'ancienne colonie britannique pour achever sa trilogie des continents, après l'Europe où le salon a démarré en 1970 à Bâle, puis les Amériques, où Art Basel Miami a ouvert en 2002.

Désormais adoubé dans la cour des grands, Art Basel Hongkong a accueilli, mercredi 22 mai dans l'après-midi, les collectionneurs "VIP", avant d'ouvrir jeudi 23 au matin, jusqu'à dimanche 26 à un public de plus en plus avide d'art et de culture. "Art Basel est une marque, un label de qualité", affirme le galeriste de Düsseldorf, Alexander Sies. Un label dont on attend qu'il ait comme effet de stimuler la qualité des œuvres exposées, d'attirer de nouvelles galeries, et, surtout, de faire venir en plus grand nombre les collectionneurs du monde entier.

Mais pour Hongkong, il s'agit d'abord de se frotter une nouvelle fois à cet étrange "art contemporain". Entre des échafaudages de bambous, créé par l'artiste indien Jitish Kallat, évoquant l'éternelle transformation de sa ville natale de Mumbai, le grand néon de 7 mètres de long de Laurent Grasso déclarant "Visibility is a Trap" ("la visibilité est un piège") ou encore ce jardin de cailloux gonflable qui se gonfle et se dégonfle comme s'il respirait, les Hongkongais devraient à nouveau se distraire et se nourrir de cette concentration, aussi abondante qu'éphémère, d'œuvres d'art dans leur ville.

L'étiquette Bâle a par ailleurs rassuré certains nouveaux à qui Hongkong pouvait sembler trop exotique. "Je ne serais peut-être pas venu sans Art Basel. C'est important d'avoir confiance quand on s'aventure ailleurs", indique le galeriste de New York, Peter Blum, qui montre des œuvres historiques de Yayoi Kusama, l'une des pionnières de l'art moderne au Japon, dont la marque de fabrique fut le pois, notamment blanc sur fond rouge. "Aller en Asie, c'est une aventure, un acte pionnier. Les galeries aiment savoir avec qui elles prennent le risque", estime Marc Spiegler, le directeur de Art Basel.

Moins d'une heure après l'ouverture "VIP", certains collectionneurs avaient déjà fait des emplettes. Les grands collectionneurs belges Guy et Myriam Ullens ont même été pris de court sur certaines œuvres déjà vendues à leur passage. "Les galeristes envoient de plus en plus leur programmation et les ventes se font avant l'ouverture", explique, faussement fâché, Guy Ullens par ailleurs assez enthousiaste de ce qu'il a vu.

La faille attendue de l'exercice va être de voir la foire de Hongkong devenir une Art Basel "de plus". D'ailleurs sur 246 galeries présentes à Hongkong, 91 seront aussi au rendez-vous d'Art Basel en juin et un certain nombre arrivent de Frieze New York, le salon qui s'est achevé il y a dix jours. Selon certains observateurs, ces galeries globales auraient d'ailleurs réservé leurs meilleures pièces pour Bâle, ne proposant au public de Hongkong que du second choix.

Les dirigeants de Art Basel affirment pourtant vouloir développer un caractère unique à chaque foire. Ils indiquent par exemple que le salon de Bâle n'accueille que 33 galeries de la zone Pacifique contre plus de 120 à Hongkong... Mais les chiffres peuvent mentir. Art Basel Hongkong se targue ainsi d'accueillir 26 galeries "de Hongkong". Or la moitié d'entre elles sont des Gagosian, White Cube, Perrotin, et autres galeries "aussi hongkongaises que la statue de la liberté ou la tour Eiffel...", s'amuse à remarquer un "petit collectionneur" français.

"Là où l'on avait une personne pour s'occuper des collectionneurs, Basel en a mis vingt-cinq à notre disposition. Forcément cela va faire venir plus de monde", indique Magnus Renfrew, le directeur de la foire de Hongkong depuis son lancement en 2008. L'oligarque milliardaire Roman Abramovich et sa compagne Dasha Zhukova font ainsi partie des mondanités et des "socialites" attendues pendant les heures réservées aux "VIP" sur les larges allées couvertes de moquette jetable rose vif.

Cette montée en gamme, qui est notable sans être radicale, a bien sûr un prix. Le mètre carré des

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 60 stands de galeries est passé de 535 à 675 dollars (+ 25 %) depuis 2011, date de l'accord de la prise de participation à hauteur de 60 % de Art Basel dans HK Art Fair.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 61

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 'Art Basel in Hong Kong 2013', 1 June 2013

By John Mcdonald

Hong Kong is said to have got its name from the smell of incense stored in warehouses by the waterfront. Nowadays in “the fragrant harbour” the dominant smell is that of money, and it’s a perfume most residents find highly agreeable. There was a certain tang in the air last week, as the increasingly successful Hong Kong Art Fair, now in its sixth year, was rebranded as Art Basel Hong Kong.

Beyond its spiritual attributes, art has always played a prominent role in the beautification of money. It was, therefore, only a matter of time until Hong Kong realised there was one lucrative market it had yet to explore. With vast new fortunes being made on the mainland, and the great desire of China’s millionaires to have all the good things enjoyed by their western counterparts, Hong Kong has become a natural destination for enterprising art dealers.

The leaders in the field are now akin to multinational corporations, with branches around the world. Larry Gagosian, for instance, has eleven galleries: three in New York, two in London, and one each in Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, Athens, Geneva – and Hong Kong. Jay Jopling’s White Cube has two galleries in London, plus outlets in Sao Paolo and Hong Kong.

This year, Lehmann Maupin has opened in Hong Kong, joining other international brands such as Emmanuel Perrotin, Ben Brown and Simon Lee. At the same time there is a thriving local gallery scene, which includes venues such as Osage, Pearl Lam, Schoeni, 10 Chancery Lane and Cat Street.

With all this activity it was a logical move for the MCH Group of Switzerland, which runs the world’s two biggest contemporary art fairs, in Basel and Miami, to buy into Hong Kong. Within a few years Hong Kong had established itself as the leading art market event in Asia, streaking ahead of its rivals in cities such as Singapore, Shanghai, Taipei and Seoul.

Hong Kong’s success was not simply due to its close proximity to China, it owed a debt to founding director, Magnus Renfrew, whose vision for the fair was a truly global one. While Art Basel in Basel (as it is now known!) has long been a showcase for the world’s richest and most powerful dealers – which means Europe and America – Hong Kong presents more of a level playing field. The organisers emphasise that at least fifty percent of the fair is devoted to Asian galleries, along with dedicated space for dealers from other outposts of the art world, such as Australia.

Another distinction of Renfrew’s model was that Art Hong Kong has made room for many young and emerging galleries. This allowed small scale, alternative venues to have a presence at the fair, having been selected by a committee of peers that favours the most original and impressive applications. In Basel such galleries can only be found in the satellite fairs.

The first thing one notices about Art Basel in Hong Kong, is that the presentation looks much more spacious than in previous years. The number of participating galleries has been reduced slightly, from 266 to 245, and the design of the booths improved. The lighting has been upgraded, and the VIP area is a more opulent affair, largely thanks to the sponsorship of Davidoff – Swiss makers of expensive luxury goods.

It could be argued that contemporary art itself is an expensive luxury item tailored to a certain lifestyle, yet this does not present a fair reflection of the Hong Kong’s mix of old and new, rich and poor galleries from 35 countries and territories

The main galleries section featured 171 participants. A special section called Insights, devoted to art from Asia and the Asia-Pacific region, added another 47 dealers to the mix. The final 37 were included in a section called Discoveries, made up of solo and two-person shows by artists from around the world. Spread throughout the fair were 17 large-scale installations selected by Tokyo curator, Yuko Hasegawa.

The variety of exhibitions, along with a lively program of talks and forums, helped promote the

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 62 pleasing illusion that the art fair was for the benefit of art lovers rather than art investors.

As in previous years there was a sense that some of the big dealers were not putting their best foot forward. The Hong Kong fair is sandwiched between Frieze New York (10-13 May) and Art Basel (13- 16 June), which acts as a disincentive for many European and American collectors. As a consequence, there are dealers who are content to send a stock room show to Asia, and save their masterpieces for next month.

Although the new owners originally planned to move the fair to February, this wasn’t feasible because it would clash with the Chinese New Year and eliminate many local clients.

The major topic of conversation, as usual, was whether the fair was better or worse than last year. My own feeling was that the layout may have been better but the quality of work was a little flat. There were a lot of galleries that looked good, but not many that might be called outstanding. However, this didn’t seem to communicate itself to buyers, who were spending freely enough.

An early highlight among sales was a triptych full of writhing red dots, called Flame of Life – Dedicated to Tu-Fu by Yayoi Kusama. It went for US$ 2 million, sold by Victoria Miro/Ota Fine Art “to an Asian collector”. It was one of 15 pieces by Kusama sold by these dealers on the first day. The second biggest price was paid for Quarteto, a work by Fernando Botero, sold by Galerie Gmurzynska of Zurich, for US$ 1.3 million to “a Malaysian collector.”

By the second evening, Tina Keng, of Tapei and Beijing, could boast of having sold works by Xu Jiang, from the series Eight Tall Sunflowers, to the value of US$2.8 million. The following day, the same gallery reported the sale of Wu Huaiqing’s Chinese Emperor 1 for US$ 2.6 million. These sales were only the cherry on top. There were dozens of works offloaded for sums in excess of US$ 500,000, by galleries from all around the world. The fact that top prices should be paid for Asian artists such as Kusama, Yoshitomo Nara, Zhang Xiaogang, Xu Jiang and Wu Huaiqing, suggests that local collectors are competing for quality works within their own region rather than hankering for scraps from American and European stockrooms.

There were eight Australian galleries included in this year’s fair – Roslyn Oxley9, Sullivan + Strumpf, and Andrew Jensen from Sydney; Ryan Renshaw from Brisbane; Tolarno, Diane Tanzer, Neon Parc, the Murray White Room, and Utopian Slumps, from Melbourne. It was an eclectic selection, with the smaller venues such as Neon Parc and Utopian Slumps, putting on low-key solo shows that defied the taste for spectacle. Tolarno followed that great Australian adage: ‘When you’re on a good thing, stick to it,” by concentrating on ceramics and paintings by Brendan Huntley, who was a sell-out at last year’s fair. Once again everything sold, often to the very same collectors.

The other exceptional result came from Diane Tanzer, who disposed of her entire exhibition of eight paintings by Juan Ford, for US$ 150,000. It was a reward for an imaginative presentation, with Ford’s paintings presented on screens featuring images of a pale, scrubby Australian bush landscape. Sullivan + Strumpf were no less daring in their solo exhibition of work by ceramic artist, Penny Byrne, called iPROTEST, which featured 300 small, kitsch porcelain figures, standing for trouble-spots all over the world. It was a piece that deserves to be acquired by a museum, but buyers were proving elusive.

Australian collectors were out in force, taking advantage of the lingering strength of the Aussie dollar before it sinks once more beneath the horizon. When this happens it may encourage collectors to do more of their shopping at home, but by now the taste for these international art fairs is well advanced. In the new, globalised world of art many collectors have begun to enjoy feeding their habit at fairs in Hong Kong, Basel, Miami, or any one of a dozen other cities, while paying fewer visits to hometown dealers.

A couple of notable Australian purchases came to light during the fair, including Play 201301 a gigantic leather-clad installation by China’s MadeIn Corp., acquired by Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery, from the Long March Space, Beijing. A floating Gothic cathedral in bondage, it should be right at home in sinful Sydney. Meanwhile, Berlin dealer, Matthias Arndt, sold an extravagant sculpture covered in pink blossoms, by Indonesian artist, Eko Nugroho to “an Australian Museum”. The price was US$ 54,000, which may prove to be a good investment, considering the increasing

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 63 enthusiasm with which collectors are responding to a new wave of Indonesian artists.

Overall the Swiss entrepreneurs behind the new-look fair can feel pleased with their journey to the east. Sales were strong, the dealers seem to have enjoyed themselves, and fears of rampaging European cultural imperialism have been laid to rest – at least for another twelve months.

Art Basel Hong Kong, 2013; Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, May 23 – May 26, 2013

Published in the Sydney Morning Herald, June 1, 2013

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 64 SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST 'Hong Kong secures its role as arts hub', 1 June 2013

Anyone who questions the city's reputation as an international arts hub need look no further than the art fair held in Wan Chai last week. The sensation whipped up by the first edition of the world famous Art Basel in Hong Kong was phenomenal. With good publicity, strong sales and high attendance, the exhibition-cum-fair has all the ingredients for a signature event in Asia.

Previously known as Art HK, the annual contemporary art fair was already Asia's biggest before MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel) took over to make it one of the three shows under the Art Basel label, along with the original in Switzerland and one in Miami, in the United States. With 245 galleries from 35 countries from around the world, the four-day contemporary art fair did not attract as many galleries as its predecessor. But the show was not inferior. The presentation was noticeably more sophisticated and the artworks were of higher calibre. More importantly, the sales were as impressive. Some big names reportedly fetched up to US$2 million apiece.

Contributing to the success was the opening of the show to all visitors during the weekend. It was effectively broadened from a trading forum for connoisseurs to an exhibition for all art lovers. The positive feedback is strong evidence of a growing appetite for the arts in the region.

Undoubtedly, China is the real driving force of the boom in art sales and auctions. As the nation's international stature rises, more Chinese artists are making an impact on the global art landscape. The growing interest in Chinese traditional and contemporary arts means there is huge potential for Hong Kong, which has long been capitalising on its position as a gateway to China. The fast-growing wealth of mainlanders is pushing the market further, with cash-rich collectors readily paying astronomical sums for the rare and special.

Art Basel Hong Kong has successfully reinforced the city's cultural and artistic image. Any doubts about our readiness to take a bigger space on the global art map should be laid to rest.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as:

HK secures its role as arts hub

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 65 LE FIGARO 'Hong Kong, une montagne d'art', 31 May 2013

REPORTAGE - La première édition de Art Basel Hong Kong, qui s'est achevée le 26 mai, a confirmé la troisième place de l'ancienne colonie britannique sur le marché de l'art, derrière New York et Londres

Des trombes d'eau sur Hong Kong. Après douze heures d'avion de Paris, la météo du mois de mai semble pourrie ici aussi. Sauf que le thermomètre affiche 29 degrés de plus. Pas de quoi affoler les Chinois de l'ancienne colonie britannique, habitués à vivre avec les intempéries auxquelles s'est adaptée l'architecture de cette ville de 1 000 m² peuplée de 7 millions d'âmes, sorte de New-York sur le Rocher. Une cité de grattes-ciel semblant tout droit sortie d'une BD de Schuiten, avec ses échangeurs autoroutiers et piétonniers qui s'enroulent autour des «malls» comme jadis les chemins sillonnaient la montagne surplombant la ville (Hong Kong signifie littéralement «La montagne aux parfums»), ses rues traversant les centres commerciaux, ses héliports perchés sur le toit des immeubles avec vue sur la baie grouillante de bateaux, qui gagne sur la mer pour ne pas étouffer.

Le vaste terrain vague de West Kowloon Cultural District, quarante hectares gagnés sur la mer le long du port de Victoria, est gorgé d'eau. C'est au pied du plus haut gratte-ciel de Hong Kong, l'ICC Tower, 484 mètres, qu'un complexe culturel gigantesque de 60 000 m² dont 20 000 m² de surface d'exposition, doit être aménagé. La presse internationale, venue en masse pour la grand messe de l'art contemporain, Art Basel Hong Kong, qui s'est déroulée du 23 au 26 mai, y a été conduite dérechef par les organisateurs mêmes de la foire, avant que celle-ci ne l'accapare. Car l'estampille de la célèbre foire suisse était une première depuis que Bâle a fait entrer Miami Beach dans son giron il y a dix ans.

Des sculptures gonflées

Sacrilege, de Jéremy Deller. Photo: Nicholas Tse; Courtesy of M+, West Kowloon Cultural District Authority Des sculptures gonflables géantes ont été posées exactement là où le musée d'art visuel «M+» doit ouvrir à Kowloon à l'horizon 2017. Le projet est une Arlésienne depuis que l'idée a émergé en 1996. Mais depuis un an, les choses se précisent. Le patron du district est australien, Michael Lynch, ancien directeur général de l'opéra de Sydney. Celui du futur musée est suédois, Lars Nittve, premier directeur de la Tate Modern à Londres et ancien patron du Moderna Museet de Stockholm. L'ensemble rappelle le projet de fondation d'art contemporain de François Pinault sur l'île Seguin à Boulogne-Billancourt, finalement installée à Venise. «Le musée sera vaste comme le MoMa de New York, ou comme deux fois la Tate Modern», déclare Lars Nittve. Pas moins de onze commissaires d'exposition ont été recrutés pour composer la collection qui comptera quatre sections: design, architecture, vidéos et culture populaire. Coût global des acquisitions: 1,7 milliard de dollars hongkongais (soit 170 millions d'euros). 225 millions ont été déjà dépensés.

Deux ou trois collections majeures

«Le bâtiment ne fait pas à lui seul un musée, souligne Lars Nittve alors que la compétition entre les six équipes d'architectes finalistes, dont Renzo Piano, Herzog & de Meuron et le japonais Sanaa, est entrée dans sa dernière ligne droite. Le lauréat sera connu en juillet. À noter que Norman Forster, à qui l'on doit les grandes lignes du district, ne participe pas à la conception du musée. «Comme pour le Guggenheim, nous devons commencer avec deux ou trois collections majeures», poursuit Lars Nittve, en annonçant le don de 280 oeuvres par treize collectionneurs et artistes originaires de Hong Kong. Une première acquisition locale, après les 1.463 oeuvres offertes par le plus grand collectionneur d'art chinois contemporain au monde, le Suisse Uli Sigg, en juin 2012.

«Au final, la collection du «M +» dépassera 2.000 pièces couvrant une période de 1954 à 2011, et des domaines aussi divers que la photographie, la peinture, la vidéo, la tapisserie, la sculpture et les installation», s'en réjouit d'avance le directeur, citant des artistes de Hong Kong stars: Gaylord Chan, Lui Chun-Kwong, Liu Heung-Shing, Chu Hing-Wah, Michael Wolf et Stanley Wong.

Complex Pile, de Paul Mac Carthy. Photo: Nicholas Tse; Courtesy of M+, West Kowloon Cultural District Authority

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 66

En attendant, le musée file la métaphore, avec six énormes sculptures gonflables et gonflées. L'exposition baptisée «Inflation!» ( jusqu'au 9 juin), représente des tabous, telle cette gigantesque crotte signée Paul Mc Carthy, et appelée Complex Pile, ce cochon de lait aux yeux rouges où l'on peut entrer, House of treasures, de la chinoise Cao Fei, ou encore cette réplique du site de Stonehenge appelée Sacrilège, de Jéremy Deller, où la jeunesse de Hong Kong joue à cache-cache et saute comme sur un trampoline (sauf par temps de pluie) . Ici, on cultive l'art et l'argent. Port franc à ciel ouvert n'appliquant pas de taxe à l'import ni l'export, l'ancienne colonie britannique rétrocédée à la Chine en 1997 est devenue un havre pour le marché de l'art. La troisième place forte derrière New York et Londres, selon Géraldine Lenain, une Française de Chine qui a grandi à Hong Kong et parle le Mandarin couramment, une experte en art asiatique, n°2 de Christie's à Shanghaï, où la maison de ventes, dirigera ses premières enchères en septembre ou octobre, à présent que les autorités chinoises ont levé, pour les pièces postérieures à 1949, l'interdiction faite aux sociétés étrangères de tenir le marteau. En attendant, c'est à Hong Kong que la société de François Pinault a organisé quatre vacations spectaculaires durant le dernier week-end d'Art Basel HK, les 25 et 26 mai et, au même endroit, le Convention Center: 90 % des 700 oeuvres d'Asie du XXe siècle et d'art contemporain mises à l'encan ont été vendus, totalisant 53, 7 millions de dollars américains. Sotheby's, implantée à Hong Kong depuis 1973, n'est pas en reste, avec toute une série d'expositions ainsi qu'une vente d'encres de Chine et d'œuvres sur papier d'artistes contemporains hongkongais et japonais, organisées en mai et juin, pour ses quarante ans dans la péninsule.

«Les chinois sont riches et voyageurs»

Si Christie's a Géraldine Lenain sur place, Sotheby's peut compter sur Kevin Ching. Ce dynamique et charmeur juriste chinois de Hong Kong spécialisé dans les joint venture est à l'origine de l'association de Sotheby's avec le groupe culturel et médiatique public Beijin GeHua Art, grâce auquel une mini- vente aux enchères sur le sol chinois a déjà pu être organisée en septembre dernier, et avec lequel une prochaine vacation d'envergure sera organisée à Pékin en novembre ou décembre. «L'essor du marché de l'art en Chine est fantastique, affirme Kevin Ching. Il y a cinq ans, la Chine continentale comptait pour 4 à 5 % seulement de notre chiffre d'affaires. Aujourd'hui, cela représente 30 à 40 %. En outre, j'ai constaté qu'en Occident, les Chinois remplissent les salles quand il y a une vente d'art asiatique ancien mais aussi contemporain. Je me suis donc dit qu'ils étaient riches, et voyageurs».

Oignon Bleu, Joana Vasconcelos, 2012, Courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Bruxelles. © Unidade Infinita Projectos.

La foire de Hong Kong a tiré partie du goût du voyage et de l'investissement dans l'art des Chinois, mais aussi de ceux des Coréens, des Taïwanais, des Indonésiens, des Australiens servis ici par la proche géographie. Plus de 60.000 amateurs ont arpenté les 245 galeries venues de 35 pays, dépensant des dizaines de millions de dollars américains autour de 3.000 artistes. La qualité n'a certes pas été du niveau de Bâle. Les galeristes ont misé sur des valeurs sûres du marché de l'art plutôt que sur l'audace. «Le marché à Hong Kong n'est pas encore mûr pour cela», analyse Olivier Belot de la galerie française Yvon Lambert qui, lors de sa première partitcipation il y a trois ans, avait dû repartir avec son oeuvre unique de Jenny Holzer sous le bras, mais a vendu en quelques minutes cette fois une photo de Kate Moss par Mario Testino pour 56.000 dollars à un collectionneur australien. Comme une figure de proue sur son stand, le parisien Daniel Templon proposait lui une sculpture monumentale Yue Minjun, repérée dans le jardin de l'artiste chinois, pour 80.000 dollars. Tandis que Nathalie Obadia cédait une pièce au drôle de nom, Oignon Bleu, fochet en laine, ornements et polyester, de la star portugaise Joana Vasconcelos, pour 60.000 euros à un Brésilien.

«Art Basel est une machine de guerre»

Étrangement, tous les patrons des galeries n'avaient pas daigné faire le déplacement à Hong Kong. Principale excuse avancée: la trop grande proximité avec la Frieze art fair de New York (10-13 mai), la Biennale de Venise, où les professionnels affluent juste avant l'ouverture du public du 1er juin au 2' novembre, et la foire d'Art Basel, à Bâle, dont la 44e édition se tiendra du 13 au 16 juin. Et les dates avancées pour le prochain rendez-vous de Hong-Kong, du 15 au 18 mai 2014, ne sont pas pour rassurer les galeristes globe-trotters. Mais dans un contexte asiatique où la démarche est encore très didactique, les visteurs ont surtout apprécié la présence nombreuse des artistes exposés.

The Tao Laughter No.4, Yue Minjun, , 2012, acier inoxydable. Courtesy Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 67 Ainsi a-t-on vu dans le dédale des allées de la foire la crème de l'art contemporain comme Yan Pei Ming (dont un portrait fut vendu aux enchères chez Christie's au bénéfice du Louvre), Xavier Veilhan et Takashi Murakami. Ces deux derniers étaient en outre présentés ensemble à la galerie hongkongaise d' Emmanuel Perrotin, située dans le même gratte-ciel, juste au-dessus de la galerie londonienne White Cube. De quoi parfaire l'éducation des Hongkongais, si tant est qu'ils en aient besoin. Et satisfaire aussi la curiosité des collectionneurs étrangers, venus nombreux cette année. Ainsi du Belge Guy Ullens, grand amateur à l'origine d'un musée privé d'art à Dashanzi, à Pékin, très actif sur le marché sur les conseils du spécialiste Jean-Marc Decrop.

«La marque Art Basel est une machine de guerre, confie Jean-Marc Decrop. Il y a un marketing incroyable. La foire est devenue très internationale, alors qu'elle n'intéressait avant qu'une poignée de collectionneurs». Magnus Renfrew, directeur de la foire affiche sa confiance en l'avenir: «Le niveau de transaction avec les chinois continentaux est encore faible. Mais la marque Art Basel est une réelle valeur ajoutée», assure-t-il, en soulignant la venue, inédite, de Coréens et de Taïwanais. Daniel Templon sourit, en rappelant ce dicton chinois: «exister, c'est insister».

Ainsi Hong Kong, cité bling-bling, se met dans le sillage de la Chine continentale, qui a enregistré «le plus fort développement de musées ces dix dernières années», selon le mensuel The Art newspaper, dans son édition spéciale du 22-24 mai diffusé durant la foire. «De 21 en 1949, le nombre d'institutions est passé à 348 en 1978 et 3.400 aujourd'hui», selon Guo Xiaoling, directeur du musée de Pékin (Beijing). L'Asie n'entend plus se faire dicter la façon d'orienter son regard sur l'art, mais en exposant et en collectionnant des artistes de la région, imposer sa propre vision culturelle.

BLOOMBERG 'Scene in Hong Kong: Kate Moss, Abramovich at Art Parties', 29 May 2013

Roman Abramovich and his girlfriend Dasha Zhukova inspected sculptures by Takashi Murakami. Kate Moss also browsed as Hong Kong wooed wealthy art buyers with champagne, James Bond-style parties and lobster feasts.

Moss studied paintings at the Art Basel VIP preview before rushing back to her hotel and changing into a black, off-the-shoulder dress for a party hosted by Dior, Artsy backer Wendi Deng Murdoch and jeweler George Jensen.

Art Basel’s blend of bling, commerce and art was brought to Hong Kong for the first time this year from May 23-26. It was neatly summed up by artist Rirkrit Tiravanjia during an Intelligence Squared event.

“When bankers get together they talk about art,” he said. “When artists get together, they talk about money.” Tiravanjia teamed with art critic Matthew Collings in a debate on whether the market is the best judge of art’s quality. They defeated Jeffrey Deitch, director of Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s deputy chairman.

Moss was joined at the May 22 Asia Society party by Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi; David Tang, founder of Shanghai Tang; and Fubon chairman Richard Tsai’s wife Maggie. Many later moved to the new Duddell Club for the Audemars Piguet after-party.

Harper’s Bazaar Art Night at the Four Seasons Hotel was attended by more than 250 guests including actresses Carina Lau and Gigi Leung, MGM Macau casino co-owner Pansy Ho and photographer Andreas Gursky.

Lobster, Caviar

The menu included lobster and scallop ceviche, minted Vaucluse green asparagus soup with smoked caviar cream and Black Angus Sirloin steak.

The dinner was co-hosted by collector and founder of Domus Collection, Richard Chang, in honor of the Royal Academy of Arts. Guests were presented with a choice of black or red carry-on suitcases to roll away their swag to Chang’s after-party for 1,000 people co-hosted by Harvey Nichols owner

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 68 Dickson Poon’s daughter Dee Poon. On May 25, Intelligence Squared Asia co-founder Yana Peel and Stephen Peel, a partner at TPG Capital, held a party that felt part Gatsby and part James Bond. Like 007’s ride to a Macau Casino in “Skyfall,” more than 400 guests made the ferry ride to the Jumbo Floating Restaurant.

Bankers, Artists

They included gallery owner Sean Kelly, Art Basel director Marc Spiegler, JP Morgan Asia private banking Chief Executive Andrew Cohen and Canada Pension Plan’s Asia president Mark Machin.

Collectors who arrived for Art Basel early got a chance to rub shoulders with artists including Murakami, Zhang Xiaogang, I Nyoman Masriadi and Zeng Fanzhi at the Asia Society’s inaugural Hong Kong Art Gala on May 20. The society honored Zeng, Masriadi and Korean artist Lee Ufan, who was unable to attend.

Asia Society museum director Melissa Chiu, the Mori Art Museum’s Nanjo Fumio, gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin, Crown Worldwide Group chairman Jim Thompson and his wife Sally were served globe-shaped, meringue-style desserts as part of an ethereal performance by artist Mariko Mori.

(Frederik Balfour is a reporter-at-large for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

Muse highlights include Martin Gayford on European art exhibitions and Jorg von Uthmann on Paris culture.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 69 BBC.COM 'Cash registers ring the changes for China's art market', 21 October 2014

By Georgina Adam

Cash registers ring the changes for China’s art market

China became the world’s largest art market in 2011 – then sales plummeted. But reporting from Hong Kong, Georgina Adam still hears the cash registers ringing.

Ker-CHING! Probably the most direct – or crass – display at last week’s Art Basel Hong Kong fair was an array of Andy Warhol dollar signs, conveniently sited right by the entrance to the VIP lounge. Brought by first-time exhibitor Dominique Levy of New York, the silk-screened works were on offer at up to a steep $6.5m. Levy was at the fair, along with 244 other exhibitors, because China represents a potential Eldorado for art dealers. In 2011 the world discovered with amazement that China had become the largest art market, beating the traditional heavyweights, the US and the UK, with sales of over $10 billion. And it had rocketed to this position with extraordinary velocity: in 1990 its share of the global art pie was an infinitesimal 0.4%. Western gallerists rushed to set up galleries in Asia, or at least hire Chinese-speaking personnel. Hong Kong, with its business-friendly, tax- and censorship-free status, became the number one choice for attacking the Chinese market, and the gateway to the whole region.

That initial elation was short lived, however. Last year art sales in China and Hong Kong slumped by 40% overall, both on the mainland and in Hong Kong.

Great fall of China

The reasons for this dramatic downturn were threefold. Firstly, the frenetic growth of the art market – 20% per annum between 2009 and 2011 – was just not sustainable. And the Chinese economy was slowing. The rise in GDP fell from 9.2% in 2011 to 7.2% in 2012.

Finally, and most seriously for art sales, there was a crackdown on tax evasion by art buyers on the mainland. Last year two art shippers and a museum director were slammed into prison, and heavy fines were imposed on those found to have under-declared values. This, inevitably, sent a chill through the market. Since then Chinese art galleries have been struggling to make ends meet and a number have closed, reports Cheng Xindong, the Beijing-based director of the Art Gallery Association.

And yet at the same time mainland China is in the grip of a frenzied museum-building boom. In the last few years, about 100 museums have opened annually with a peak of nearly 400 in 2011, according to the Chinese Society of Museums. These museums are not only in the major urban centres, such as Shanghai – with its new, $64m Power Station – or Beijing, where the National Museum of China recently emerged from a $400m revamp. Even in far-off Yinchuan, at the point where the Great Wall of China meets the Yellow River, almost $300m is being lavished on an arts centre.

Private collectors are also opening museums, such as the Shanghai billionaire investor Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei, who have already opened one, and are about to launch a second. Liu has dropped huge sums to buy art: he paid $27m to buy a 16th-century Ming scroll at auction in Beijing in 2009.

Fair trade

So China is still seen as a potential goldmine, even if the bulk of sales are in the traditional fields such as ceramics and scroll paintings. This is why dealers jetted in to exhibit at the Hong Kong fair. And with Christie’s spring array of auction sales being held at the same time, deep-pocketed collectors from all around the region – from the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan and Korea – were also in town for what has become Hong Kong’s ‘art week’.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 70 Then there were the socialites: the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich with his art-loving partner Dasha Zhukova; Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang; Wendi Deng Murdoch, wife of publishing mogul Rupert Murdoch; model Kate Moss and Hong Kong pop star Edison Chen. The Chinese dealer and all- out glamour girl, Pearl Lam, who never does things by halves, was showing colourful paintings by Zhu Jinshi in her Pedder Building gallery and threw a splashy dinner at the famed Peninsular Hotel to celebrate.

Collecting contemporary art in Hong Kong is a new phenomenon, and the absence of a good museum infrastructure has not helped develop tastes. In addition, there is a strong overlap with the luxury goods market, aided and abetted by the companies’ own thrust into the art world: vodka, cigars, watches, cars and champagne were actively present.

As a result, particularly popular were ‘brand names’. Eighteen works by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, whose profile was immensely enhanced after she collaborated with the Louis Vuitton shops, flew out of the Victoria Miro stand at prices of up to $2m. The Los Angeles gallery Blum and Poe did well with the Japanese artists Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami – who of course designed handbags for Vuitton. Chinese artists were popular, and MadeIn Company’s Play 201301, 2013, a Gothic cathedral hung by ropes from the ceiling and made of bondage-style black leather, zips, chains and tassels, sold to the Australian White Rabbit museum for $325,000.

Sales at the fair were strong overall, and at the weekend Christie’s racked up almost $100m in two auctions of contemporary Chinese art. While the Warhols apparently didn’t sell well, there is little doubt in most people’s minds that China has a more than auspicious future for the art trade.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 71 EL PAIS 'Renfrew: "En Asia, el arte que era caro era considerado bueno"', 27 May 2013

Renfrew: “En Asia, el arte que era caro era considerado bueno” La feria Art Basel en la excolonia británica gira alrededor de cuatro secciones, que incluyen artistas consagrados y otros noveles de todas partes del mundo

Habla rápido, con precisión suiza y la pasión de quien se ha pasado muchos años entre artistas. Magnus Renfrew, británico, de 37 años, conoce de primera mano el mercado del arte moderno y contemporáneo asiático. Dirigió la muestra Art HK, en Hong Kong, desde que fue creada en 2008. En 2012, tras la adquisición de esta, el año anterior, por la renombrada gestora de ferias de arte suiza Art Basel, fue nombrado director de Art Basel para Asia. Antes de mudarse a Hong Kong, fue responsable de exposiciones en la galería Contrasts de Pearl Lam, en Shanghai. Es director de la feria Art Basel en Hong Kong, que se celebra hasta el domingo, con la participación de 245 galerías, más de la mitad de ellas de Asia y la región Asia-Pacífico.

P. ¿Por qué han creado Art Basel en Hong Kong?

R. Asia tiene ahora más milmillonarios que Europa, la mayor generación de riqueza en este momento está sucediendo en Asia y el equilibrio de poderes está basculando hacia aquí en todos los aspectos, como la economía. Y la cultura, a menudo, va detrás. El mercado del arte tiende a seguir al dinero, por lo que hay grandes oportunidades para las galerías de encontrar nuevos coleccionistas.

P. ¿En qué se diferencia Art Basel en Hong Kong de las otras dos ferias: la de la propia Basel (Basilea) o la de Miami?

R. Cada una de las tres tiene su identidad única. En Art Basel en Suiza, el 50% de las galerías participantes procede de Europa; en Miami Beach, el 50% es de América –del norte al sur-, y es muy natural que en Hong Kong también el 50% sea de Asia y Asia-Pacífico. Para que cualquiera de las ferias sea un éxito, debes ser capaz de generar una fuerte base de apoyo de la región en la que se celebra.

P. Se habla mucho de que el mercado y las galerías de arte, al igual que el peso de la economía mundial, se están desplazando hacia Asia. ¿Es cierto?

R. Creo que el proceso está aún en su etapa inicial. Las galerías se están tomando Asia mucho más en serio de lo que lo hacían. La gente que quiere estar en el negocio en los próximos 20 o 30 años entiende realmente que Asia tiene que formar parte de su estrategia de futuro.

P. Y en lo que se refiere al arte y los artistas asiáticos, ¿están haciéndose más conocidos, más comprendidos en Occidente?

R. En Asia, se ha producido un fenómeno particular. Los artistas se han hecho conocidos por sus resultados comerciales en las subastas. No ha habido el marco de los comisarios y la crítica para evaluarlos como en Occidente. El mercado ha desempeñado este papel. Lo que era caro era considerado bueno. En los últimos años, hemos visto un desarrollo muy rápido en el entorno de evaluación del trabajo de los artistas.

P. ¿Hay diferencias entre los coleccionistas occidentales y los asiáticos?

R. No se puede generalizar lo que es un coleccionista occidental. Los coleccionistas occidentales son todos individuos, y lo mismo ocurre con los asiáticos. La gente colecciona por una gran variedad de razones, tanto en Occidente como en Asia. Algunos lo hacen por especulación o inversión, otros son verdaderamente apasionados por sus colecciones. En todo el mundo, existe el espectro completo de razones.

P. ¿Cómo ve la situación del mercado mundial del arte?

R. Es muy interesante lo importantes que han sido en los últimos años los coleccionistas de los nuevos mercados en la construcción del mercado. La importancia del sistema de galerías se está haciendo plena en los nuevos mercados. La gente está comenzando a entender que las galerías

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 73 ayudan a apoyar la noción de que los artistas creen para el largo plazo. Ahora, el compromiso de los coleccionistas de estos mercados no está tan determinado por la inversión. Están comenzando a tener una pasión genuina por las obras que compran.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 74 THE NEW YORK TIMES 'Hong Kong Art Fair's New Look', 27 May 2013

By JOYCE LAU

HONG KONG — There were many expectations for the first Art Basel Hong Kong, but no one thought the Swiss fair’s first foray into Asia would be quieter than its local predecessor, ART HK.

The event, which closed Sunday evening was, by no means, quiet in terms of events and exposure. A city that barely registered on the cultural map a few years ago seemed genuinely surprised that celebrities like Kate Moss would drop by. The global art establishment turned out in full force, including representatives from the Tate in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and major U.S. museums. Also walking the halls were art -world figures including Dasha Zhukova and her partner, the Russian businessman Roman Abramovich; the dealer Larry Gagosian; and the artists Fernando Botero and Takashi Murakami.

But Art Basel Hong Kong was quieter in another sense. ART HK, which began during the 2008 financial crisis, had to fight to get noticed in a city where many people did not know what an art fair really was. It did so with mass publicity and by opening its doors to the public.

This year, under Swiss management, the event had slightly fewer galleries — 245 in total, with 48 showing in Hong Kong for the first time. There were higher standards set for the gallery selection, better crowd control and far more breathing space. Viewers could move from booth to booth without elbowing through crowds; collectors could have conversations with dealers without yelling. And while Art Basel Hong Kong still drew a good mix of the local public, including Hong Kong’s ubiquitous uniformed schoolchildren, gallerists did not spend time trying to prevent toddlers from pressing their faces against the Anish Kapoor mirrored surfaces while their parents took photos with their iPhones.

As many noted, the event had “that Art Basel feeling.” When multimillion-dollar works are on the line, every detail counts — from high-quality walls that are exactly the right size, to lighting that casts that perfectly even white glow. Security guards beeped visitors in and out with electronic cards. “Last year, I was worried that someone could just take a small work under his arm and walk out with it,” said one U.S. dealer who asked to remain unnamed.

The change could be attributed partly to the fact that the show stopped handing out passes like candy, and partly to the fact that there are now about 150 outside events held during what is informally known as Hong Kong Art Week. In 2008, the fair was one of the few quality offerings for an art-hungry public. This year, there were plenty of other exhibitions, installations, workshops, talks and tours, even in Hong Kong’s outlying neighborhoods.

Art Basel Hong Kong was also different from Art Basel’s fairs in Miami and Basel. Gallerists noticed a slower pace than in the West, where they are used to bracing themselves for an onslaught of aggressive buying as soon as collectors arrive for the preview.

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“At Basel in Miami, the big sales are done in the first three hours,” said Mathias Rastorfer, director of Galerie Gmurzynska, based in Switzerland, and the modern art expert on Art Basel’s selection committee. “There’s this hyper energy. It’s crazy. But that’s not the case in Hong Kong. Buyers are seeing works, thinking, researching, and then coming back. It’s like a medieval market — you go from stall to stall and compare the oranges.”

Galerie Gmurzynska held what it said was Mr. Botero’s first solo show in China, and flew him out for the opening. “I’m going into hiding,” joked Mr. Botero, 81, as Asian women clutching their $50 catalogs lined up around him for signatures and photographs. He mused about how his works, with their voluptuous figures and bright tropical colors, would be seen by a Chinese audience for the first time. “With my sensual full bodies, happy faces and bright hues, maybe they think they are Chinese?” he said, adding that he hoped that he would someday have a retrospective at a Chinese museum.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 75 During the fair’s preview last Wednesday, Galerie Gmurzynska sold Mr. Botero’s “Quarteto” from 2012 for $1.3 million to a Malaysian collector. The second day, Princess Michael of Kent leaned in toward Mr. Botero and whispered, “I’ve sold another, to a Chinese friend,” while pointing to a perfectly balanced ballerina sculpture.

By Sunday, they had sold seven Boteros — three paintings and four sculptures — ranging from $400,000 to $1.3 million, to collectors from Hong Kong, China, Indonesia and Malaysia.

“Our sales are to new collectors,” Mr. Rastorfer said. “We’ve also made a lot of new contacts.”

Kishore Singh of the Delhi Art Gallery repeated a common refrain among dealers showing in Hong Kong for the first time — that Art Basel was great for networking, if not necessarily for transactions.

“There have not been so many sales, but interest has been high,” Mr. Singh said, adding that he hoped to return next year. “These Indian artists are not well-known, but we hope to inform art lovers about India’s art masters.”

Anne-Claudie Coric, director of Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris, sold nine works. “We were expecting more this year because last year, we sold more,” she said, though she added that “People were curious. The fair is excellent and the attendance is great.”

“Collectors here want engagement and education,” said Jeff Poe, a co-owner of Blum & Poe, a Los Angeles gallery that has long had an office in Tokyo and is planning on opening an exhibition space there soon. “They won’t be pushed into doing things quickly. It’s not a Western way of doing business.”

Particularly popular was a side room with two new works by artists known for twisting the cartoon aesthetic particular to Japan. Viewers crowded around Murakami’s “Pom & Me: On the Red Mound of the Dead” from 2013, and not only because the artist — whom Blum & Poe had long championed to the American market — had been hanging around in person. “It’s a really important work,” Mr. Poe said. “It’s his look at mortality.” It sold quickly for $400,000.

By the last day, they had sold nine works, with two of Yoshitomo Nara’s giant dog head sculptures — at $350,000 per head — on reserve.

Ashley Rawlings, the director of Blum & Poe’s Tokyo office, said sales were “better than previous years.”

“There is a lot of interest,” he said. “For us, we have more connections with the Asian clients, from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia.”

The Dominique Lévy Gallery of New York — formerly the “L” in L&M Arts, which broke off to form its own branch this spring — chose to go with a single series of Andy Warhol’s dollar signs.

“People come and look first, and then they go home to research,” said Begum Yasar, an associate director with Dominique Lévy. “It’s not the same as other fairs. At Basel, it’s very transactional. Here, it’s quiet and elegant, and there’s space. That’s nice.”

“Sales are not as high as we expected them to be, but interest is high,” she said Sunday. “This has been a really popular booth. We have sold a couple of artworks.”

The simple, iconic selection was an apt choice considering that a major Warhol retrospective just closed at the Hong Kong Museum of Art in March and drew more than 250,000 visitors. That show, “15 Minutes Eternal,” also drew attention to the city’s unique placement in China, as the Mao portraits shown here were then barred by the authorities when they traveled onto Shanghai.

While Hong Kong benefits from wealthy Chinese collectors, it also has an advantage over other Chinese cities, which are governed by Beijing’s laws. Art shows on the mainland are bound up with red tape and censorship. Even if a controversial work — like a Mao portrait or an Ai Weiwei installation — gets through customs, it is often only after much delay and paperwork. In addition, Hong Kong does not tax art imports, exports or sales, nor does it have a luxury levy. A collector buying art on the mainland could pay up to 34 percent in taxes.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 76

Art Basel is the new lynchpin of what is developing into Hong Kong’s art season. Increasingly, any art news worth reporting is now released the week of the fair. It was on the last day of the fair that Art Basel announced, for example, that its main sponsor would shift from Deutsche Bank to UBS.

M+, the planned museum for the $2.8 billion West Kowloon Cultural District, waited for Art Basel to announce a major acquisition of work by Tehching Hsieh, a New York-based performance artist originally from Taiwan. M+’s new home may not be ready yet, but it is already building its collection, waiting for the Hong Kong art boom to happen.

Calvin Yang contributed reporting.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 77 FORBES 'The Global Art Market Beats a Path to China's Doorstep', 27 May 2013

Robert Olsen

This past week saw much of the art world’s high and mighty milling about Hong Kong for the inaugural edition of Art Basel and the myriad of events taking place on the fair’s periphery. The global art market has been shifting from Europe and North America towards Asia for some time, but this year in particular marks a milestone for Hong Kong’s ambition to become a regional art hub. And for a city that looks increasingly like a hub of tainted government officials, Art Basel’s arrival is certainly a welcome development.

Of course, the purists will bemoan the event’s commercial underpinnings, likening it to a giant art flea market because everything on display has a price. The works on show are merely the galleries’ current inventory, not their best art. Indeed, the layout and the lighting does seem more suited to a factory floor than for admiring great works, but sacrifices have to be made to engage new collectors.

Hong Kong’s access to the growing wealth of Chinese collectors combines with a highly developed infrastructure to facilitate trade that few locations in Asia can match. It’s a recipe that saw the city already rise to become the world’s third-largest art auction market after New York and London.

So, it seems only fitting the world’s freest economy would attract the interest of a market that was recently described as having “practically no oversight or regulation.” And the signs of its development here are readily apparent.

Many of the world’s top galleries, including Gagosian, White Cube, Lehmann Maupin and Galerie Perrotin, have been willing to brave Hong Kong’s sky-high rents to set up outposts near long- established players like Hanart TZ and Schoeni. Even our much-maligned government could see the writing on the wall and threw its weight behind the development of the M+ museum and Central Police Station project.

The Art Basel franchise belongs to Switzerland’s MCH Group, which had been so impressed by the success of the Art HK fair that it bought a controlling stake in its owner, Asian Art Fairs (AAF), for an undisclosed sum in July 2011. AAF was a joint venture between Tom Etchells, Sandy Angus and Will Ramsay. The British trio launched the fair back in 2008 with over 100 galleries that grew to 266 last year.

MCH, which operates the watch and jewelry fair Baselworld, sees Hong Kong as the Asian extension of its art fairs in Basel and Miami Beach. In a recent filing with the Swiss exchange, the company said earnings rose 42% to CHF 27.4 million ($28.5 million) last year, on operating income of CHF 390.2 million. This was the first year MCH incorporated the Hong Kong fair into its accounts, but the company didn’t provide a breakdown between the three.

Although contemporary art may look tempting as alternative assets, investors would be wise to avoid being seduced by the banner headlines. As one collector confided, high-profile auctions are always breaking new records because paintings and other works by the world’s greatest artists are only attainable maybe once or twice in a lifetime. If a collector has the wealth to buy at that level, it usually means they’re well into middle age or beyond. Billionaires aren’t concerned about cost, they’re thinking mainly about their legacy.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 78 WALL STREET JOURNAL 'UBS Secures Global Art Basel Sponsorship', 27 May 2013

By JASON CHOW Updated May 26, 2013 10:35 p.m. ET

UBS AG is taking over from Deutsche Bank AG as the lead sponsor of Art Basel in Hong Kong, the biggest art event in Asia, UBS said Monday. The new deal solidifies the Swiss bank's position as the main sponsor of the global Art Basel brand.

Art Basel's other two fairs, which are held annually in Basel, Switzerland, and Miami Beach, are already supported by UBS.

"This new collaboration ideally complements our existing portfolio of sponsorships and underlines our ongoing commitment to supporting and promoting contemporary art," said UBS Chief Executive Sergio Ermotti in a statement.

Financial details weren't disclosed. The agreement was described as a "multiyear" deal.

Art Basel events have become staple meeting points for the world's wealthy art collectors and socialites. British model Kate Moss and Russian billionaire Roman Abramovitch, along with his girlfriend Dasha Zhukova, were among the visitors in Hong Kong this past week during the fair. More than 60,000 people attended the Art Basel in Hong Kong, fair organizers said.

Many of the 245 galleries that exhibited in Hong Kong reported strong sales. "Flame of Life - Dedicated to Tu-Fu (Du-Fu)" by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama sold for $2 million to an Asian collector at a booth that featured works from the London-based Victoria Miro gallery and Tokyo-based OTA Fine Arts.

"Quarteto" by Colombian painter Fernando Botero was purchased for $1.3 million by a Malaysian collector from Galerie Gmurzynska, a Swiss gallery.

The Hong Kong event, which closed on Sunday, is the first time Art Basel has appeared in the Asian city, which has emerged in recent years as a major art hub for the region. In 2011, MCH Group AG, the company that owns the Art Basel franchise, purchased the Hong Kong International Art Fair, known in art circles as Art HK. Art HK started in 2007 and grew to become Asia's largest and most international art event.

In 2009, Deutsche Bank signed a deal to be the lead sponsor for the Art HK fair for "up to five years," according to the statement released at the time of announcement. The value of the deal wasn't disclosed.

The sponsorship has been a question mark since Art Basel acquired Art HK because of UBS's sponsorship of the group's other events. The German bank announced Friday it would launch a three-year touring exhibition program for Asia of art works from its extensive collection.

UBS operates an "art competency group" that advises its wealthy clients on how to manage and build their art collections. Previously, UBS had a larger "art advisory" team, but the bank shut the group down in 2009.

This wasn't the first time two banks dueled over sponsorship of a major Hong Kong event. Recently, HSBC Holdings PLC took over as a main sponsor of the Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament, the biggest sporting event of the year in the Chinese city. HSBC, which sponsors the tournament globally, took over the coveted Hong Kong sponsorship from Credit Suisse Group.

Write to Jason Chow at [email protected]

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 79 SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST 'UBS sponsors Art Basel Hong Kong as finance, culture intersect in Asia', 27 May 2013

Vivienne Chow

The globalisation of the art world is extending from the cultural to the financial, with UBS sponsoring the Asian arts scene via a Hong Kong art fair.

The Swiss bank will become the new partner of Art Basel Hong Kong from tomorrow, the South China Morning Post has learned.

UBS will replace Deutsche Bank. The German bank sponsored Art Basel Hong Kong this year, the inaugural event under its new name. Deutsche has been sponsoring the fair's predecessor, ART HK, since 2009.

The Swiss bank has been a partner of Art Basel, the world's largest modern and contemporary art fair, for 20 years. It also became a partner when Art Basel launched Art Basel Miami Beach in 2002.

ART HK, which started in May 2008, rose to become Asia's largest modern and contemporary art fair. In 2011, MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel), organisers of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, acquired a 60 per cent stake in ART HK's organisers, Asian Art Fairs. ART HK subsequently fell under the umbrella of the Art Basel family, which now has presences in Europe, the Americas and Asia.Chi- Won Yoon, chief executive of UBS Asia Pacific, said the new partnership with Art Basel Hong Kong was a "natural extension of a long-standing partnership with Art Basel".

The Swiss bank will actively look at Asia in terms of sponsorships for arts and culture in the region. The bank's Hong Kong outpost is the largest in terms of the number of employees in Asia, but the number of Asian works featured in the bank's art collection was "not enough in respect of the size of our operations here", said Stephen McCoubrey, director and regional curator of UBS Art Collection, which has more than 35,000 works of art produced from the 1960s onwards.

McCoubrey said that Hong Kong artists were on the radar and that the bank was working on expanding its collection.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 80 SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST 'Art Basel wraps up in Hong Kong after show of world's finest', 27 May 2013

Competition between Western artists and Asian works 'very positive', Art Basel organisers say

A week of art madness ended yesterday with the closure of exhibition Art Basel's Hong Kong debut, which turned into a showdown between 245 galleries from around the world.

Galleries from Western nations - making up half of the total number exhibiting - pulled out the big guns, bringing over major works by big-name artists, and they reported strong sales last Wednesday on "VIP day". Galleries from the Asia-Pacific region, including Hong Kong, said business was slow the first couple of days and they had to work extra hard to draw attention from collectors. Some said sales began to pick up towards the end of the fair and that deals were still being negotiated 30 minutes before the fair closed.

Gallery Hauser & Wirth sold SP234 by Sterling Ruby to an art foundation on the mainland for more than US$250,000. Pearl Lam from Hong Kong sold Four Noblemen by Zhu Jinshi for US$195,000. London's Victoria Miro, co-presenting with Asia's Ota Fine Arts, sold the 1988 Yayoi Kusama work Flame of Life - Dedicated to Tu-Fu (Du-Fu) for US$2 million to an Asian collector.

Taiwanese dealer Tina Keng sold eight works from the series Eight Tall Sunflowers by Xu Jiang for US$2.6 million and Wang Huaiqing's abstract work Chinese Emperor for US$2.6 million.

Keng said the competition was particularly keen.

"All the big [Western] artists are here. So you must bring the Asian equivalent," Keng said.

One Asian dealer said their gallery was like a monster in their home country, "but here compared to these big Western galleries, I'm like an ant".

Art Basel Asia director Magnus Renfrew said many collectors had gone home to do some research into artists whose work they had seen at the fair before returning on the final day to buy.

"The competition has been very positive and it helps drive up the standard of the presentation across the board," Renfrew said. "Western galleries feel the pressure as much as the Asian ones."

Originally known as Art HK, the fair has run since 2008 under this name and became the largest in Asia. In 2011, Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach organisers MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel) acquired a 60 per cent stake in Art HK organisers Asian Art Fairs, leading to the event's transformation into Art Basel this year.

Despite the change, there was no drop in participation by local artists, with some 26 Hong Kong galleries exhibiting to the fair's 60,000 visitors.

Hong Kong artist Stanley Wong, who was showing at local gallery Blindspot, said the fair this year had become more sophisticated with improvement in the standard and calibre of work on show. "But at the same time, I don't see anything very edgy and powerful," he said.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 81 THE GUARDIAN 'Art Basel fair woos wealthy Chinese with champagne, logos and singers', 25 May 2013

David Batty

The world-renowned Swiss fair has set up in Hong Kong on the long march to a bigger slice of Asia's massive art market

The branding hits as soon as you leave Hong Kong International airport and spot two huge billboards heralding the Asian debut of the world's most prominent art fair, Art Basel. Amid a PR frenzy that drew the likes of supermodel Kate Moss and Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, it seemed that even the torrential rain and 18,000 lightning strikes across the territory hours before the VIP preview on Wednesday were just part of the city-wide spectacle.

There is much familiar about Art Basel in Hong Kong, which runs alongside the original fair in its namesake home city in Switzerland and a sister event in Miami Beach – not least the sponsors. Trolleys of Ruinart champagne stalk the aisles at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. A BMW "art car" brightly painted by Spanish artist César Manrique is displayed outside one entrance. Absolut ArtBureau, an offshoot of the vodka drink company, has commissioned an "art bar" by Adrian Wong, in which a Cantonese lounge singer performs with an animatronic band of multi- limbed manga-like creatures, evoking a mix of colonial kitsch and Blade Runner.

Art Basel's purchase of the previous Art HK fair two years ago led some locals to question whether Hong Kong's art scene was becoming a post-colonial venture for importing western art into Asia. With China now the world's second-largest art market after the US, and Asia home to more billionaires than North America, the attraction seems obvious.

In recent years, several top commercial western galleries have set up outposts amid the Louis Vuitton and Prada stores in the city's central business district, including American Larry Gagosian, the world's richest art dealer, in 2008 and London gallerist Jay Jopling's White Cube in March 2012.

At packed-out private views, both galleries brought out their big guns. White Cube showed the Chapman Brothers' macabre new installation, The Sum of All Evil, vitrines packed with thousands of miniature figures in violent torment; and Gagosian presented paintings by the late New York graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

But the wooing of the Chinese collectors and their vast wealth is a long, slow process. Most western galleries have yet to convince the big buyers of mainland China, whose taste for contemporary art remains patriotic, according to market analysts.

Graham Steele, director of White Cube Hong Kong, said: "The barriers are coming down, but not as fast as western dealers would like them to. There isn't the cultural momentum yet. The major Chinese collectors come to Hong Kong for Christie's or Sotheby's auctions of Chinese art."

US gallery Pace's Beijing branch, which explicitly declares itself an Asian gallery and runs a different programme from the US and UK branches, has found success by becoming a major dealer for Chinese contemporary artists. Its stand at the fair included work by Zhang Xiaogang, whose paintings have fetched multimillion-pound prices at auction.

Several British dealers said that Singapore, Taiwan and the Philippines, which are more familiar with western culture, were their most important markets in Asia. Australians are also major collectors. Ellie Harrison-Read, sales associate at Lisson Gallery, said: "Big names such as Anish Kapoor and Marina Abramovic, people who are familiar, sell well. Brand is very important here."

This seemed to be apparent in big sales of the fair's first day. London's Victoria Miro gallery sold a wall-sized painting by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama for £1.32m and White Cube sold a Gary Hume sculpture for £66,243, while 15 sculptures by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, depicting a cartoon version of the artist and his dog, sold for £89,428 each.

The local art scene, which has long felt overshadowed by the Chinese contemporary art boom, has mixed feelings about the influx of international dealers. Pui Pui To, director of 2P gallery, one of

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 82 Hong Kong's few art spaces to represent local artists, said: "Now that the blue chip galleries have arrived, it's become much tougher for us to survive."

Spiralling rents have pushed younger galleries further from the city centre. Pui Pui To's gallery, which is showing in Art Basel, is on a backstreet in Sai Ying Pun in the city's western district. "The only brand names round here are McDonald's and KFC," she said.

However, she praised Art Basel in Hong Kong's director, Magnus Renfrew, who founded Art HK for supporting the local art scene through educational programmes and collaboration with non-profit, artist-run projects. Renfrew said that when he first arrived in Hong Kong it was referred to as a "cultural desert" with little audience for contemporary art: "Since the fair opened, the number of visitors has grown from just 19,000 in 2008 to 67,000 last year and the gallery scene is more sophisticated."

He believes that the current imbalance between the art market, which has long had a big presence in the territory with Christie's and Sotheby's auction houses, will change with the construction of the West Kowloon cultural district, which will include the M+ museum of visual culture, twice the size of Tate Modern, and 16 performing art museums. An outdoor exhibition of inflatable sculptures on the site, M+ mobile, which includes a giant upturned cockroach, a suckling pig you can walk into and British artist Jeremy Deller's bouncy castle version of Stonehenge, has drawn 130,000 visitors in just three weeks.

Lars Nittve, executive director of M+ and the founding director of Tate Modern, compared the exhibition to the sensation caused by Carl Andre's bricks when they first were shown at the Tate. "Really for the first time in Hong Kong it has provoked public debate about whether something that looks ugly can be art. Can you jump on art? Can art be fun?"

Harriet Onslow of Pearl Lam Galleries, based in Hong Kong and Shanghai, thinks there will be room for a wider range of galleries as the art scene diversifies. "Collectors are not going to decide against buying one of [the smaller galleries'] artists for HK$5,000 just because I've sold them something for HK$200,000," she said.

However the work of one of the local artists in the Pearl Lam booth suggests that Pui Pui To is not alone in her ambivalance towards the internationalisation of Hong Kong's art scene. Tsang Kin-wah offers a tongue-in-cheek critique of the art fair system in a text installation in which scathing comments in vinyl lettering spread across the floor like the tentacles of an octopus:

"ANYONECANBEANARTISTTHEREFOREANYA$$HOLECANBEANARTIST

ANYONECANBEACOLLECTORTHEREFOREANYA$$HOLECANBEACOLLECTOR

CREATE$LUXURYARTCREATE$BIGMONEYCREATE$POWERCREATE$BIGMONEY

CREATE$BIGNAMECREATE$FAMECREATE$POWER."

Onslow said: "It's about how fucking awful art fairs are and how it's no longer about the art but the fair. The text is etched on glass because that signifies how the art and the artist is disappearing."

Yet in the Deutsche Bank's exclusive VIP room another work by the artist, best known for painting words in English and Chinese in seemingly floral patterns, offers a more positive if rather cynical take, with the phrase "Making Art, Making Money" discernible in the grey text. It seems unlikely that Tsang Kin-wah at least will be disappearing any time soon.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 83 FRANKFURTER ALLEGEMEINE ZEITUNG 'Art Basel in Hong Kong: Der Osten lehrt den Westen das Staunen', 24 May 2013

Der Osten lehrt den Westen das Staunen Die Messe von Hongkong findet zum ersten Mal unter Führung der Art Basel statt. Doch gerade die Kunst aus dem asiatischen und pazifischen Raum tut gut - und sorgt für starke Verkäufe. 24.05.2013, von ROSE-MARIA GROPP, HONGKONG

Gefragt nach der durchschnittlichen Größe einer Wohnung in Hongkong, schätzte ein Bürger der Stadt: vierzig Quadratmeter. Das ist wohl noch zu hoch gegriffen in dieser Stadt der ragenden Türme, die so viele Menschen beherbergen auf so wenig Grundfläche. Gemessen daran haben manche der Stände auf der Art Basel Hong Kong verschwenderische Dimensionen. „Hong Kong is the perfect place“, schwärmte Marc Spiegler, der Direktor der Art Basel, zur Eröffnung. Schließlich sei Hongkong auch eine Hafenstadt, wie Basel und Miami Beach. Außerdem, möchte man hinzufügen, von steuerlichen Vorteilen gesegnet, was auch den Handel mit der Kunst beschwingt. Einen bedenkenswerten Aspekt steuerte dazu ein Kenner der Lage im Gespräch bei: Nichts sei so teuer in Hongkong wie Platz. Inzwischen ist es die Stadt mit den höchsten Immobilienpreisen auf der Welt; weshalb Kunst hier liegenzulassen kaum lohnend wäre.

Marc Spiegler weiß auch sehr gut, dass es darum geht, „diesen asiatischen Markt zu bauen“. Der ist zwar durchaus schon da, zumal Magnus Renfrew als Direktor der Art Basel für Asien geblieben ist, der zuvor die Art Hong Kong seit 2008 führte, bis diese Messe 2011 von Basel übernommen wurde. Im Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre sind in zwei Hallen und auf zwei Ebenen rund 250 Galerien aus 35 Ländern versammelt. Die Basel-Premiere bedeutet zugleich ein Novum in der sonst so durchglobalisierten Kunstszene: Mehr als die Hälfte der Teilnehmer kommt aus dem asiatischen und pazifischen Raum. Das ist ein deutliches Bekenntnis zur Region, ohne das dieser Markt freilich nicht auf Dauer zu erobern wäre. Außerdem ist es das intelligente Kalkül der Direktoren Spiegler, Renfrew und Annette Schönholzer, die für die neuen Initiativen des Baseler Großunternehmens zuständig ist. Man kann nicht an drei Plätzen die gleiche Show haben wollen, so formuliert es Spiegler mit Blick auf Basel und Miami Beach.

Und tatsächlich hinterlässt dieses erste so kompakte Aufeinandertreffen der Galerien aus dem Westen und dem Osten einen nachhaltigen Eindruck. Es wird - auch in der Gegenwartskunst - Zeit, sich davon zu verabschieden, dass Europa die Qualitätsmaßstäbe setzt und Amerika allein seligmachend ist. Dabei tritt die Klassische Moderne in den Hintergrund (erwähnt sei als Ausnahme die Galerie Leandro Navarro aus Madrid, die einen ganzen Stand mit schönen Picassos, Kleinformaten vor allem und Papierarbeiten, eingerichtet hat). Es dominiert die Zeitgenossenschaft. Die Plazierung der Galerien ist ausgesprochen geschickt, besonders dort, wo es zum spannungsvoll inszenierten Nebeneinander oder Gegenüber von Teilnehmern beider Seiten kommt.

Beginnt man also oben mit der Halle drei, sagt David Juda an seinem Stand bei der Preview fröhlich: „Leute von überall sind da.“ Für die hält er seines Hauskünstlers Katsura Funakoshi geheimnisvolle Holzfrau „Am I Floating?“ bereit (300.000 Euro) oder auch Christos berühmten frühen vollgeladenen, verpackten Einkaufswagen (600.000 Euro). Vis-à-vis bilden Richard Gray, Karsten Greve und die Galerie Gmurzynska ein starkes Karree. Bei Gray hängt ein eleganter Frank Stella von 1974, „Mrs. Rabbit’s Rainbow III“ (2,2 Millionen Dollar), Greve hat eine großartige Bronze von Louise Bourgeois, „Inner Ear“ aus dem Jahr 1962 (Auflage 6), dabei, und Gmurzynska zelebriert eine One-Man- Präsentation mit neueren Bildern von Fernando Botero (130.000 bis 1,3 Millionen Dollar; das teuerste ist bereits verkauft), der zur Preview auch selbst gekommen ist. Galeriedirektor Mathias Rastorfer ist für die Auswahl der asiatischen Moderne zuständig, keine einfache Aufgabe - vielleicht wird sich diese Gruppe durch die Messe in Hongkong zuallererst herauskristallisieren. Hans Mayer, Hongkong-erfahren, lobt die Organisation und erwartet die Klientel für seinen grünen Lucio Fontana (1,25 Millionen Dollar) oder auch für Hans Hofmanns „Shifting Planes“ von 1947 (346.000 Euro).

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 84

FINANCIAL TIMES 'The Art Market: first they took Miami, now they take Hong Kong', 24 May 2013

By Georgina Adam

Basel brand hits HK; one fair in, one fair out in California; massive deflation for sculpture

A powerful battalion of the art world’s grandees jetted in from New York, London, Beijing and many other points to attend the new Art Basel in Hong Kong, which launched this week and ends on Sunday. This is the first truly “Basel” edition of the Asian fair, which the powerful Swiss firm acquired two years ago. And anyone who knows the other two fairs in its portfolio – Basel and Miami Beach – will have recognised the “brand”, with every detail, from typeface to maps, now homogenised throughout.

While the transformation from the ArtHK fair is not radical, the new owners have smoothed some things out, for instance distributing stands better between the two floors and placing the VIP lounge upstairs. The fair is spacious and well lit, flattering the art on view. But with “Basel Basel” round the corner, some galleries have not brought their best works, and others are frankly a muddle. But there are high points, among them Peter Blum’s marvellous offering of early Kusama works including “Phallic Bowl” (1965) in the $300,000 range – showing up the brash, garish offerings of more recent Kusama works. And the small Australian gallery Sullivan and Strumpf is showing subversive tableaux of figurines by Penny Byrne – “iProtest” – inspired by political unrest across the world.

Some exhibitors, including Blum, are attending for the first time, specifically because it is now a Basel event. Other newbies at the opening were the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, his partner Dasha Zhukova, Wendi Deng Murdoch and posses of collectors and museum directors including Lacma’s Jeffrey Deitch. Artists – Fernando Botero, Takashi Murakami, Abbas Kiarostami and many of the best-known Chinese names – had also hotfooted in.

As for sales, Hauser & Wirth reported a shower of deals and Arndt immediately sold a flowered puppy by the hot Indonesian artist Eko Nugroho, “Flower Generation II” (2012), to Adelaide’s South Australia Museum for $54,000 and a Jittish Kallat to the Belgian collector Guy Ullens, tagged at $180,000, while Hanart quickly placed four ink paintings by Qiu Zhijie with a big New York museum for $20,000 each. “There’s a dramatic difference in sales this year,” said a beaming Tim Blum. while Paul Kasmin also said business was “excellent”.

. . .

Along with the new fair, the week marked an extraordinary change in Hong Kong as an art hub. The night before the fair opening, the six galleries in the Pedder Building staged a joint vernissage and were so mobbed that a sign outside announced “Queuing time approx 30 minutes”; once in, visitors could see Basquiat at Gagosian or the new Lehmann Maupin space, showing a quintessentially Hong Kong scene by Zheng Guogu. The same crowd then packed into White Cube and Perrotin nearby. All of this was inconceivable just two years ago before the Basel juggernaut, with its 50,000-plus list of VIPs, rolled into town.

. . .

While there is certainly a lot of buzz about the growing art market in California, fairs there are not gaining any traction. The third edition of Art Platform Los Angeles, one of a portfolio of fairs owned by Chicago’s Merchandise Mart Properties, has just been cancelled. Held in a hangar in Santa Monica airport – where it had relocated last year after being held downtown – the fair had failed to attract enough support for its upcoming September edition.

But as one dies, another is born: Silicon Valley Contemporary, planned for April next year in San Jose Convention Center. The founders, who already organise other fairs in upscale locations such as Aspen and the Hamptons, come from the technology sector and say they will revolutionise the fair model. “We will look for the intersection between a physical art fair and a virtual one with online auctions,” says executive director Rick Friedman, adding that he will “introduce basic Valley tenets

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 85 such as open systems, transparency in pricing and art value, full disclosure and ease of transaction.” About 60 international exhibitors are being sought for the first edition, which is slated for April 10-13 2014.

. . .

Inflation art is the newest thing – blow-up sculptures. Cynics who dismiss such works of contemporary art as “just a lot of hot air” are delightedly pointing to the fate of a number of these pumped-up monsters. In Hong Kong, a crowd-pleasing exhibition – called Inflation! – on the site of the future M+ museum in West Kowloon was recently hit by heavy rainfall. McCarthy’s “Complex Pile”, a giant brown simulacrum of excrement (you read that right, sadly) as well as a flower sculpture by the Korean artist Choi Jeong-hwa, “Black Lotus”, were punctured and collapsed. And the much ballyhooed giant rubber duck floating in the harbour, the work of Florentijn Hofman, popped and flattened into a yellow omelette. They have all been pumped back up now. Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 86 THE ECONOMIST 'Art Basel Hong Kong: Local Pride', 23 May 2013

THE Hong Kong art market is strong and prosperous, buoyed by low taxes and free of the censorship that inhibits much of the art on the mainland. But the local scene has long felt overshadowed by the big-name Chinese contemporary artists. So many were jittery at the opening today of the inaugural Art Basel Hong Kong, concerned that an influx of big galleries from New York, London and Paris would crowd out the booths peddling home-grown talent.

There was little need to worry. “Competition drives up the standards. It already has after five years,” said Magnus Renfrew, the Asia Director for Art Basel Hong Kong. He is well placed to know, having spent years running Hong Kong’s art fair when it was an independent, scrappy event. Art Basel bought the fair last year, and its first Hong Kong incarnation runs until May 26th.

Of the 245 galleries showing at the Hong Kong Convention Centre, over half are Asian. Of these, 26 are from Hong Kong, the strongest showing for any city except New York. This week Hong Kong is filled with art events, talks and the usual high-flying parties. To expose Hong Kong’s contemporary art scene to international buyers, Art Basel invited its top dealers and collectors to a special tour of the Wong Chuk Hang area on the waterfront of Aberdeen, where old warehouses have been renovated into new galleries.

Some of Hong Kong’s most venerable art galleries have been decamping to Aberdeen to escape the exorbitant rents of the central district and to inhabit a livelier, younger area. Among those with branches there are Alisan Fine Arts, the first professional gallery in Hong Kong to show contemporary art, and Pekin Fine Arts from Beijing.

So what are Hong Kong artists producing? Mostly art that feels very Chinese.

The booth of Schoeni Art Gallery is dominated by a video installation by Hung Keung (pictured). Trained at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, Mr Hung also studied art in London, Germany and Switzerland. Yet his piece “Dao x Microcosmic Play and Appreciation” feels rooted in Chinese culture. It features three round tables topped with black glass arranged a few feet apart. Tiny cameras circulate around the tables, their images projected on white screens. One table holds a black Buddha, small but his presence looms. Another is scattered with black toy-like tanks, helicopters and jet fighters. The third features a solitary small stone. This work is about peace and calm in an era of violence, explains Mr Hung. Traditional Chinese art views the white colour of rice paper as “an infinity surface,” he adds. “Now I am saying the screen represents white paper. The black toys on black glass give the feeling of black ink.”

The booth of Gallery EXIT, a local gallery based in the Wong Chuk Hang neighbourhood, features the work of Ivy Ma, a Hong Kong-based artist. Her piece “Mother” is a large, hanging portrait of her mother carved in plywood. Measuring one meter by two meters, the image is from a photograph taken in the early 1950s, when Ms Ivy’s mother arrived from southern China as part of a wave of immigrants escaping the Communist revolution. “Mother” smiles pleasantly at passers-by, her face brimming with hope, her hair fashionably styled in a ‘50s bob. The work feels quintessentially Chinese, but with a wider contemporary appeal.

Artists from Guangdong province in southern China have long influenced art in Hong Kong. At the Pekin Fine Art space, works on paper by Chen Shaoxiong capture images of protests, such as democracy advocates who oppose Beijing’s efforts to restrict political freedoms in Hong Kong. His sweeping brush strokes on white paper give these pieces an unusual intensity, though they are not much larger than a legal pad. “He is making ink relevant to contemporary society,” said Meg Maggio, the founder of Pekin Fine Art. “Not many can do that.”

In the confines of the exclusive VIP room run by Deutsche Bank at the fair, a large wall length work by one of Hong Kong’s best-known painters, Tsang Kin-Wah, is the star piece. The artist is known for painting words in English and Chinese in patterns that evoke wallpaper. In this piece, the phrase “Making Art, Making Money” is easily discernable in grey against white. Like a growing number of Hong Kong artists, Mr Tsang is happy to embrace the creed.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 87 THE NEW YORK TIMES 'Hong Kong Finds Its Footing in Art World', 22 May 2013

As Art Basel inaugurates its first fair in the Far East on Thursday, it will not only be staking its claim to a growing market for contemporary and modern art, but also bolstering Hong Kong’s position as the dominant art hub of Asia.

With the show, which features 245 galleries at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center through Sunday, the Art Basel Group has not strayed from its predecessor’s goal of staging an Asia- focused event. “I know there was an initial fear that Basel would just make a copy of what they do in Switzerland and Miami,” said Magnus Renfrew, Art Basel’s director for Asia and the founder of Art HK, the precursor to Art Basel in Hong Kong. “But we’ve maintained our original mission. A majority of galleries are still from the Asia-Pacific region.”

Many galleries in the region had indeed expressed fears that they would be pushed out of the event in favor of bigger, global names in the art world. While the presence of international galleries has certainly increased, the fair has put a spotlight on regional galleries in its Insights section, which features projects developed specifically for the Hong Kong show.

Art Basel is also continuing its tradition of presenting large-scale works from leading international artists in the Encounters section. This year’s selections, curated by Yoku Hasegawa of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, will feature 17 artists, including the Shanghai-based MadeIn Company, the Indian artist Jitish Kallat and the New Zealand-based artist Seung Yul Oh.

There was little a decade ago to presage that Hong Kong would draw so many galleries, artists and collectors. When Art HK, the precursor to Art Basel Hong Kong founded by Mr. Renfrew, had its premiere in 2008, much of the art world viewed the city as little more than a gateway to the more artistically flourishing centers of Beijing and Shanghai. Demand for Chinese art was soaring at the time, and although Sotheby’s and Christie’s had already established presences in Hong Kong — international auction houses were not permitted to operate independently on the mainland — many of the city’s arts representatives were turned toward the blossoming arts centers of mainland China.

The Hong Kong gallery offerings were little better. Save for a few veterans like Hanart TZ Gallery, which opened in 1983, and Osage Gallery, established in 2004, contemporary art galleries in the city were dealing largely with commercial art and offering few platforms on which artists could thrive.

But Hong Kong has experienced an arts renaissance in the past few years, and the city now has 80 contemporary art galleries, according to Art Asia Pacific Magazine, with reputable dealers including Ben Brown Fine Arts, Gagosian, White Cube and Lehmann Maupin opening outposts in the city. For the economist Clare McAndrew, the author of a market report for the European Fine Art Fair this year in Maastricht, the Netherlands, Hong Kong’s free market and its lack of taxes on imports or exports of art have contributed to drawing these foreign galleries.

The local government, meanwhile, has announced plans to invest 21.6 billion Hong Kong dollars, or about $2.8 billion, in a new arts hub, the West Kowloon Cultural District, where the M+ contemporary art museum is scheduled to open in 2017.

Some of these developments have been in play for years, but many arts specialists credit the success of the Art HK fair, and its takeover in 2011 by the international giant Art Basel, with strengthening Hong Kong’s position as the artistic hub of Asia. “The acquisition of Art HK by Art Basel has unquestionably cemented the city’s position as a mandatory destination for collectors, curators and critics in the global art circuit,” said Nick Simunovic, director of the Gagosian Gallery in Hong Kong.

For Courtney Plummer, director of Lehmann Maupin’s Hong Kong space, which opened in March this year, the idea of a Hong Kong gallery matured over time. “It really was a natural progression,” she said of the gallery’s decision to open in the city. “But we did notice that Hong Kong was in the air a lot, with the auctions, the opening of the Asia Society and the fair itself. The fair did not directly influence our decision to come, but it certainly made it clear to us that people love coming to Hong Kong.”

In 2012, China had a 25 percent share of the global art market, much of it based in Hong Kong. The

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 89 city is now the third-largest art auction center in the world, after New York and London, and Sotheby’s Hong Kong alone had sales of more than 7.8 billion dollars in 2011.

Some major players in the Hong Kong art world caution against overstating the reputation the city had for many years as a “cultural desert,” however. Mr. Renfrew of Art Basel said that this “was the prevailing thought” when he was scouting in Hong Kong in 2007 but that it “was an unfair assessment.”

“There were many different organizations, like Asia Art Archives and Para/Site, who were contributing to the city’s cultural life,” he said, referring to a regional cultural research organization founded in 2000 in Hong Kong and to a contemporary space founded in 1996 that is run by artists. “There were also a number of strong galleries, like Hanart and Osage, who had strong programming that was different from the purely commercial objectives of the city’s established antiques galleries,” he continued. “I see the city’s artistic developments as happening more in parallel with the fair.”

Central to that development are Hong Kong’s protections of free speech and a culture of openness and critical thinking, said Robin Peckham, the founding director of Saamlung, a small project space and gallery in the Central district of Hong Kong. Mr. Peckham moved to the city from Beijing in 2009. “I was attracted by the more scholarly approaches in the working methodologies of artists in Hong Kong, and the broader culture of research in the art world,” he explained. “Hong Kong is already more significant than Beijing and Shanghai: the transparency of the gallery and auction business, the possibilities of serious curatorial research offered by M+ and AAA — none of that exists elsewhere in China.”

Once Hong Kong’s art fairs and galleries shined a global spotlight on the city, the local government took notice. “We were seen mainly as a commercial enterprise, so they were not familiar with the cultural significance of an event like ours,” Mr. Renfrew explained. “But I think the local government has since been greatly encouraged by the success of the fair. Fair attendance has risen from 19,000 visitors our first year to 67,000 visitors last year. They realize now that there is a hunger for contemporary art from the local populace.”

The city, which posted a surplus of 64.9 billion dollars in the most recent fiscal year, has embarked on an ambitious plan for the West Kowloon Cultural District, which will include 60,000 square meters, or 645,000 square feet, of exhibition space at the M+ contemporary arts museum. Lars Nittve, a former director of the Tate Modern in London and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, has been appointed executive director of the museum and Pi Li, a major figure in the Chinese art world, a senior curator.

“The interest in Hong Kong developing a major institution has become stronger as a result of the fair and all the other developments throughout the city,” Mr. Nittve said of Art HK and its successor. “The perception of Hong Kong, and its position in the region as a major art hub, has been strengthened.”

For some, however, the influx of international galleries like Gagosian and White Cube presents a risk to local artists and galleries because they often focus on global heavyweights like Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol, rather than on local artists. While this is sometimes true — Gagosian did have a Damien Hirst show last year at its space in the Pedder Building — the galleries are generally viewed as bringing fresh air, money and new collectors to the city.

“The increased presence of international galleries is a very positive thing for Hong Kong,” Mr. Renfrew said. “They have raised the level of artistic programming and introduced major international artists to the city.” Not least, the changing landscape has encouraged local galleries to deepen their programming in the city. Tang Contemporary and 10 Chancery Lane are just two of the driving forces behind Art East Island, a series of exhibitions held in a warehouse building on the eastern reaches of Hong Kong Island. Past exhibitions have included an Ai Weiwei show and a Dinh Q. Le solo project.

The spotlight that comes with each gallery opening, and with prominent fairs like Art Basel Hong Kong, could also presage good things for local artists. “There are dozens of great artists working in Hong Kong who for many years were more or less overshadowed by the developments in mainland China,” said Mr. Simunovic of the Gagosian Gallery.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 90

“As the cultural community grows,” he continued, “I think you will see Hong Kong-based artists rise to greater prominence.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 91 SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST 'All eyes on Hong Kong as Art Basel hits city, bringing tourism boost with it', 22 May 2013

All eyes on Hong Kong as Art Basel hits city, bringing tourism boost with it

Hong Kong's newest arts fair may reflect the cultural and economic value of art, but also a globalisation of culture that can stifle artistic expression

As the curtain goes up on the first Hong Kong excursion of the Art Basel international art show today, it will become the focal point not just for the art world, but for the city's tourism efforts.

The Tourism Board is promoting the Asian outpost of the world's largest contemporary art fair as the centrepiece of an "Art Month", which also includes a range of satellite fairs and the irrepressible, inflatable Rubber Duck. Even Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying will attend the fair's opening ceremony this morning - the first time the city's top leader has presided over the opening of a major art fair.

The dramatic boom in Hong Kong's art fair business since the forerunner to Art Basel - Art HK - made its debut in 2008, has resonated across the region.

So also has the emergence of the city and the West Kowloon Cultural District as centres for art auctions. Cities from Singapore to Tokyo and Abu Dhabi to Manila, are embracing art fairs not just for the lucrative business opportunities they create, but also for their power in branding the city and bringing in affluent visitors. But as more Asian cities rush to join the game, there are growing warnings of the key risk from the trend; the globalisation of culture via contemporary art.

"Culture is very important in marketing a city," says cultural critic and consultant Desmond Hui. "Similar to the construction of cultural districts and the cultivation of a creative economy, art fairs are part of the equation." Unlike art biennales - which are organised by the authorities as an official presentation of arts and culture - art fairs are engineered by market forces and have a different role, and can forge a close relationship with a city. Governments should recognise the fact that art fairs play an important role in cultural and creative industries, Hui says.

"In Hong Kong everything is market-driven, so the government doesn't have to think. But if the government can provide appropriate support and let the private sector grow, the impact could be bigger," Hui says. "A city's cultural infrastructure does not equal the commercialisation of art."

Hong Kong government statistics released this month shed light on the attraction of building a cultural industry. Cultural and creative industries were worth HK$89.6 billion in 2011, 4.7 per cent of gross domestic product and a marked increase on their 3.8 share in 2005.

Amid general growth in the number of art fairs, the Art, Antiques and Crafts sector was ranked as the third most lucrative cultural and creative industry, generating just over HK$10 billion - almost double the HK$5.4 billion recorded in 2007, the year before Art HK made its debut.

It's inevitable that other cities are doing their best to replicate such growth. Taking Singapore as an example, the government proactively supported the Art Stage Singapore fair in January. The Singapore government also offers overseas galleries the use of the historic Gillman Barracks, a contemporary art site put together by the government's Economic Development Board. A tax-free zone has been created to draw auction business away from Hong Kong, while government bodies such as the National Arts Council and the Singapore Tourism Board actively co-operate to generate a creative buzz.

Art critic John Batten says an art fair can draw the attention of outsiders and also takes on a wider public perception - thereby adding something to the city. But while a successful fair can serve as a branding tool for a city and draw cultural events to take place around it, it also needs the city, he adds.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 92 "The art scene wants to associate with Art Basel. But a good art fair also wants to associate with a city - an art fair wants to be seen as part of the fabric of a city," Batten says.

Art Basel Asia director Magnus Renfrew says that rather than simply being a forum for the trading of artworks, an art fair shares both cultural and commercial functions. He wants the art fair to form a positive relationship with Hong Kong, and even serve as an ambassador for the city.

"Art fairs can help promote a city as a cultural destination. We want to benefit the cultural scene in Hong Kong. We are not just bringing audiences to discover the city, but also curators and museum directors," he says. "There is this increasing recognition of Hong Kong as a major centre, not just for the trading of art, but also as a networking and meeting place for the international art world. The fair helps build the brand of Hong Kong as a cultural and financial hub."

Renfrew recognises that cities also hope to ride on the back of art fairs to promote themselves.

"It's very natural for a host city of an art fair to use this opportunity to demonstrate their cultural strength. Governments are more aware of the importance of art fairs [as] key events of the cultural calendar. Culture is an important part of the identity of a city, and art fairs can play a strong PR role," he says.

But, Hui says, other cities such as Taipei and Tokyo, which host art fairs on a different scale, can benefit from a more established cultural infrastructure - the network of public and private institutions that cultivate creativity - than Hong Kong, Singapore, or mainland Chinese cities.

Take, for example, March's Art Fair Tokyo. It may not be the most glamorous event on the arts calendar, but it is able to showcase local art to a local audience already familiar with the subject from the city's museums and other cultural institutions. Surrounding the fair is the Roppongi Art Night, an all-night art happening in the hip Roppongi Hills area. A smaller contemporary art fair, G- Tokyo, is held concurrently. These events, crowded with local youngsters, offer a different side of Tokyo to visitors.

"There's a long history of art in Japan. The Japanese like to appreciate art with their own taste. We don't have to follow the global trend," says Art Fair Tokyo's executive director Takahiro Kaneshima. Kaneshima says many young art fairs in the region look up to Art Basel and Frieze, a contemporary art fair in London and New York. But by achieving a "global standard", he says, they end up featuring the same galleries and the same artists. "We try to make our own style of art fair. It doesn't make sense to have just another Art Basel," he says. "The rich can go to Switzerland and Hong Kong. We feel that we should make a fair that is more interesting locally." Kaneshima says he wants his fair to be a platform for local artists and collectors, and make art accessible. This year's fair attracted 44,000 visitors viewing art works brought by 136 galleries - almost all of them from Japan. The balance is in stark contrast to Art Basel Hong Kong, where half of the galleries came from the West.

"I always think; why doesn't our fair have big international galleries? But the truth is, few people here are interested in them," he says. "We should learn about the global context, but Asia has different aesthetics. We want to show and create our own. For Asian people, it's nice to have this kind of 'global' art fair ...but isn't such a Western-style strategy some kind of colonisation?"

Kaneshima says it is inevitable that art fairs will follow a western model. But he believes creating a uniquely Asian system is important. Japan's economic troubles of the past two decades have been a wake-up call to collectors and artists, he says. They now take time to sell works of art through galleries and there is more effort to cultivate talent.

"It takes five years to sell an expensive sculpture, and it takes 20 years to make an artist," he says.

Internationally popular Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is in Hong Kong for a solo exhibition of his new works at Central's Galerie Perrotin Hong Kong. He says that today's art fairs and the market are vibrant.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 93 "When I debuted [in the international scene] 20 years ago, I hoped for such conditions," the artist says. "But young people misunderstood the concept of making money. Auctions put up the prices [of art works] in a short time, but there's also a short lifespan for artists."

Murakami is helping the next generation of artists. He "coaches" emerging artists under his company, KaiKai Kiki, ensuring they create art with a "healthy" mentality so that the money goes into the pockets of the artists' families as well as the artists themselves, reducing the temptation for them to blow their new-found wealth. In 2002, he founded the GEISAI Operation, an art fair offering emerging Japanese artists a taste of the art market. The development of Tokyo's largely homegrown art fair scene contrasts starkly to that of Hong Kong and other cities, which have a weaker cultural infrastructure and rely on foreign-run fairs. The concern is that the interest of foreigners in a city can be transient.

"Foreigners bring the Western style to Hong Kong, which serves as a platform for them. But what if they move away from Hong Kong?" Hui asks.

This worries artist and critic Anthony Leung Po-shan. She believes the vibrant art scene - a parade of glamorous openings, parties and free-flowing champagne - is in fact sending an alarming signal to the city.

"It is a new form of globalisation," Leung says. "Contemporary art becomes a tool, the best social occasion for global elites. It is not about the cultural diversity that [UN cultural body] Unesco advocates. Contemporary art becomes a new label, like Louis Vuitton, that people are after."

Leung worries that such globalisation of culture through the contagious art fairs obsession will eventually undermine or even extinguish most indigenous local craft and cultures in Asia in the long run.

In fact, Britain is already experiencing such a phenomenon, with officials deciding that the country's age-old craft industries no longer warrant inclusion within its creative industries. While the British contemporary art scene has blossomed, last month Britain's Department for Culture, Media and Sport released a consultation paper proposing to remove craft as a category within the creative industries as "most craft businesses are too small to identify in business survey data ... we've not been able to provide gross value added data".

Leung says the growth of the culture sector in Hong Kong is mainly in contemporary art, while traditional art forms stagnate.

"Will it kill the local art forms? It depends on the local authorities," she says.

"Art fairs create great synergies. The positive side is that these fairs help widen the spectrum of arts and culture. But with this developmental-state mentality dominating Asia, and creative industries becoming state policy, Asia becomes a place that is just about making money. Art fairs then become a merger not just of culture, but also of capital. Cities have to beware of art fairs."

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 94 THE NEW YORK TIMES 'Hong Kong Welcomes the Art World', 22 May 2013

HONG KONG — There were no art fairs to speak of in this metropolis before 2008. But this year, Hong Kong, once derided as a cultural desert, nabbed a prize coveted by cities across the region — serving as Art Basel’s only Asian outpost.

The inaugural Art Basel Hong Kong, which opens to the public Thursday, has drawn planeloads of collectors and gallery bigwigs from the West, lured here in part by the growing, glittery market. It’s billed as a mutually beneficial arrangement: Art Basel capitalizes on the moneyed collectors heading to Hong Kong, while giving international credibility and exposure to local artists, galleries and the city itself.

But as Hong Kong welcomes its new guest for four days of openings, parties and lunches, there are also some backstage jitters about finally being on the world stage, as well as trepidation that an event that started as ART HK will lose its distinctively Asian flavor. Art Basel has taken over ART HK, which began as a local fair in 2008 with about 100 galleries and quickly doubled in size, reflecting the city’s growing art market. (Hong Kong is planning to pour billions of dollars into developing a cultural district in West Kowloon.)

“You can feel the difference in the air — there’s a lot of anticipation,” said Nicole Schoeni, a local gallery owner. “Art Basel is a very well-established professional art fair with immense knowledge. We can benefit and learn from it.”

But, she added, “Who knows how it will go this week?”

To try to ease concerns, Art Basel retained Magnus Renfrew, Art HK’s director since its inception, and he has taken pains to maintain its roughly 50-50 division of Western and Asian participating galleries. Art Basel, in a nod to the local culture, also abandoned its original plan to hold the event in February, when it would have run up against Lunar New Year.

Still, Art Basel’s influence is easy to spot.

The week started with the first art gala to be held at the Asia Society Hong Kong headquarters, which opened last year. On Monday night, as a tropical storm lashed the $50 million complex, a renovated 19th-century British Army compound, about 200 invitees rubbed shoulders with major dealers and artists like Takashi Murakami. At one table, exquisitely bejeweled Korean women plotted which dealers to meet, while lamenting how hard it was now to hit both Frieze New York, which ended last week, and this newly ascendant fair (which was at least closer to home).

The fair has an iPhone app and a catalog “like a telephone directory,” Mr. Renfrew said. “The quality is really a step up. The architecture is much improved. We have a huge V.I.P. lounge with views of the harbor. The expectations of the visitors are higher, and there is increased interest from collectors, both from the U.S. and around Asia.”

Local galleries planned their best shows, installations and openings for this week. But of the fair’s 245 galleries — chosen from more than 600 applicants — only 26 have a permanent presence in Hong Kong, and many of those are relatively recent imports like White Cube, Gagosian, Ben Brown and Lehmann Maupin.

Even a few local boosters will admit that the paucity of Hong Kong galleries is largely a reflection of the weakness of the local art scene. In past ART HK events, pride of place went to Western galleries, mostly from London, showing celebrity artists like Damien Hirst.

“They made an effort to include Asian galleries, but, of course, they have to choose the right galleries,” said Pearl Lam, an eccentric violet-haired dealer who made a splash last year when she timed the opening of her new Hong Kong space with the 2012 ART HK fair. “What we need is to increase standards so that our own galleries can compete with Western galleries. It’s not good enough to just have Art Basel here.”

To that end, Ms. Lam hosted a lunch for collectors on Tuesday with Paul Moorhouse of the National

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 95 Portrait Gallery in London, who is curating the abstract painter Zhu Jinshi’s first solo show in Hong Kong, opening at Ms. Lam’s space this week.

Another problem is a lack of plain old experience. While there are now almost 100 galleries in Hong Kong, only a few were around when the Chinese art scene first boomed in the 1980s.

Ms. Schoeni, who took over her gallery from her father, Manfred Schoeni, is one of those who have seen the changes. “When dad started 20 years ago, there were only a handful of galleries in Hong Kong,” she said. “It wasn’t until 2004 that auction houses started paying attention to contemporary Chinese art, and that’s when the big market boom — the big gallery boom — came.”

But even now, exposure to the West remains limited. Ms. Schoeni points to the Hong Kong artist Hung Keung, whom she chose for an interactive solo show during Basel.

“He’s garnered international attention among critics and has been collected by the Hong Kong Museum of Art, but he hasn’t had much exposure on the commercial level,” she said. “He will be teaching participants about Chinese characters and inviting people to create their own characters, which will then be animated and digitized for his next work.”

Many gallery owners are not worried. Henry Au-yeung of Grotto Fine Art, which represents local artists, said of Art Basel, “They did the right thing in being more inclusive, in presenting Hong Kong art, and not just using Hong Kong as a platform for selling.”

“If you go to a fair in New York,” he added, “there will be a lot of New York galleries. Same for London. And, hopefully, it will be the same for Hong Kong.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 96 TIME OUT HONG KONG 'Is Hong Kong ready for contemporary art', 22 May 2013

In Hong Kong, circa May 2013, it seems reasonable to start the exploration of any topic with reference to a rubber duck. But in the context of our city’s art scene, it takes on a relevance all the more poignant than a mere passing allusion to Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s 16.5m-tall Rubber Duck, which is presently braving the polluted waters of Victoria Harbour. In the glorious days of our toy industry in the 1970s, rubber ducks were one of the major earners for Hong Kong, yet conspicuously absent from the homes of 99 percent of our population. And so it is the case with our abrupt rise towards the pinnacle of the global art market in the past few years, which certainly hasn’t been sufficiently reflected in the maturity of the art-viewing public. Hong Kong is a great gathering point for money, which art always follows. The odyssey for it to become a legitimate art capital, however, is only starting now. Here are some of the major issues that we must address, negotiate or generally begin to grapple with…

Being a leading art market vs Becoming an art-conscious city

As if you didn’t know, Hong Kong’s art market is flourishing. Some 67,000 people flocked to last year’s ART HK, compared to 19,000 during its first edition in 2008. There has been an expanding army of smaller fairs, like the recent Affordable Art Fair, to offer ‘cheaper’ pieces that are priced below $100,000. And our fair city has, somehow, grown to become the world’s third largest art market by auction sales. Indeed, in terms of business, it has been a period of exponential growth. But does this boom necessarily coincide with an increase in public awareness when it comes to contemporary art?

“Absolutely,” says Claire Hsu, co-founder and executive director of the Asia Art Archive. “When we began over a decade ago, we had to beg people to come to our programmes and were lucky to get 10 people for a talk. Now we can easily get a full house with one email to the mailing list. We had about 7,000 people visit the Song Dong exhibition in January in under three weeks, and the staggering [attendance] figures at the art fair every year show people’s hunger to see contemporary art.” Magnus Renfrew, the director Asia of Art Basel who has closely witnessed our evolving art market over the past few years, agrees that things are turning for the better: “One learns about art through having the opportunity to see it, and I think historically in Hong Kong, there had been very few opportunities to see modern and contemporary art in an institutional setting. But that’s changing.”

It is indeed a great time to be an avid art audience in Hong Kong. Aside from the fairs and auctions, local galleries specialising in contemporary art are growing more established by the year, while more multinational galleries are opening branches here than ever before. Just as an impressive diversity of non-commercial exhibition producers are emerging across the city (from the Asia Society to Oi!, the awkwardly titled new community art space at 12 Oil Street), the curatorial team behind M+ – the visual culture museum to be opening in late 2017 at the 40-hectare West Kowloon Cultural District – has been making great strides in assembling a collection to rival some of the world’s best.

So all in all, what else could hold back Hong Kong’s ferocious climb up the art world ladder?

An open mind vs The legacy of Hong Kong education

When the M+ museum acquired 1,510 artworks from Swiss collector Uli Sigg’s legendary collection of Chinese contemporary art in September, the irrefutable coup was met with generally positive responses from most cities in which art matters – except right here in our city, where the reception was decidedly mixed and more than a few people questioned the quality of the works. Putting aside the debatable view that we might have overpaid for the collection, it’s hard to shake the impression that any informed and sensible discussion is simply way off the cards as our city continues to be run by generations of people who finished their education without ever encountering the notion of art history.

In the February 2 episode of leading channel TVB Jade’s programme News Magazine (which was subtly titled Art – Rubbish), the oil painter Lin Minggang – the chairman of the Hong Kong Oil Painting Research Society who issued an open letter to condemn the Sigg Collection as ‘rubbish’ – elaborated on his philosophy. “Some of these works are nonsensical. Some are the opposite of art.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 97 There are, however, some people who do their utmost to promote and push these works,” bemoaned the conservative artist, who later added: “An artwork should give pleasure to the viewer. It should make you feel comfortable.”

If Lin’s understanding of modern art is outdated by a century, so it appears to be the case of the television programme’s writer, who at one point enlightened the public by declaring – with reference to a Zhang Peili glove painting – that ‘one of the major characteristics of contemporary art is perhaps its incomprehensibility’. As if confirming that we’re indeed far behind the rest of the art world, the show then channelled Duchamp and played party pooper at this year’s Fotanian Open Studios by asking the visitors – including a bemused William Lim, the dedicated collector of Hong Kong art and co-chairman of Para/Site Art Space – if a mug for brushing teeth was an artwork.

The casual preference of this mainstream television programme to find a clear-cut definition of the object over considering its origin, context or even the creative process reflects the jarring lack of art knowledge even in the most prominent of media. To the cynics, this is but a natural extension of our ingrained culture to find a model answer in everything. You see a porcelain urinal and you get a porcelain urinal. Simple.

Artistic excellence vs Political consideration

The stilted perspective presented by the programme didn’t end with its meditation on a ready-made object, however. After highlighting the negative coverage on the Sigg Collection in the Mainland and the pro-Beijing local press, it went on to pull out a controversial quote from the respected cultural critic Oscar Ho, who went on camera to dismiss the importance of Chinese contemporary art. “With a collection of such things, how meaningful would it be to put them in Hong Kong?” he asked, before adding: “Not only to Hong Kong, but these works are meaningless to the Chinese people too. Most of the people in China have no idea what these works are about.”

The mainland Chinese population has certainly had little appreciation of the politically sensitive works on Mao and Tiananmen. But even if we pretend for a moment that artists such as Ai Weiwei, Fang Lijun and Zhang Peili weren’t already notable throughout the art world, is it by itself a valid reason to dismiss the group of historically important works that are finding a home here – precisely due to our freedom of expression – solely because they were severely censored in their place of origin over the decades? What are the odds that one can tie up art and politics in any constructive conversation when the country in question is still prohibiting the showing of iconic works like Andy Warhol’s silkscreen paintings of Mao – as is the case with the touring exhibition Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal, which is currently at Shanghai’s state-owned Power Station of Art before its next stop in Beijing?

It’s disheartening to see the way our art development is scattered with comical putdowns by people in power, who, despite being well into middle age, may be coming across contemporary art meaningfully for the first time in their lives. Following the claim of Christopher Chung Shu-kun, chairman of the Joint Subcommittee to Monitor the Implementation of the West Kowloon Cultural District Project, that dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s middle finger to Tiananmen ‘can’t be considered art because even children can do that’, lawmaker Chan Kam-lam merely added to the idiocy by stating that political works ‘are not works of art’.

If half of these many outrageous claims were meant for building up Hong Kong art instead of putting it down, we could well be in for something special. In a society that’s accustomed to polite applause instead of true and informed critical voices, however, it’s reasonable to conclude that Hong Kong simply doesn’t have the mature cultural atmosphere for its own art scene to really blossom yet. At a recent forum in Wan Chai’s Foo Tak Building to discuss the obstacles facing Hong Kong contemporary art, artist/scholar Anthony Leung Po-shan cited the 2009 transformation of the Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition to the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial Awards as an illustration of the effects of the colonial political principle of ‘fairness’. By turning the biennial into a competition, it ensures a sense of fairness to the selection process. And where will that lead us?

Artist development vs A lack of meaningful critique

While there’s an enviable degree of artistic freedom in Hong Kong when compared to the Mainland, what we lack sorely is a culture of professional art criticism that could effectively give the artists an honest assessment on their practice – an essential part of the art ecology to situate the art created

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 98 into a larger discourse. Good critics usually make good curators, but when critics are largely absent and artists begin to regard staying in the profession as a triumph in itself, it becomes increasingly difficult for Hong Kong art to rise above its sideshow status to the city’s prospering market.

According to Cosmin Costinas, the executive director of Para/Site Art Space, there’s been a sense around here that the recent growth in our art scene ‘can lead to other opportunities – and not just in terms of [the operation of] commercial galleries’. “For some of the artists in Hong Kong, I think they need to make bolder decisions,” says the curator. “Now, both the galleries and all of us – including the non-profits and institutional – are trying to build something in Hong Kong. But I think it’s important to hear more loudly the voice of the artists.”

And it’s not like a platform hasn’t been set for Hong Kong art to finally take the spotlight. As the first major Hong Kong contemporary art exhibition outside the city since 2007’s Horizons at Shanghai’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the recent Hong Kong Eye showcase at London’s Saatchi Gallery attracted more than 200,000 visitors over its duration. The show’s co-curator Johnson Chang, who famously brought Chinese contemporary art to the world with his landmark exhibition China’s New Art Post-1989 in the early 1990s, told us ahead of the London showing last December: “The ‘export’ of art suggests influence. It builds self confidence and builds bridges of connection, which are very necessary for Hong Kong art now.”

Speaking of the fundamental improvements that are required of our art scene, artist Lam Tung-pang says: “I believe the turning point could arrive when local entrepreneurs and private foundations – together with the support of the government – make a long-term goal to develop our local art and collecting culture.”

The good news is that a concerted effort to contextualise Hong Kong art looks to be happening through a variety of different channels. Of the 867 works of visual culture that M+ has acquired outside of the Sigg Collection and that may be exhibited prior to the opening of the museum building, 700 are from Hong Kong and are mostly either collected from the artists directly or through their local galleries. More than three books have been published inside the past 12 months on the subject of Hong Kong contemporary art, while the growing interest in writing about our art history has also seen the AAA and the Hong Kong Museum of Art collaborate on an Oral History project with Hong Kong artists.

Gallerists advocating conceptual art vs Prohibitively expensive overheads

It’s one thing for a gallery to focus on selling wall-hanging pieces that go nicely into any living room; it’s quite another to be dedicating your space to conceptual art installations which are sometimes practically ‘unsellable’. When we talked to Nigel Hurst in late 2012, the gallery director and chief executive of Saatchi Gallery observed that many of our homegrown artists are not ‘particularly market-engaged’, which ‘makes their works more appealing to the art market in the first place’. Tell that to the resolute gallerists who are striving to carve out a place for our emerging artists with limited international reputation and non-existent secondary market potentials.

“Hong Kong has a good, interested audience for contemporary art, but I don’t think there’s enough of an educated audience for conceptual art [yet],” says Pui Pui To, the Central Saint Martins graduate who founded 2P Contemporary Art Gallery in 2010. “We make exhibitions with works that nobody really needs or wants to buy. The biggest challenge is how you try to keep your gallery if you have nothing to sell – or if nobody wants to buy anyway. Our programme is extremely experimental, risk-taking and progressive. A lot of people who come by the gallery would be like ‘what’s this?’ The educated audiences are usually those who are already involved in the art world, like curators and writers; many of them come from overseas.”

While a whole heap of overseas galleries are expanding into Hong Kong, galleries which are more committed to Hong Kong or Asian contemporary art have seemingly found the need to adjust their strategies. Just as Gallery Exit moved from Central to Tin Wan and Osage closed its Soho space to concentrate on its Kwun Tong galleries, Saamlung ceased operating as a commercial gallery and will move forward as a non-commercial project. Magnus Renfrew of Art Basel describes the environment for young galleries in Hong Kong as being ‘very challenging’. “The overheads for galleries are very, very high here, and the price point for emerging artists or perhaps other conceptual artists tends to be relatively low,” he says. “So to make it viable, you need to sell a huge quantity of work.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 99 Given that it normally takes at least HK$2m to start a gallery, and that every exhibition costs about $15,000 to set up, a good and regular audience base appears to be the very least that a gallerist should be hoping for. “The rental in Hong Kong is just way too high for us to survive,” says To. “People can see that [2P] is not like those galleries on Hollywood Road. There are people coming to the gallery who want to know and take the time, listen to the audio, watch the video properly from the beginning to the end. Sometimes you put art in a context, and it’s not [about finding] any conclusion. Art doesn’t always have a conclusion. You can give the audience a direction but not a certain interpretation.”

Rubber Duck vs Complex Pile

Since late April, the imagination of the Hong Kong population has been ruthlessly captured by various large-scale inflatable sculptures around town. A few days after the exhibition Mobile M+: Inflation! was unveiled at the West Kowloon Cultural District, featuring such controversial pieces as Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy’s poop-like Complex Pile and Chinese artist Cao Fei’s roasted pig sculpture House of Treasures, Florentijn Hofman’s Rubber Duck arrived at the harbour to put the snap-happy public into a craze. The number of visitors to the M+ exhibition had topped 100,000 at the time of press, whereas nobody can really keep count of all the duck photos floating – or, indeed, otherwise – on the internet.

The phenomenon for artists to scale up their works in order to grab attention is usually reserved for the more prominent art markets in the world, although, in Hong Kong’s case, the impressive sight couldn’t have planned for a better time to deputise here. To many people in the crowds, the question ‘is it art?’ may well be their first ever art awakening. “I think it’s a great show,” says Renfrew of Inflation!, probably no pun intended. “There’s a lot to debate about what art should be, what art could be. There had been other similar debates in other places around the world historically, as well. It’s a very important part of raising people’s awareness. It’s really quite an important moment.”

Now that everyone is going to see the gigantic works, does it matter if quite a number of them have no idea whatsoever that they’re actually looking at, uh, art? “That’s a very good question, very interesting,” says M+ curator Tobias Berger, who goes on to distinguish Inflation! from works of public art, such as Rubber Duck. “Public art is the kind of art you talk about, you encounter it on the way to work and you cannot get around it. It’s public, it’s there, and I cannot choose not to go there. [As for] what we do with Inflation!, everybody who goes to that exhibition, they [have to] go there on purpose. We don’t really talk about our exhibition as a public art exhibition; it’s a sculpture exhibition for us. It’s basically like going to a museum. You would not use Complex Pile as a public art piece, because people would misunderstand it. But you can show it in an exhibition.”

Ironically, the remarkable thing about our city’s burgeoning awareness towards art appreciation is that SK Lam – the AllRightsReserved creative director who has previously presented well-received showcases of the works by Yue Minjun and Yayoi Kusama for Harbour City’s marketing campaigns – has almost been forced to apologise for the inflatable duck’s immense popularity. “At first, we were only trying to avoid the typhoon season. We were also hoping to coincide with Art Basel and to take advantage of its momentum,” says the celebrity designer. “It’s an artwork after all. It’s not a toy or a prop. It’s not Doraemon. It’s not a licensed [cartoon] character.” He then turns whimsical: “It’s funny to say. Someone told me the other day that the rubber duck piece doesn’t inspire much introspection. I didn’t know what got into me but I just spontaneously replied ‘when it’s gone, you’d be thinking about it for a long time’.” Lam chuckles. “It’s not going to be here forever, you know.”

Is that a threat to the unsuspecting public, the local art scene, or the precious overlapping section of both?

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 100 TIME OUT HONG KONG 'Magnus Renfrew interview', 21 May 2013

Having led the Hong Kong International Art Fair (ART HK) since its inception in 2007, Magnus Renfrew meets with Edmund Lee to reflect on his latest challenges as the director Asia of Art Basel

So, the first Art Basel in Hong Kong. How's it going for you guys? I think it's a very special moment for the whole team. We worked very hard over the last six years to build the fair. With the first five editions as ART HK, we laid some very solid foundations. Art Basel's arrival means that we have access to far greater resources than we've had previously, and to a wealth of experience and expertise that's been amassed over [more than] 40 years. I think there's a real opportunity to take this from being a fair of regional importance to being one of global importance. The Art Basel involvement really gives this an injection of energy, but it also gives people a sense of stability that this is something that's going to be around for a very long time.

Have there been any surprises as to what the Art Basel brand brings to your work? I wouldn't say it's a surprise. I've always had huge respect for Art Basel, so I would've hoped that its involvement would have an effect on things. It's been very positive in terms of raising awareness in the global art world about the activities in Hong Kong. The resources that we have – such as the 25 VIP relations managers around the world, in comparison to having one VIP manager three years ago – has been quite a substantial change in a short period of time. This may seemingly be a small detail but there are many of these small details, and together they make a big change.

For the public, how would you explain the major differences between ART HK and Art Basel? Well, there are many things that remain the same – and I think it's important to celebrate the things that remain the same rather than to apologise for them. I think Art Basel acquired ART HK because we were on a similar vision for how we want to create the best possible art fair for Hong Kong. People have been very pleasantly surprised by the exhibitor list, on which 53 percent of the galleries come from Asia and the Asia-Pacific. I think there had been an expectation that perhaps a copy-and- paste version of Basel would be transplanted into Hong Kong, and that's not been the case. Regarding the positioning of the fair, that's actually one of the shortest conversations that we've had together. There was no debate at all that we should have a very strong proportion of galleries coming from Asia and the Asia-Pacific.

How about the selection process for galleries? Is this year any different from the previous editions? First of all, we've purposely reduced the number of galleries slightly this year. We've tightened things up. We had 266 galleries last year and this year we have 245 galleries, although it's worth saying that the overall floor plan is slightly bigger than last year. The galleries have taken larger spaces on average, so there's actually a slight increase in size.

Can you talk about some of the submitted proposals from exhibiting galleries that have especially impressed you? I think there are many great proposals. One of the phenomenons this year is that we have a stronger presentation of modern work or post-war work from Asia. Historically, the vast majority of the work from Asia at the fair has been made in the last 10 years, so it's really great to have work that's from a bit earlier. For example, we have work showing at Tina Keng Gallery from the 1930s, we have work by Chinese and Taiwanese artists who were spending time in Paris, and we also have work by post- war Japanese artists from the Gutai Group, who are having a show at the Guggenheim at the moment – a big retrospective of the movement. And also, for the first time, we have work by Indian modern artists like Francis Newton Souza and MF Husain. The phenomenon of having some of those more historical materials from Asia is a new departure, and I think it's really interesting.

What are your ambitions for the fair? The ambition is to put on the best possible show that we can. We've got the strongest line-up of galleries to date. The quality of work is exceptional this year. Of course we want to make sure that the galleries have a successful time and that they meet interesting people who can help to further the career of their artists both in commercial and critical terms – by building the reputation of their artists with curators, museum directors and critics. It can also act as a platform for networking for the international art world. We want to introduce collectors from the West to artworks from Asia, and we want to provide a platform for galleries from around the world to meet with new collectors. Those are the ambitions. We really hope that the galleries find that a worthwhile experience, and we

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 101 hope that the collectors and the general public alike really enjoy the full spectrum of what Art Basel has to offer.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 102 FINANCIAL TIMES 'Beyond the samosas', 18 May 2013

Artists are casting off clichés of national identity – but will galleries cling to the old borders?

If the contemporary art world has a unifying characteristic, it is its global nature. Anyone riding the art-fair carousel from Delhi to London by way of Hong Kong, Basel and New York knows that borders have never been more porous. Numerous artists, curators and collectors have been born in one place, educated in another and are based in a third. Many come from immigrant backgrounds. Some artists draw on their ancestral heritage. Others not. Many live in countries where national identity is itself a hybrid.

Yet efforts to group artists according to geography are strong. A raft of survey shows – from the Hayward Gallery’s New Directions from China last autumn to the Saatchi Collection’s current overview of Soviet art – are now being aped by selling exhibitions organised by the auction houses. (Sotheby’s put on a display of central Asian art in London last month and currently has a selection of contemporary art from Brazil in New York.) Art fairs too are taking on a regional identity. One of the cornerstones of Art Basel in Hong Kong this week (May 23-26) is Insights, a display of projects by galleries based in Asia or the Asia-Pacific region chosen on curatorial merit by the fair’s selection committee.

Behind the initiative, says fair director Magnus Renfrew, is the desire to ensure a strong representation of galleries from the Asia-Pacific region while retaining “tight editorial control”.

For the galleries, Insights offers a strong commercial opportunity. Yet isn’t there a danger of consigning Asia-Pacific art to a ghetto? Mimi Chun, director of participating Hong Kong gallery Blindspot, thinks not: “Our primary focus is Chinese photography and [Insights] provides a more relevant context for us to feature our work in.” Renfrew also believes that context is essential if work is to be understood by those of “a different cultural upbringing”.

Not all agree. In his essay entitled On Not being a Tree, Aveek Sen, a writer and curator based in Kolkata, argues powerfully against “the tyranny of context”. Sen perceives that work by westerners is “supposed to be universal ... We respond to the Venus de Milo or Mona Lisa without having to know about classical Greece or Renaissance Italy” whereas Asian art is “tied to its time and place” by curators’ misplaced belief that “an informed understanding of the contexts in which it is produced is essential for doing it full justice”.

Gradually, however, a shift is occurring. At Tate Modern, art from across the world is collected through regional acquisition committees. Yet the work is not displayed along geographical lines. “All art and artists come from a place [but] no artist wants to be circumscribed by one label or can be,” observes Achim Borchardt-Hume, head of exhibitions at Tate Modern, which is currently home to a monograph of 97-year-old Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair and will soon inaugurate a solo show of Sudan-born, UK-based modernist Ibrahim el-Salahi.

Collective exhibitions are beginning to recognise links through practice rather than place. In a bid to rethink notions of national identity, at the Venice Biennale this year Germany has swapped its pavilion with France. It will show a quartet of artists, only one of whom is from Germany, though all have strong creative links with the country. One of those chosen, the Indian photographer Dayanita Singh, is also due a monograph at London’s Hayward Gallery in October. “I made the curator promise that there is no India angle to this and he agreed. But then I said: ‘Yes, you say that now but you’ll serve samosas at the opening!’” says Singh, who deplores the fact that “the world is so focused on Indian art but more on the Indian than the art”.

Indeed, why were the monochrome geometric drawings of Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi overlooked when the Serpentine Gallery and the Pompidou were putting together their survey shows Indian Highway (2008) and Paris-Delhi-Bombay (2011)? According to Mohamedi’s gallerist Deepak Talwar, her subtle poetics “didn’t fit the curators’ criteria of art that spoke loudly that it was Indian”. Yet when MoMA put together On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century (2010) it included Mohamedi in a line-up that ranged from US minimalist Robert Ryman to the Brazilian modernist Lygia Clark.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 104 Adriano Pedrosa, an independent curator based in São Paulo, believes regional and national survey shows are “simplistic”, although when handled sensitively they can be a “starting point to introduce regions to a certain audience”. The more successful tend to focus on “very specific criteria”, he argues, in which artworks are connected through characteristics that go beyond location. The Royal Academy’s forthcoming show Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910-1940, which focuses on work by national and international artists influenced by Mexico’s revolution of 1910-1920, should be such an example.

Pedrosa also champions exhibitions that establish “connections and dialogue between the margins” rather than the more frequent encounters between Europe or the US and countries still viewed as peripheral. He himself orchestrated gripping encounters, notably between artists from Latin America and the Middle East, when he curated the Istanbul Biennial in 2011. Those regions, alongside work from south Asia, also created thoughtful cross-vibrations in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India earlier this year.

Now Pedrosa is working on Hiwar, Conversations in Amman, a residency and conversations programme at the Khalid Shoman Foundation in Jordan. Culminating in an exhibition in November, it will encompass artists from countries including Angola, Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, Palestine and the Philippines.

Similar goals are being set at Delfina Foundation, a London-based organisation that supports artists from north Africa and the Middle East. Delfina’s director, Aaron Cezar, explains that when the foundation started, its mission was to address the isolation of Arab artists following 9/11. “Mostly what was surfacing then were regional shows focused on women, war and religion,” he says.

Delfina’s early projects sustained work that did not conform to those stereotypes. Now, Cezar feels, it is time to form “unlikely alliances”. One recent collaboration is between an Egyptian and a Brazilian artist who both responded to the film archive Videobrazil. The new approach also inspires Points of Departure, an exhibition of work made through a residential exchange of British and Palestinian artists that opened in Ramallah and is coming to the London’s Institute of Contemporary Art in June. “The artists strongly resisted the notion of a traditional east-west cultural exchange which tends to focus on difference,” explains Cezar. “Instead the exhibition emerged from common ground within their practice, in particular from the idea of liminality [notions of border and threshold] which recurred for all of them at every level.”

Most artists do not want to be burdened, as Cezar puts it, with the responsibility of being “a cultural ambassador”. Singh’s guests at the Hayward will have to content themselves with sushi, or perhaps scones.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 105 FINANCIAL TIMES 'East, west and points in between', 18 May 2013

Super-curator Yuko Hasegawa’s flair for fusing cultures and disciplines is ideally suited to Hong Kong

Horizontal: it’s one of curator Yuko Hasegawa’s preferred words, though she is anything but. When we catch up over Skype in the week before Art Basel in Hong Kong, it’s 10.30pm in Tokyo, and Hasegawa, in fluent English, launches into an energetic discussion on the shifting geopolitical and cultural landscape and what this means to the wider art world. “Different methodologies, different cultural ideas, and a horizontal approach,” she says, leaving the high v low and east v west orthodoxy trailing in her wake.

Hasegawa is one of the contemporary art world’s global super-curators, popping up everywhere from São Paulo to Kiev, ushering artists from everywhere into a position that she hopes runs counter to what she calls the “west-centrism of knowledge in modern times”. In March this meant assembling the work of more than 100 artists and architects (a third of them from the Middle East) for the 11th Sharjah Biennale in the United Arab Emirates. She included critical work, such as a piece by the young Saudi Sara Abu Abdallah of a veiled girl staring at a written-off car. “It’s the nearest a Saudi woman will ever get to having a car,” explained Abu Abdallah at the time. “Icons of Christianity are taboo there,” says Hasegawa, “and nudity and pornography. But politically, it’s very free. I was surprised.”

Last year for Art Hong Kong (which has since become Art Basel in Hong Kong following its acquisition by Art Basel owner MCH), she curated a Projects programme of larger-scale work. This year it is reprised as Encounters, with 17 galleries delivering weighty installations that will appear in two piazzas that have been designed into each floor of the fair by architect Tom Postma. While these works – which include a series of brightly coloured acrylic boxes by New York-based Brit Liam Gillick, a Venetian blind installation by the Korean Haegue Yang, and a suspended sculpture by Beijing- based Wang Yuyang, who has been known to create vast spheres from energy-saving lightbulbs – are for sale, their presence is equally intended to widen the visitors’ vision and liven up the show. Magnus Renfrew, one of the fair’s four directors, says: “In a relatively new market like Hong Kong, it’s important to show the full perspective of what art can be.”

This is all extracurricular for Hasegawa. She has a full-time job as chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (MOT) and is professor of curatorial and art theory at the city’s Tama Art University. At the museum she has just presided over the opening of an exhibition of the Mexico- based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, and is working on an autumn show that will blur the boundaries between art and design.

“I’m interested in cross-disciplinary work. I’ll be working with 25 to 30 artists and designers with a focus on how data and information can be visualised,” she says. Among them will be Ryoji Ikeda, a Japanese musician/artist/mathematician who creates challenging imagery and music out of binary code. “I’m less concerned with art historical positions and more interested in creating a platform,” she says.

Hasegawa has been a name to reckon with since the late 1990s – she was on the jury of the Venice Biennale in 1999 – but made her mark with the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, where she was chief curator and founding artistic director from 1999 to 2006. She commissioned the Japanese architects Sanaa to create the museum’s exquisite circular glass building, and introduced 10 site-specific installations by artists including James Turrell and Anish Kapoor that are integrated into the architecture.

Since its opening in 2004, Kanazawa has been an extraordinary success (and also put Sanaa on the international architectural map). “Everything there is horizontal,” says Hasegawa. “There are no borders. The museum is a part of the city and the city is a part of the museum. People come as though they’re visiting a shopping mall. They don’t know anything about contemporary art. In Japan, there is not such a hierarchical divide. High and low culture are on the same plane.”

It’s this that has drawn her to Hong Kong, where last year she sat on the advisory board of the HK$21bn West Kowloon Cultural District project, which by 2018 will deliver a new arts complex to the city. “In Hong Kong and mainland China, people don’t have much opportunity to see big

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 106 institutional presentations. In Hong Kong until now there’s been little cultural provision, though the film industry is really important. That’s the local culture. If I make the right selections for Encounters, it will really expose people to this kind of work. People come to the art fair out of curiosity, and it’s an open entry point.”

Hasegawa’s curation of Encounters does, in fact, have a historical viewpoint. There is an eight-metre wide 1991 installation by Chen Zhen. A Chinese artist who grew up during the Cultural Revolution and emigrated to Paris as soon as Deng Xiaoping came to power in 1986, he represents the artistic diaspora of that decade.

“Haegue Yang lives in Germany,” says Hasegawa. “There’s a cultural hybridity there, and an artist making their own reality.” And as for Turner Prize-winning Scottish artist Susan Philipsz, Hasegawa sees her sound art – in this case a piece called “It Means Nothing to Me” in which she sings a traditional Welsh folk song – as perfectly tailored to the Asian sensibility. “Asian people like performance, sound, music and memory. We are interested in temporality. Take calligraphy, for example. A western person will see the final form. But an Asian person will see the process and the work as something imbued with time.”

And with that, Hasegawa has leapt seamlessly from a Turner Prize winner to calligraphy; a woman who, rather like Hong Kong itself, can synthesise west and east.

The numbers are impressive. Almost dauntingly so. Visitors to this week’s first Art Basel in Hong Kong will have as many as 250 galleries, originating from some 35 countries, to relish. The organisers make much of the fact that almost 50 per cent of the participants are from Asia and the Asia-Pacific region, as well they might: one of the strengths of their December fair in Miami is its distinctive regional nature (in that case, its relation to its Latin American neighbours), and the last thing we want from a fair is globo-blandness.

At Hong Kong, along with three other distinct sections – Galleries, for 170-plus mainstream international players; Encounters, for large-scale work; and Discoveries, for budding hopefuls – is the Insights section. This features work that has been made specially for the event, from galleries in the Asia and Asia- Pacific region, and its inclusion reinforces the emphasis on that chunk of the globe – a vast and varied part, but united in its determination to make concrete its not-western identity.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 107 CHINA DAILY 'Art Basel's Hong Kong opening signals shift towards Asia', 15 May 2013

By Kelly Chung Dawson (China Daily)

Since the 1970 launch of Art Basel, the summer art fair in Switzerland has been integral to the international art scene, drawing 60,000 artists, collectors, curators and gallery owners to an annual promotional platform widely regarded as the art world's most important event.

The fair's winter edition, begun in Miami in 2002, attracts some 50,000 visitors.

This month, Art Basel expands to Hong Kong, taking over ART HK, a successful fair founded in 2007 under the direction of Magnus Renfrew. Art Basel owners MCH Group in 2011 bought a 60 percent stake in Asian Art Fairs Ltd, producer of ART HK, which had some 67,000 attendees last year.

The rechristened and streamlined Art Basel HK, which also will be led by Renfrew, signals a recognition of Asia's growing role in international art. More importantly, Art Basel now has a platform for art business on three continents, during three seasons a year. That Hong Kong is one of these platforms is a watershed.

Art Basel HK will run May 21-25, two weeks after the outdoor Frieze NY. The Venice Biennale opens on June 1, followed a week later by Art Basel in its original Swiss locale.

Housed in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Art Basel HK will present works from 245 international galleries (compared with 266 last year) in 35 countries. Half of the participating galleries are in Asia, organizers said.

Renfrew described the Hong Kong show as offering the "strongest-ever lineup anywhere in Asia to date". According to the Art Newspaper, that 50 percent includes Western galleries with Asian locations, such as New York-based Gagosian Gallery.

The fair's Insights section, which will highlight artists of Asian and Asian-Pacific origin (including the Middle East and Turkey), could counter criticisms that Art Basel in the past has neglected local artists. Art Basel has already taken steps to promote more European artists at Basel and more American artists in Miami, to create a deeper sense of connection, organizers said. Also featured in Hong Kong will be more than 30 galleries with New York locations, including David Zwirner, Peter Blum, Gladstone and Marian Goodman.

The assembled work will cover a span of 1,200 years of art history - in painting, photography, video, sculpture, drawings and installations.

Besides connecting Asian artists and galleries to Western buyers, Art Basel HK aims to provide opportunities to galleries representing Western artists eager to sell to Chinese collectors, an increasingly significant art market. Art fairs are crucial in promoting artists abroad, as they offer an overview of the scene as well as one-stop shopping for curators, institutions and collectors eager to assess trends driving the market. Strengthening personal and business relationships - often one and the same - is integral to building brands and promoting business.

Art Basel chose Hong Kong because of its status as an Asian financial hub, lack of tax on art imports or exports, and its international dynamism, according to organizers. Established international galleries like Gagosian already have a presence in the city, whose proximity to the Chinese mainland is a major draw.

Although sales at the country's major auction houses dipped last year (49 percent at Beijing Poly International Auction Co and 38 percent at Sotheby's Hong Kong), art buyers in China are still considered a boon to art sales worldwide.

Renfrew compared the Chinese art market to America's of a decade ago, around the time Art Basel launched in Miami. He has said that to be taken seriously, international galleries and institutions can

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 110 no longer focus only on the West.

Art Basel HK is split into four sections: Galleries, featuring a variety of forms from 171 of the world's leading galleries; Encounters, presenting large-scale installations and sculptures, curated by Yuko Hasegawa, organizer of the Sharjah Biennial and chief curator of Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art; Insights, devoted to pieces created for the Hong Kong show by artists and galleries in Asia; and Discoveries, featuring one- and two-person shows by young artists early in their careers as well as a $25,000 prize.

In addition to the major exhibitions, Art Basel will offer its usual side programming, including the Conversations series with art insiders and informal Salon discussion panels on various art topics. The Asia Art Archive, the Asia Society and Para/Site Art Space are also offering a variety of events in conjunction with the fair. The Hong Kong Art Gallery Association will conduct gallery tours for visitors.

FORBES TRAVEL GUIDE 'Art Basel debuts in Hong Kong', 13 May 2013

Having expanded west to Miami from its Swiss hometown of Basel more than 10 years ago, Art Basel is now heading east for for its inaugural Hong Kong exhibition. Kicking off on May 23, Art Basel in Hong Kong will attract gallerists, collectors, artists and art enthusiasts to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre to admire the global artwork Art Basel has become known for. To make the debut experience as smooth as silk, our Forbes Travel Guide editors have pulled together the essential details necessary for a masterpiece trip to Art Basel in Hong Kong.

What to Know

In 1970, art gallerists Ernst Beyeler, Trudi Bruckner and Balz Hilt sparked the Basel, Switzerland art scene with a show that was a success from the start—90 galleries and 30 publishers from 10 countries exhibited at the show, which drew a crowd of more than 16,000. During the last four decades, Art Basel has continued to evolve and grow, with Art Basel in Miami debuting in 2002; and now, the latest addition to the roster, Art Basel in Hong Kong, is making its debut May 23 through 26.

The Hong Kong edition is truly embracing its location, carving out a unique spot for itself in the trio of Art Basel shows. At least half of the participating galleries hail from Asia and the Asia-Pacific region, and works from both emerging talents and modern masters will cover 1,200 years of art history in paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, photographs and video. The Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, a work of art itself with sweeping roofs and a glimmering glass façade looking out onto Victoria Harbour, will play host.

Tickets for Art Basel in Hong Kong can be purchased at the show or online in advance. You have the option to buy a one-day ticket for HK$250 (around $32); but if you know you’ll be returning for more, we suggest the four-day option for HK$750 (around $96).

What to See

With almost 250 galleries from 35 countries, navigating Art Basel in Hong Kong could be quite the headache. But the show is split into distinct sectors that include contemporary art, sculpture, photography and large-scale works, making it much more manageable.

The “Galleries” sector will showcase more than 170 of the world’s top modern and contemporary art galleries—such as London’s Atlas Gallery and Amsterdam’s Grimm. This is where you’ll find a wide range of art forms including paintings, sculptures, film and digital pieces.

“Insights” is for pieces created specifically for the Hong Kong show from galleries in the Asia and Asia-Pacific region. Here, you’ll find special works such as artist duo Zhuang Hui and Dan’er’s Leftover Material from the Carpenters, a multimedia piece of copper and acrylic that’s painted to mimic the texture of wood, and Australia’s Tolarno Galleries’ collection of paintings featuring bizarre

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 111 depictions of faces.

The “Discoveries” sector is where budding contemporary artists from across the globe are showcasing their works. Viewers here get an early glimpse into a new era of artists still young in their careers, such as video and installation artist Erin Shirreff, who is presented by New York’s Lisa Cooley gallery.

“Encounters” focuses on large-scale installations and sculptures prominently displayed throughout the convention center. These giant projects range from mountainous sculptures to works from galleries such as Beijing’s Osage Gallery, which has featured artists like Shen Shaomin and his I Touched The Voice of God installation made from broken pieces of China’s second manned rocket into space.

While the show offers a staggering amount of art to view, the Art Basel experience is far from passive. Attendees who want to gain more insight into the art world should check out the Conversations and Salon programs. At morning “Conversations” discussions, you can listen to (and chat with) prominent members of the art community debating things such as producing, collecting and exhibiting art, while the afternoon “Salons” feature smaller presentations, panels and lectures from artists, academics, curators and collectors.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 112 THE AUSTRALIAN - WISH MAGAZINE 'Magnus Renfrew, Art Basel HK director', 3 May 2013

LOVE, sex, death, life, loss and man's inhumanity to man.

Art has always been about the great issues. These are shared human experiences and things that define our lives. I firmly believe that art should be transgressive; that is to say, to be made uncomfortable by a work of art is just as valid as being uplifted - that's my starting point.

People often remark on the shock value of contemporary art but this has always been a feature. Generalisations are dangerous and the idea that contemporary art from Asia is always more lyrical and decorative than the art of Europe and the US is a misconception. In the region there is the full spectrum of subject matter and approaches to producing art and much of it is just as challenging.

My background is art history, which I studied at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and on graduation I worked for the auction house Bonhams for seven years. In my last year before leaving Bonhams I helped put together their first sale of contemporary Asian art in London. That was June 2006 and in the lead-up to that event I was fortunate enough to meet the Hong Kong-born gallerist Pearl Lam, and I moved pretty much immediately after the auction to Shanghai to run her galleries. I was sent around to a number of cities in China - Chongqing, Kunming, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Beijing - visiting the studios of established and younger artists and it was an incredible learning experience.

As my contract with the gallery was coming to an end I was approached to become founding director of a new art fair in Hong Kong. In June 2007 I moved to Hong Kong from Shanghai and we began recruiting galleries for the inaugural Hong Kong International Art Fair, or ART HK, which ran for five years. I was retained as director, Asia, by its successor, Art Basel, which opens its inaugural edition to the public on May 23. Art Basel, established in 1970, runs shows in Basel and Miami Beach for modern and contemporary works but this is its first show in Asia.

People often ask what is Asian art but it's a difficult question to answer because there are many different centres of cultural production in Asia, from the Middle East to Tokyo, that are very distinct. At Art Basel in Hong Kong, 53 per cent of the 245 galleries on show are coming from Asia and the Asia-Pacific, which is our focus, and that's important for the success of the fair. That includes a handful of galleries such as White Cube, Gagosian, Emmanuel Perrotin or Lehmann Maupin, which have spaces in Hong Kong as well as elsewhere.

In the West, we tend to divide things into good and bad, right and wrong, black and white, yes or no, in a search for a single truth. Living in Asia, it's been really interesting to see that there are other ways of looking at the world. I think people in Asia have had a more sophisticated understanding of the West than we in the West have had of Asia. But it's really important, if you want to have a sophisticated understanding of the world, that you have one that's not just limited to Europe and the US but that includes an understanding of art produced elsewhere.

There have been cross-cultural relationships and influences for the past 100 years and more. This is an area that we feel will gain further attention. Chinese abstract emigre painters such as Zao Wou-ki and Chu Teh-Chun moved to France and brought that calligraphic element to gestural painting. It is difficult to look at the work of Franz Kline and Pierre Soulages without seeing the influence of Asian art and artists. Yves Klein spent time in Japan and some of his work is reminiscent of work of the Gutai group, who were working in the late 50s. Also in pop culture today there are a lot of influences from Japan, and now Korea, on the West. We live in a moment where everything is beginning to swirl together.

The thing that excites me most about this fair is the quality of the galleries on show: we have a very stringent selection process. It has four sectors: Galleries, for leading galleries; a Discoveries sector for emerging artists; an Insights sector dedicated either to a single artist or a thematic presentation by artists from Asia and the Asia-Pacific; a Magazines sector, highlighting leading publications from around the world; and the Encounters sector for large-scale sculpture and installation works that show that art does not just have to be a sculpture on a plinth or a painting on the wall. NEW YORK TIMES - T MAGAZINE 'Hong Kong's Culture Fix', 1 May 2013 http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/hong-kongs-culture-fix/

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 114

Later this month, Art Basel invades Hong Kong, opening a Far Eastern front in its continuing quest to dominate the global art market. The event will include work by 3,000 artists, half of them from Asian galleries that are new to international buyers. Other exciting events are riding in on Basel’s coattails: Hong Kong’s gigantic forthcoming contemporary art museum, M+, has built a temporary sculpture park in Kowloon made up of inflatable works by the likes of Paul McCarthy and Jeremy Deller. In Central, the historic neo-Classical-style Pedder Building, which is already home to a Gagosian outpost, has recently become even more of a destination with the opening of the influential New York gallery Lehmann Maupin. “There’s just so much potential right now in Hong Kong,” says David Maupin, the gallery’s founding partner, who inaugurated his Rem Koolhaas-designed space in March with a show by the Korean artist Lee Bul. “We represent artists in Seoul, we have clients in Singapore, and we do a lot of business in Japan — Hong Kong just seemed like a natural hub for us.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 115 LOS ANGELES CONFIDENTIAL MAGAZINE 'Art Basel HK Enchants LA Collectors', 26 April 2013

Almost two years after Art Basel owners MCH Group bought a majority stake in Asian Art Fairs Ltd., which produced the Art HK contemporary art fair, the rechristened Art Basel in Hong Kong opens to much international fanfare on May 23.

Boasting work presented by 245 of the world’s leading galleries, an improved floor plan, and architectural design (at the waterfront Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre), the show promises to provide Western audiences with the context to uniquely explore the diverse histories, ideas, and aesthetics of Asia’s visual arts, a segment of the art market that has skyrocketed in recent years. Art Basel’s expansion into Asia also gives the storied fair, which began more than 40 years ago, an unparalleled three-continent, year-round engagement with the art world cognoscenti (its other shows being in Switzerland and Miami Beach). “I’m sure the opportunity to proliferate in all cities anywhere has been presented to the Basel team,” says Shamim M. Momin, curator and director of the LA-based art organization LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division). “They have clearly chosen their evolution into Asia quite carefully and specifically.”

Magnus Renfrew, who as the original fair director and now director of Art Basel Asia, has overseen the transformation and is confident that both attendees and participants will be blown away. “With an emphasis on the highest quality work and presentation,” Renfrew says, “the fair will showcase artworks by more than 3,000 artists—ranging from young stars to the Modern masters of the early 20th and 21st centuries, hailing from both Asia and the West.” Renfrew has always been a firm believer that Hong Kong is the natural home for a major international art fair. “We are geographically positioned at the heart of Asia and we are the region’s financial center,” he notes. “There is no tax on the import or export of art, and Hong Kong has both an increasingly expanding cultural sector and a culturally interested population.” And with the rapid proliferation of art fairs creating a climate in which dealers are forced to carefully select where to devote their resources, it’s telling that many of the most prestigious are putting effort into building their Asian audience at the Hong Kong show.

The Basel shows are perhaps most renowned for the respective selection committee’s unflinching curatorial rigor in choosing those participating galleries as well as the curation of the fair’s four sectors. “Each year will be an opportunity for galleries to participate, with every applicant undergoing the identical review process and given the same consideration,” explains Renfrew. “New committee members are appointed by Art Basel’s director. They generally serve for five to 10 years.”

More than 170 modern and contemporary exhibitors will bow in the main section of the show this year, including participants like LA’s 1301PE and Blum & Poe galleries. Many eyes will be on the Insights sector, which is highlighting projects specifically devised for the fair from 47 galleries from Asia and the Asia-Pacific regions. The Discoveries segment will likely be the most experimental, presenting solo and two-person exhibitions by emerging artists exclusively and, in an exciting twist, will feature a $25,000 prize, while the Encounters sector will be presenting large-scale sculpture and installations organized by celebrated Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa and will be spread throughout the convention center’s two exhibition halls.

But Renfrew reminds attendees not to forget about all of the outstanding ancillary activities. “In addition to the quality of art brought by our galleries, Art Basel is known worldwide for the parallel programming surrounding our shows,” he says. “That includes Conversations and Salon discussion panels and ambitious collaborations with powerhouse local partners, including museums and local institutions.” The Conversations talks give the audience an insider’s viewpoint as members of the art world discuss all aspects of art production, curating, and display, while Salon is a more informal short-presentation format that includes talks, panels, and performances.

Special exhibitions and events at local Hong Kong galleries will be of immense interest. The local gallery scene has been invigorated over the last few years by the arrival of major international blue- chip players like Gagosian Gallery and White Cube, which have joined local stalwarts like Hanart TZ Gallery, which has been around since the 1980s and is well known for championing emerging Chinese artists. The multitude of special exhibitions and events at Hong Kong cultural institutions and not-for-profits is dizzying, including a parallel talks program by Asia Art Archive.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 116 The government is getting in on the art act too by celebrating the opening of its new Artspace @ Oil Street, which is housed in a 1908-built heritage building that is the former clubhouse of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, but has been remade into a project space for working artists and curators and is open to the public. Asia Art Archive, widely regarded as the most important collection of source material for the recent history of art in Asia, has grown from a single bookshelf in 2000 to more than 35,000 records, comprised of thousands of physical and digital items. This unique institution, which has worked diligently to record and save works about art—both publicly and privately held across Asia—and make then accessible to the general public, will also be hosting special presentations during Art Basel in Hong Kong, including a series of panel discussions and a keynote lecture.

Not surprisingly, the Hong Kong show has proven attractive to corporate sponsors looking for a foothold in Asia. Deutsche Bank has signed on as lead partner, joining existing associate sponsors Davidoff, Audemars Piguet, and Absolut Art Bureau, among others, which all support the shows in Switzerland and Miami Beach. Many comparisons have actually been made between today’s Hong Kong art market and that which existed 10 years ago in Miami Beach. “The market is in a relatively early stage of development here, much like the atmosphere in Miami when we opened there,” says Renfrew. “We want to be part of the cultural surge in this dynamic city and the show provides the perfect global platform for that.” Adds Momin, “With everything going on in the art world, it is important for collectors, curators, and dealers to be able to trust the kind of professionalism that Basel always brings, but which isn’t always verified with other fairs.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 117 THE AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW 'Australian galleries join the Art Basel juggernaut', 18 April 2013

by Claire Stewart

The countdown to the AsiaPacific’s biggest art sale is on, with the latest incarnation of global art fair behemoth Art Basel opening in Hong Kong on May 23.

Since Art Basel indicated its intention to acquire Art Hong Kong in 2011, speculation has been rife the new ownership will threaten the tight regional feel developed at ArtHK over five years with Magnus Renfrew at the helm.

Renfrew, who has been put in charge of Art Basel Hong Kong, dismisses any concern, saying the selection team that chose the 245 exhibitors from among 700 applicants was very conscious of maintaining a regional flavour.

Of rumours it will become harder for Australian exhibitors to secure a spot in future fairs, he says: “I don’t think we can guarantee anything. But strategically this fits with the way the fair has developed in Basel [Switzerland] and Miami Beach [Florida, US] where 50 per cent of exhibitors come from Europe [in Switzerland] or 50 per cent from the Americas, North and South [in Miami]."

One thing that has changed is the Hong Kong fair organisers can now tap into Art Basel’s VIP collector database and a 25-strong team of VIP managers, up from just one in Hong Kong three years ago. “There’s a real curiosity, and they’re registering to attend," Renfrew says. “You can’t tell until the doors open, but the signs are looking promising." “They", of course, are the big spenders.

In the past eight weeks, Hong Kong- based Renfrew has been touting for business in London, Paris, New York and Basel, as well as Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Jakarta, Manila and Sydney – a taste of what he refers to as the regional constituencies, from which he hopes to draw crowds of art buyers.

Next he is off to Melbourne, then on to Hobart to peruse David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art and visit “a couple of local collectors".

AUSTRALIAN COLLECTORS ON THE RISE

“One of the areas that has been really quite surprising, that we hadn’t anticipated how important it would be, is the Australian audience," Renfrew says. “Over the past few years there has been a significant rise in collectors from Australia buying beyond its borders."

This year, four new local galleries have been given a coveted stand at the fair, which is expected to draw a 65,000- strong crowd over its four-day run.

Melbourne’s Murray White Room is showing predominantly new work from Polly Borland, Tony Clark, and others, while Sydney’s Jensen Gallery will take a selection of works from local and European artists, including Jude Rae and Imi Knoebel.

Dianne Tanzer Gallery will show paintings by Juan Ford, and Utopian Slumps is taking Dutch-born, Melbourne-based artist Sanne Mestrom.

Hong Kong’s geographical position, its duty-free status, relative freedom of expression and shared history with the West all helped fuel the success of ArtHK, which started with 19,000 visitors in 2008 and had 67,000 last year.

Renfrew says Art Basel did not procure the Hong Kong fair purely because of its exposure to the Chinese audience. “China is hugely important to this fair and as time goes on that’s probably the place for the most growth, but we created this fair to be for all of Asia," he says. “There are now more billionaires in Asia than there are in Europe. And the art market tends to follow the money. We’ve really just scratched the surface of potential at this stage."

This year for the first time historical work by major post-war Indian artists such as M F Hussain and Francis Newton Souza will be on show as more Indian galleries show at the art fair .

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 118

“People are interested in seeing the context in which the contemporary has been created," says Renfrew, the son of two archeologists, who “rebelled" by studying post-modern art and theory at St Andrews in Scotland.

CAN’T COMPLAIN ABOUT THE PARTIES

Along with the Picassos, Warhols and pieces by Chinese French painter Zao Wou-Ki (who died last week, aged 93), Renfrew says the fair will feature works from the Gutai group of Japanese artists, which has seen a resurgence in popularity over the past 18 months, and is now showing at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

“It’s quite interesting to see modern work that has stood the test of time for 20, 30 years. People can sometimes feel a bit rootless, perhaps, and it’s good for them to see where things come from."

Renfrew has heard of novelist Tom Wolfe’s merciless satire of the champagne-swilling art crowd in his latest work, Back to Blood.

“Clearly there is an excitement and a buzz around the social aspects of collecting, but that is by no means all of it," Renfrew says. “You can’t complain about how many parties there are."

The Australian Financial Review

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 119 TIME MAGAZINE 'Asia's Art-Fair Boom', 21 January 2013

Asia’s Art-Fair Boom: Hong Kong and Singapore Compete for Cultural Top Slot The region’s major cities see them as critical vehicles for cultivating creative identities and developing world-class art scenes

By Justin Bergman / Singapore Jan. 21, 2013

Visitors walk past artworks at Art HK, Asia's premier art event, in Hong Kong on May 16, 2012

When photographers Rachel Rillo and Isa Lorenzo opened their Silverlens gallery in Manila in 2004 — the first dedicated photography gallery in the Philippines — they had few ways to reach buyers outside the country. But as the Asian art market has boomed over the past decade, so too have art fairs that allow galleries like Silverlens to hook up with nouveau riche collectors from China, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and beyond. Rillo says they were early to jump on the circuit, spending a good chunk of their budget to exhibit at fairs in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. “People just don’t think of contemporary art and say, ‘Oh, sure I’ll go to the Philippines,’” she says. “The influx of all these art fairs came at a great time.”

Twenty years ago, East Asia had one art fair of note — Art Taipei, founded in 1992. Today, it seems every major city in the region has a fair, and some cities are host to several of varying size. Hong Kong, for instance, held six fairs last year, including Art HK, the premier art event on the continent, and has plans to add yet another in 2013, a miniversion of France’s oldest art fair, Biennale des Antiquaires. Not only are these events becoming big business in Asia, the region’s major cities see them as critical vehicles for cultivating creative identities and developing world-class art scenes. But while many cities would like to lay claim to being Asia’s global arts leader, only two cities realistically have a shot at snagging the title — Hong Kong and Singapore.

(MORE: Is Asia’s Red-Hot Art Market Heading for a Slowdown?)

This year could be pivotal in deciding who takes a decisive lead. Art HK will be reborn as part of the Art Basel global brand in May — introducing a new level of sophistication and stardom to Asia’s art- fair circuit — while the upstart Art Stage Singapore will be going all out with its third edition, running from Jan. 24 to 27, to prove it’s a legitimate contender and not just a well-funded pet project of the ambitious Singaporean government.

Although these two fairs have established themselves as the leaders in Asia, they are relative newcomers to the scene. Art Stage began just three years ago, while Art HK held its first fair in 2008. Beijing, with its flourishing art scene, was first out of the gate in China with the China International Gallery Exposition in 2004, but a falling-out among the founders led to a competing event, Art Beijing, in 2006. Neither has done particularly well since.

Shanghai followed in 2007 with a much anticipated new fair, SH Contemporary, led by Lorenzo Rudolf, a former director of Art Basel and founder of Art Basel Miami Beach, but after a strong first edition, the fair is now on its third director and has seen a steady decline in prestige and quality. Art Taipei is still going strong — recording its highest-ever sales last year — but it’s considered more of a regional player, not a global one. Tokyo and Seoul also have long-running fairs, but they are more domestic in scope.

(MORE: Five Festive Events You Won’t Want to Miss in 2013)

What Hong Kong and Singapore have that other Asian cities don’t is an extremely favorable tax structure: neither country places an import tax on art, whereas mainland China taxes art at 34%. The two are also established global business centers with reliable shipping systems and strategic geographic locations as the gateways to China and Southeast Asia, respectively. Hong Kong has one other feather in its cap — it’s now the world’s third largest art-auction market after New York City and London. For these reasons, it’s no surprise, really, that MCH Group — owners of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach — decided to purchase a controlling stake in Art HK two years ago, adding an Asian element to its global portfolio.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 121 Because Art HK had such a successful formula, growing from 100 galleries and 20,000 visitors during its first edition in 2008 to 266 galleries and 67,000 visitors last year, director Magnus Renfrew says few changes are planned for the premier Art Basel HK fair this year, and the art will continue to have a 50-50 Western-Asian split. “It would be quite strange to change radically a form already proven to be going in the right direction,” he tells TIME. He hopes, however, the Art Basel name will attract a higher quality of work and more big-time buyers from around the world. “I have to pinch myself sometimes when I think that just three years ago we had one VIP manager sitting in the office in Hong Kong and we now have 25 VIP managers around the world hoping to direct VIP traffic to the art fair,” he says.

The only concern, some gallerists say, is that down the road the fair will be less reflective of the region. “What people are saying [in Shanghai] is you have all these Western galleries coming in, they’re afraid it will change the quality of the fair and what is on offer. It will be a less Asian fair, more a Western blue-chip kind of fair,” says Rebecca Catching, director of Shanghai’s OV Gallery.

(MORE: Has Shanghai Lost Its Artsy Edge?)

In Singapore’s favor, meanwhile, is a more exciting local arts scene, as well as massive backing from the government, which has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into new museums, galleries and performing-arts spaces; built a 30,000-sq-m FreePort at Changi International Airport for collectors to store artworks; and lured Rudolf from Shanghai to Singapore to launch the new Art Stage fair in 2011. The event opened strongly with 121 galleries and 32,000 visitors in its first year, but sales dipped during the second installment, making this year vital to the fair’s long-term success. Rudolf believes Art Stage could carve out a niche by focusing on Southeast Asian art, particularly works from Indonesia, which the fair will highlight this year in a special section, selling works by Indonesian artists not represented by galleries. “I think we go in the right direction because what I see [is that] the big interest all over the world in this fair this year is exactly because of Southeast Asia,” he said. “Southeast Asia is on the step to become an international trend.”

For now, there seems to be room for both Art Basel HK and Art Stage to flourish, but this could change if galleries and collectors are forced to choose between the two. Art Basel had planned to move its fair to February this year, which would have put it in direct competition with Art Stage. The organizers changed their mind because of the timing of Lunar New Year but left open the possibility of a move in the future.

Rudolf, for one, is hoping the two sides can coexist peacefully. “It is, of course, important that these two fairs aren’t held too close to each other and that each remains distinct and that each has its own clear identity,” he says. “As long as these two fairs complement each other and not compete with each other, they both act as catalysts to develop the arts scenes in Asia.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 122 DIE WELT 'Der lange Marsch zu sich selbst: Die erste Art Basel in Hongkong hat ihre Galerienliste vorgelegt. Direktor der Kunstmesse ist ein Mann, den man kaum kennt: Magnus Renfrew. Begegnung mit einem unauffälligen Aufsteiger.', 19 January 2013

Der lange Marsch zu sich selbst Die erste Art Basel in Hongkong hat ihre Galerienliste vorgelegt. Direktor der Kunstmesse ist ein Mann, den man kaum kennt: Magnus Renfrew. Begegnung mit einem unauffälligen Aufsteiger

Magnus Renfrew hat diesmal keine guten Vorsätze für das neue Jahr gefasst. Oder zumindest keine, die seinen Lebensstil radikal verändern würden: "Dieses Jahr wird ein besonderes Jahr", sagt Renfrew. "Wir alle haben lange und hart darauf hingearbeitet. Und jetzt werde ich meine ganze Energie darauf verwenden, dass es ein Erfolg wird."

In dieser Woche hat die Art Basel in Hongkong ihre Teilnehmerliste bekannt gegeben. 245 Galerien aus 35 Ländern werden Ende Mai im Kongresszentrum am Victoria Harbour ausstellen. Es ist das erste Mal, dass die Hongkonger Veranstaltung von der Messegesellschaft MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel) Ltd. verantwortet wird, sich mit der Marke "Art Basel" im Namen schmücken darf und auch an den dazugehörigen Standards messen lassen muss. Die Lektüre der veröffentlichten Galerienliste hält da keine Enttäuschungen parat: Was das Renommee der teilnehmenden Kunsthändler angeht, bleibt Hongkong weiter der begehrteste Messeplatz östlich der Alpen.

"Es ist eigentlich kaum zu glauben: Vor drei Jahren haben wir in Hongkong darüber geredet, dass wir die Art Basel für Asien sein wollen – und nun sind wir es", sagt Renfrew. Dass der Erfolg so schnell kam, sei das Verdienst eines hart arbeitenden, großartigen Teams gewesen, sagt der 37-Jährige. Das ist ihm wichtig: keine Einzelleistung, sondern ein Team. Und sicher wird es so gewesen sein, und doch gibt es immer einen Einzelnen, der mehr Motor ist als andere.

Von 2007 bis 2012 war Renfrew der Direktor der Vorgängermesse Art HK, von der Gründung bis zu ihrem erfolgreichen Abschied. Er hatte beträchtlichen Anteil daran, dass das Projekt in Windeseile wuchs, und er blieb am Ruder, als die Schweizer die Fühler ausstreckten. Seit Herbst vergangenen Jahres ist er nun Director Asia der Art Basel. Das bedeutet, dass er im Komitee der Messe die Interessen Asiens vertritt. Renfrews rasanter Aufstieg ist auch anderen nicht verborgen geblieben: 2010 landete er erstmals in der von der Zeitschrift "ArtReview" herausgegebenen "Power 100"-Liste der einflussreichsten Personen der Kunstwelt – auf Platz 92. Im Jahr danach verschwand er wieder. 2012 lag er dann als Teil des Art-Basel-Direktoriums plötzlich auf Platz 16.

Neben dem extrovertierten Marc Spiegler und der eleganten Annette Schönholzer ist der zurückhaltende Renfrew der am wenigsten auffällige der drei Art-Basel-Direktoren. Was weiß man also über diesen Mann, der die Geschicke des asiatischen Kunstmarkts in Zukunft so stark bündeln könnte wie kein Zweiter? Ehrgeizig ist er sicherliech. Das beweist nicht nur seine Abschlussarbeit in Kunstgeschichte, die zu den besten in der Geschichte der schottischen St.-Andrews-Universität gehörte. Auch im Einsatz für seine Messe ist er unermüdlich. Die Zeitverschiebung spiele ihm da manchmal in die Hände, erzählt er. Er könne schon in Ruhe arbeiten, wenn die Kollegen in Europa noch schlafen.

Die Kunst hat er schon als Kleinkind als Teil seines Lebens akzeptiert: Renfrews Vater ist ein bekannter Archäologe, die Eltern gingen oft ins Museum. "Ich war immer von Kunst umgeben", sagt Renfrew. "Meine frühste Erinnerung an ein Bild ist wohl das minimalistische Gemälde des britischen Bildhauers William Turnbull, das in unserem Hausflur hing." Viel stärker habe ihm allerdings Giovanni Bellinis Porträt des Leonardo Loredan beeindruckt, das ihm als Sechsjährigem begegnete. "Ein unglaubliches Gemälde", sagt er über das Bildnis des venezianischen Dogen, der von der Wand der National Gallery in London herab mit strenger Miene die Annäherungsversuche der Nachwelt prüft.

Renfrew hätte wohl auch eine akademische Karriere verfolgen können. Stattdessen ging er zum Auktionshaus Bonhams, wo er die Abteilung für zeitgenössische asiatische Kunst aufbaute und 2006 die erste Versteigerung in dieser Sparte arrangierte. Danach arbeitete er ein Jahr für die Hongkonger Galeristin Pearl Lam als Galeriemanager in Shanghai, bevor der Direktorenposten der neu gegründeten Messe lockte. "Die ersten Jahre waren ein unglaublicher Lernprozess", sagt Renfrew. "Wer die asiatische Kunst verstehen will, muss unvoreingenommen auf sie zugehen. Als ich anfing,

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 123 durch China zu reisen, war meine erste Reaktion als westlicher Kritiker, die meisten Werke automatisch abzulehnen. Doch dann begann ich, mit den Künstlern zu reden und immer mehr chinesische Kunst zu sehen. Manchmal änderte sich meine Meinung, manchmal auch nicht – aber auf jeden Fall begriff ich, dass ich von einem anderen kulturellen Referenzrahmen ausgehen muss."

40 Flüge absolvierte Renfrew allein in den ersten sechs Monaten seines Jobs als Messedirektor. Als Erstes gewann er einen Galeristen in Shanghai. Der ließ sich ganz rational von den Argumenten überzeugen, die heute noch für Hongkong sprechen: Keine Mehrwertsteuer, keine Import-/Export- Zölle, internationale Verkehrsverbindungen, Zweisprachigkeit, Reichtum. Der Durchbruch begann 2009, als es Renfrew gelang, einige westliche Powergalerien wie Gagosian oder White Cube nach Hongkong zu holen. Die Kollegen von Pace, Perrotin oder Hauser & Wirth kamen ein Jahr später, der große Rest folgte dann 2011, als es erste Übernahmegerüchte aus Basel gab. Plötzlich war Hongkong ein dicker Punkt auf der Kunstmarktlandkarte.

Nach 260 Galeristen im vergangenen Jahr ist nun die Zahl der Teilnehmer im Sinne der Qualität reduziert worden. Über 50 Prozent der Galerien stammten weiterhin aus Asien. "Es gab im Vorfeld Befürchtungen, dass wir die Art Basel einfach nach Hongkong kopieren könnten", sagt Renfrew. "Es ist uns aber ganz wichtig, dass es eine asiatische Messe ist, mit starkem Bezug zur Region."

Natürlich hat es auch Verschiebungen gegeben. Dass ein Händler wie Alexander Ochs, der ein langjähriges asiatisches Profil hat, nicht mehr dabei ist, kann man sicher als Verlust ansehen. Zu den Neuzugängen gehören 303 Gallery aus New York oder Johnen aus Berlin. Er gebe sogar Seminare für Galeristen, die zum ersten Mal kommen, sagt Renfrew. Um bestimmte Fehler zu vermeiden: "In Asien sind persönliche Beziehungen sehr wichtig. Man muss integer, bescheiden und offen auftreten", so der Direktor. "Vor allem muss man zugänglich sein: Wer am Stand hinter seinem Schreibtisch sitzt und in den Laptop tippt, wird hier keine Geschäfte machen."

Den Prozess des gegenseitigen Lernens will die Messe in diesem Jahr noch verstärken. So sollen in der neuen Sektion "Insights" Galerien aus Dubai bis Melbourne kuratierte Single-Artist-Shows, thematische Gruppenausstellungen oder historische Materialien zeigen, welche die asiatische Kunstgeschichte der letzten 100 Jahre beleuchten. "Asien wird in Zukunft mehr und mehr Teil unseres Lebens werden", sagt Renfrew. Wenn man seinen Schilderungen glauben darf, sollte man sich darauf freuen.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 124

HUFFINGTON POST 'Art Basel Hong Kong: Early Plans Show Fair's Commitment To Regional Artists', 15 January 2013

Hong Kong’s biggest art fair, Art HK, received an official Swiss makeover this year, courtesy of glitzy global brand, Art Basel. The Hong Kong outpost becomes the third official location for the premier fair, joining the ranks of Art Basel events in Switzerland and Miami Beach.

The freshly labeled Art Basel Hong Kong recently announced its 2013 lineup, featuring over 48 galleries who have never shown in the Asian city before. So what can we expect from Art Basel’s new transplant fair?

“The most important thing that Art Basel brings is increased international profile,” Magnus Renfrew, Asia director for the fair, told the Wall Street Journal. The Swiss company has already recruited galleries from 35 countries around the world, including Russia, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina. Although the total number of galleries has decreased — this year’s tally is 245, down from 264 at Art HK 2012 — big newcomers to Hong Kong include Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. from New York, Wentrup from Berlin and Galeria Pedro Cera from Lisbon, according to WSJ.

The fair is attempting to maintain a regional emphasis as well, making sure that 50% of the the participating galleries hail from the Asia or the Asia-Pacific region. According to The Art Newspaper, however, this includes Western galleries that have Asia-based locations, such as Gagosian and White Cube. Still, the number of regionally-specific participants is helped by one of the fair’s four subsections, titled “Insights,” which will be dedicated to 47 galleries from Asia (including Turkey and the Middle East). Early numbers show that of the 171 galleries in the main space, Asian galleries account for 43% in 2013 — an increase from the 40% reported last year at Art HK.

Check out the 10 hottest artists from Art Basel Miami Beach in the slideshow below, and let us know what you think of Art Basel Hong Kong’s plans in the comments section.

The first edition of Art Basel Hong Kong will takes place from Thursday, May 23, to Sunday, May 26, 2013 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC).

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 125 ART IN AMERICA 'Why Mess with Success?: Art Basel Hong Kong', 15 January 2013

by Brian Boucher

Art Basel Hong Kong, the new moniker for Art HK since it is under 60 percent ownership of Art Basel, has announced its May 2013 exhibitor lineup.

Other than the new name, the fair (May 23-May 26) stays the course set by founding director Magnus Renfrew, who is now one of three members of Art Basel's executive committee. The fair will again be in four sections; the number of exhibitors, at 245, is down only slightly from last year's 266; as she did last year, Yuko Hasegawa will curate the Encounters section (showing large-scale works); the size of the prize, at $25,000, remains the same; as in past years, the fair will take place at the futuristically designed Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Exhibiting galleries come from 35 countries, with more than 50 percent hailing from Asia and the Asia-Pacific region-stretching from Turkey and the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent through Australia and New Zealand. Notably, some 28 of these galleries have exhibition spaces in Hong Kong, and for as many as 48 galleries the fair will be a Hong Kong debut.

The main section of the fair, the gallery section, will feature 171 modern and contemporary exhibitors. First-time participants include 303 Gallery (New York), Andréhn-Schiptjenko (Stockholm), Dirimart (Istanbul), Dominique Levy Gallery (New York), Galerie OMR (Mexico City) and Wentrup (Berlin), among others.

Other sections will be dubbed Insights, Discoveries and Encounters. Insights includes 47 galleries from Asia and the Asia-Pacific region, all showing projects devised for the fair. Discoveries presents solo and two-person exhibitions by international emerging artists, organized by 27 galleries, and features a $25,000 prize. Curated again this year by Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and organizer of the upcoming Sharjah Biennial, the Encounters section offers large-scale sculptural and installation works, sited throughout the fair.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 126 THE GUARDIAN 'ArtReview's Power 100 list reveals art-world battle for supremacy', 18 October 2012

Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer

Magazine's survey of most important figures in contemporary art dominated by visionaries – and dealers for super-rich.

Two opposing camps are battling it out for domination of the international contemporary art world. On the one hand, the huge globalised art dealerships catering to the international super-rich – those individuals so dazzlingly wealthy as to be immune to the economic crisis. And on the other, a vision of art that is politically engaged, historically aware and socially inclusive.

That, at least, is the story according to ArtReview magazine, whose annual list of the 100 most important figures in contemporary art, the ArtReview Power 100, is published on Thursday.

At the top of the list is the first woman to be accorded the No 1 slot: the Italy- and US-based curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. She was the curator of this summer's Documenta, the grand-scale art exhibition, regarded as perhaps the contemporary art world's most important event, that takes place in the German town of Kassel every five years.

Described by one critic as "the most important exhibition to date of the 21st century", Christov- Bakargiev's Documenta was seen as setting a fresh agenda for artists, audiences and curators. The €25m (£20m) event, which took over the entire city, combined new work by artists including Tacita Dean and Ryan Gander with relics of the destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas, anti-Nazi tapestries from the 1930s, and even experiments devised by the physics department of the University of Vienna.

The Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei – this year at No 3, having been accorded the highest place last year – also fits into this category of politically and socially aware art according to ArtReview editor Mark Rappolt, thanks to his activism and battle for freedom of expression. So does new entry Pussy Riot, at No 57 on the list. Two members of the feminist-punk collective lost their appeal this week not to be sent to Russian penal colonies. Rappolt also pointed to new entry Theaster Gates (No 56), the African-American artist whose practice is concerned with urban planning, alleviating inner- city poverty and social activism, as well as making objects. These are figures, said Rappolt, who are "trying to interact with the world rather than waiting for the world to interact with them".

Second, fourth and fifth place on the list, however, are occupied by the macho blast of the world's most dominant art dealers: Larry Gasgosian, Iwan Wirth and David Zwirner. US dealer Gagosian this week added a new Paris space to his already huge portfolio of galleries, spanning Los Angeles, Hong Kong, London, Rome, Athens, Geneva and New York. The new gallery, in the north-east outskirts of Paris, is in the grounds of Le Bourget airport, the most important hub for private aviation in the city – the billionaire equivalent of providing a carpark. In September, the Art Newspaper reported that the combined floor area of Gagosian's 13 premises is set to overtake that of Tate Modern.

Despite the global economic crisis, the continued expansion of such high-end galleries reflects, according to Rappolt, the strength of the top end of the contemporary art market, bolstered by the desire among tycoons to "enter the weird social elite that collecting art creates". This elite is small but highly international, and this year is registered on the ArtReview list by the meteoric rise of Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, who has shot up nearly 80 places since last year to No 11 on the list. A daughter of the emir of Qatar, she is the chair of the Qatar Advertisement museums authority, and is rumoured to have spent, with her family, over £600m on western art over the past decade, including works by Damien Hirst and Mark Rothko.

The highest ranked artist on the list is Gerhard Richter, who celebrated his 80th birthday this year. Regarded as a national treasure in his native Germany, he is also a figure who continues to reinvent himself and to exert influence over younger artists. He is officially the most expensive living artist at auction: last week one of his works, Abstraktes Bild (809-4), from Eric Clapton's collection,sold for £21.3m at Sotheby's.

The list reflects further trends in the contemporary art world: notably the rising influence of Brazil, and the growing importance of its artists, collectors, dealers and art fairs. A new entry is Adriano

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 130 Pedrosa at No 98, a rising Brazilian curator, who curated a section of this year's Frieze Masters fair in London; and at No 71 is another new entry, Brazilian dealer Luisa Strina. Larry Gagosian opened a temporary space in Rio in September; and Jay Jopling (No 20) who owns the White Cube gallery, is to open a new permanent outpost in Sao Paulo this autumn.

The highest-ranked Briton on the list is Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, who at No 8, has overtaken his opposite number at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Glenn D Lowry, at No 9. Damien Hirst, whose monumental sculpture of a pregnant woman was this week erected in the Devon town of Ilfracombe and who was the subject of a major Tate retrospective this summer, has risen from No 64 last year to No 41.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 131 FINANCIAL TIMES 'Tomorrow, the world...', 8 June 2012

By Peter Aspden

As this year’s Art Basel opens its doors, here is a look at the expansion of one of the art world’s top brands.

If any proof were needed of the dizzying rise of the Asian art market in recent years, the news that Art Basel is launching a new edition in Hong Kong next year has surely clinched the argument. The blue-chip contemporary art fair, which started life in the moneyed Swiss city in 1970, has so far only lent its name to one offshoot, the Art Basel: Miami Beach fair, which has been bringing collectors to the sunny climes of Florida since 2002.

Over the past decade, as the internationlised art market has shown both a broadening of the collecting base and an ever-increasing willingness for clients to dig deep into their pockets, the fair has been approached by numerous cities hoping to take advantage of Art Basel’s brand value. But it has taken until now for its directors, Marc Spiegler and Annette Schönholzer, to succumb to temptation.

“Asia has been on our radar for a long time,” reveals Spiegler as we speak in a quiet room away from the bustle of last month’s Art HK fair. “We knew it would have to be a pan-Asian city, and there are only three.”

“Shanghai has tax and government issues, Singapore has censorship issues. The one thing that attracted us to Hong Kong was its long history of freedom of expression. This is not a place with a history of censorship, and that was a really crucial factor,” says Spiegler.

Unlike its launch of the Miami Beach fair, Art Basel is building on a firm foundation in Hong Kong. Art HK reported a highly successful return to mark its fifth year, attracting 266 galleries from 38 countries, and more than 67,000 visitors, an increase of 6 per cent over last year. Sales included the $3m purchase of a work by the Chinese artist Chu Teh-Chun to a south-east-Asian collector.

The gradual increase in those numbers over the past few years has evidently impressed Art Basel: in July 2011 its parent company acquired 60 per cent of Asian Art Fairs, which had launched Art HK. The fair’s director, Magnus Renfrew, will remain in charge of its new incarnation next year, and spearhead Art Basel’s Asian activities.

Schönholzer says that the timing of the takeover is perfect. “The scene here in Hong Kong has come on in leaps and bounds. When we came here two years ago it was clear that Art HK had gained world recognition, and that was what finally drew us here.”

Renfrew, for his part, says the involvement of Art Basel in what is already a successful fair will be good for the city-state. “One of the things that has been exciting for us has been the cultural impact of the fair on the city, in terms of new galleries and collectors. The one thing Art Basel can bring to the table is incredible access to the wider art community. It has extraordinary reach to every corner of the globe.”

Spiegler and Schönholzer are coy about what they will bring to the fair in the way of innovations, but they promise a good deal of extra-curricular activity outside the main fair. “We don’t believe in change for change’s sake,” says Spiegler. “But there is great potential for the VIP programme. More and more people will be coming from the west, and we need to give them a great experience to turn them into repeat customers.”

Renfrew believes the fair will not just be about educating western collectors about Asian art. It will have the broader aim of getting them to “open their minds to new aesthetics that they may not immediately understand. When I first came to China, I would go on studio visits and I found it difficult to engage with works that were so far from my own cultural upbringing.”

Spiegler has a broader ambition still: to teach the wider world about those “pockets of Asian art history” that remain relatively undiscovered by the west. “Art Basel’s strategy has always been to

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 132 show how contemporary art is grounded in art history, and how that history is dynamised by the contemporary.”

I ask if the increasingly global spread of Art Basel denotes the emergence of a new breed of art collector who is intuitively international in outlook. “Collectors are very competitive with each other,” replies Spiegler. “When you see the leading collectors redefining themselves by collecting not only their own country’s masterpieces, but masterpieces from all over the world, people are going to want genuine world-class collections, not just works from the Nato countries. And then they start to think about interesting juxtapositions.”

With its latest addition, Art Basel (from now on, all three of its fairs will only bear that name) has most of the globe covered, says Spiegler.

“Basel is a medieval city and a capital of culture. Miami is a Latin city on the cusp between two continents. And Hong Kong is an international metropolis in Asia. We are now able to cover all the areas that should be covered.

“And we can convince galleries in this part of the world that Art Basel is not some crazy, distant thing on a mountaintop. It is here, and we want to encourage people to be part of it.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 133 THE ECONOMIST 'Hong Kong as a hub for the arts: Shopping for a centre', 30 May 2012

Chen Guangcheng

IN A recent essay Eric X. Li, a venture-capitalist-turned-commentator who often finds himself in agreement with the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, argues against a commonplace. He says the arts don't need openness and democracy government to flourish. He brings many a fine example of great works that were created under the sort of constraints imposed by tyrants and mercurial patrons. The suffering-artist cliché suggests that he may well have a point. But the art industry at large, a world of burgeoning commerce that's built primarily on trust, is a different creature entirely. And its needs are many.

In the past two decades, mainland China's art market has followed the same flight path as the rest of the country's rocketing economy. Galleries and collectors have flocked in from abroad. But the mainland leaves some things to be desired. Some of them can be found just across the funny border crossing that separates the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong from the rest of China. And as the Hong Kong Art Fair closed last week, there was a sense of tides turning. A number of mainland-based galleries are setting up shop in Hong Kong (five are confirmed; a few others that are actively considering it). This despite the sky-high prices for commercial real estate, a determinative factor for many galleries. Why? Presumably not for the local breed of democracy. But perhaps for other political qualities?

For an answer it might help to turn to the company that runs the most successful commercial art exhibitions in the world. Last year Art Basel decided to buy a controlling stake in the company that runs the Hong Kong Art Fair.

“Art Basel has been looking at Asia for a long time and we seriously considered three possibilities: Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong,” according to Marc Spiegler, one of the two directors of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. It soon appeared that each of the other two would be less than ideal. Ease of doing business and a guarantee for the freedom of expression were of paramount importance to Art Basel's choice. “If you want to bring the top international galleries you can't restrict them too much in terms of what they can show. You don't want people to live in constant fear of having their booth shut down or censors come in and telling to take works away,” in Mr Spiegler's words. That stands in the way of Shanghai, at least.

Geography plays a role too. “Obviously China is very important for us, but so is South-East Asia. And Japan and South Korea, two of the most sophisticated art markets in Asia, with Taiwan. Australia too is a strong market, as is the Middle East.” Hong Kong is ideally located to serve them all and “it's very user friendly” explains Magnus Renfrew, the fair's director since its inception five years ago. “There's no tax for the import and export of art” he adds. Galleries that exhibit in China face tariffs and duties that can add up to as much as 30% of a work's value.

And there are other forces at play for galleries, beyond the low taxes and easy logistics. As businesses invest significant money and time in bettering their products, so galleries invest in their relationships with artists, often at significant cost. Where promising young artists are concerned, a hands-on gallerist can also play a role much like that of an old-fashioned patron. Galleries have a vested interest in helping them grow and be seen. Where the rule of law is loose and contractual practices inconsistent, an emerging artist might be easily “poached” by bigger galleries based in Europe or America, which can show their works to their long-established networks of collectors.

Hong Kong is perfectly placed for galleries based on the mainland to venture their first steps abroad. There are power struggles to represent established artists around the world and the rivalry between galleries is intense. One competitive advantage—besides the more obvious curatorial clout—is show space.

“The art world is becoming more globalised than ever and a presence in Hong Kong makes a lot of sense for us. We can show [our artists'] work to a wider and more diverse audience across the region.” says Steven Harris, founder of M97, a Shanghai-based art-photography gallery that will open in Hong Kong later this year.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 134 Opening in America or Europe is not really in the plans for many China-based galleries. Platform China, a Beijing-based gallery focused on emerging talent, relies mostly on a pan-Asian clientele, explains Claudia Albertini, the director of their newly opened Hong Kong space. Being at “the heart of Asia”, as she puts it, also makes it easier to connect with regional museums and institutions. If one were to extrapolate from one small example (in an industry that has many peculiar traits, admittedly), in the art scene perhaps lies a cautionary tale for the larger China, eager to expand the reaches of its “soft power”. Some of the same intangibles that collectors, museums and galleries hold dear are what the rest of the business world craves too, to grow beyond the cheap manufacturing and infrastructural development that has boomed so loudly in the new China. The artists and galleries have tried the mainland and found it wanting. Is the central government paying attention?

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 135 LE FIGARO 'Hongkong, la nouvelle place forte du marche de l'art', 27 May 2012

Béatrice De Rochebouet

L'essor de la Chine a fait de ce grand centre financier où l'on vient écouler son cash et acheter sans taxe le grand rendez-vous culturel de l'Asie.

De notre envoyée spéciale à Hongkong

La ville, mini-New York ou super-Monaco, est en plein boom. Économique et maintenant culturel. Enclave privilégiée de la République populaire de Chine, Hongkong est un grand port franc, sans taxe, ni à l'import ni à l'export, et un grand centre financier où l'argent coule à flot, la monnaie locale n'étant pas convertible à l'extérieur. «Pékin, pour son foyer d'artistes de renom, son réseau plus ancien de galeries, de centres culturels et de sociétés de ventes comme Poly, aurait pu être le centre du marché de l'art en Asie, estime Jean-Marc Decrop, l'un des premiers Français à avoir défendu l'avant-garde chinoise à l'étranger. Mais sa législation est tellement contraignante et son régime fiscal tellement dissuasif! Du coup, nombre de collectionneurs de Chine continentale ont des résidences à Hongkong où ils peuvent, en toute tranquillité, entreposer leurs achats.»

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 136 SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 'The big picture: No longer a cultural backwater, modern Hong Kong mixes business and beauty', 26 May 2012

John McDonald

No longer a cultural backwater, modern Hong Kong mixes business and beauty.

Under the hood ... Soloist by Alex Seton. Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art had a sellout with Seton’s marble sculptures at ART HK 12.

Hong Kong is ideally located to take advantage of an Eastern economic boom that keeps defying Western prophets of doom. Although it may sound scarcely believable, that defiant attitude is shared by leading Western art dealers who have begun opening gigantic new spaces in a city long known as a cultural backwater.

Those bad old days when Hong Kong was all business and no art have been swept away by the realisation that art can be very big business in its own right. The crucial catalyst has been the Hong Kong International Art Fair (ART HK), which has grown exponentially in popularity and turnover since its inception in 2008. At the age of five, it may be said that ART HK is no longer an emerging fair - it is a fully mature operation that ranks alongside Basel and Miami as one of the world's leading showcases for the commercial art trade.

Featuring 266 galleries from 38 countries, ART HK is now almost the same size as its peers in Europe and the US.

The final list was chosen from more than 700 applications, using a selection process that required applicants to show flair and innovation. This produced a show of exceptional quality and consistency. In Asia, ART HK reigns supreme, with fairs in Singapore, mainland China and Korea offering scant competition.

The mushrooming gallery scene is all the proof that is required. Last year, Gagosian and Ben Brown opened new premises in the Pedder Building, and have now been joined by Pearl Lam and Simon Lee.

More impressive are the new Connaught Road venues of White Cube and Emmanuel Perrotin. These galleries are vast, immaculate and incalculably expensive.

Even if you are selling works by Anselm Kiefer or Takashi Murakami, it seems inconceivable that any dealer could hope to make a profit, given inner-city rental prices that exceed those of London and Manhattan.

One assumes these new spaces are an investment in the future, as economic power shifts inexorably from West to East, and art is required to beautify money.

The dealers are following trends established by the big auction houses that spent much of the 20th century selling Chinese art and antiques in New York or London. Now the currents are reversed, with Chinese clients buying back their patrimony from Western collectors via Hong Kong.

Although the biggest sums are paid for works of traditional Chinese art, there are mainland millionaires buying modern Western and Chinese art and a growing number who are setting up private museums. One of the most fascinating events of ART HK 12 was a panel consisting of private museum owners in Asia, including Li Bing, who has a museum on the outskirts of Beijing and a contemporary art collectors club; Wang Wei, who plans to start two museums in Shanghai; and Dr Oei Hong Djien of Indonesia, who has just set up his third museum. The great joy of a private museum is that you can do whatever you like. Dr Oei has made his money in the tobacco industry, and says he'll keep building museums so long as people keep smoking.

In Hong Kong it is not only the dealers who are starting new galleries - the Asia Society of New York has just renovated an impressive building that previously housed the Hong Kong Jockey Club and an explosives magazine. Australia's Melissa Chiu, the New York director of the Asia Society, led the assembled journalists on a tour of the new facility, a brilliant feat of architectural rejuvenation.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 137

The new Asia Society is a classy addition to the city's artistic life but the behemoth that towers over other arts project in Hong Kong, and indeed the world, is the West Kowloon Cultural District. The responsibility for bringing this $HK21.6 billion ($2.74 billion) project to fruition lies with another Australian, Michael Lynch. With an opening only three years away, there is a huge amount of work to be done. For Lynch and the director of the proposed new M+ museum, Lars Nittve, this includes a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the local population. During the art fair, they organised a show of contemporary-art installations in the nearby district of Yau Ma Tei. The positive responses convinced both men that preconceived ideas about Hong Kong philistinism were misguided. All the citizens needed, apparently, were opportunities to show their love of art.

Back at the fair, it was proving to be the best-ever year for the Australian dealers.

Tolarno Galleries had a sellout with Brendan Huntley's paintings and ceramic sculptures; while Sullivan+Strumpf matched this feat with a sellout of Alex Seton's marble sculptures. This is the second fair in a row in which Sullivan+Strumpf has sold everything, suggesting an unusually keen instinct for what people want, although Ursula Sullivan says the only recipe for success is to have good artists.

In the main Galleries section, Australia was represented by Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Roslyn Oxley9 and Anna Schwarz.

The Asia One section featured Ausin Tung, Nellie Castan (with the only indigenous artist, Bindy Cole), Tristian Koenig, Damien Minton, Tim Olsen, Ryan Renshaw, Sullivan+Strumpf, and Tolarno; the third component, Art Futures, included two emerging Melbourne galleries, Neon Parc and Anna Pappas. This was more than respectable, with the numbers up by one from last year. It also suggests that fair director Magnus Renfrew's working definition of ''Asia'', which stretches from Turkey to the Pacific, is providing a measure of security for the Australian dealers, who are not big-time players.

Next year, when ART HK comes fully under the umbrella of the Art Basel group, there will inevitably be changes but anxieties have been lessened by the news that Renfrew will remain at the helm, and 50 per cent of the show will be devoted to Asian galleries.

Last year the Galleries section was located on level one, while Asia One and Art Futures occupied the halls on level three. In 2012, the three sections have been artfully integrated, with Asia One enjoying a central position.

This removed the ''upstairs, downstairs'' effect of last year and created a more even platform for galleries large and small.

This may have played a part in the success of the Australian galleries, which came as blessed relief from the inertia of the art market in Sydney and Melbourne. Tim Olsen was selling abstract expressionist paintings by Sophie Cape, while Barry Keldoulis offloaded a variety of works to a diverse group of clients. His best sale was a new wall piece by Sean Cordeiro and Claire Healy, bought by a well-known Indian artist. Ausin Tung, although based in Melbourne, showed works by Shanghai artist Wu Daxin, including an amazing photo of the burnt ruin of the CCTV building in Beijing, which came across as an apocalyptic warning to China's soaring ambitions.

The smaller galleries at ART HK 12 seem to have done better than their larger, more glamorous counterparts. Many of the most prominent dealers sold almost nothing, although one only needs a single million-dollar sale to cover costs. They may have had themselves to blame, because some sent stockroom works to Hong Kong while saving their best pieces for Art Basel.

Although one hears that the Asian market is raw, impulsive and unsophisticated, it seems to be growing up quickly.

The great value of Hong Kong is that it is probably the most open art market in the world, with few of the provincial hang-ups of other big cities. Hong Kong has a population of 7.07 million Finally, an ever-popular feature of ART HK is the annual debate. The proposition this time was ''Contemporary art excludes the 99 per cent'', with British filmmaker Ben Lewis and American artist Paul Chan arguing in favour, while conceptual art guru Joseph Kossuth and the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Liz Ann Macgregor, argued the contrary. A poll taken before

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 138 the debate showed most of the audience opposed the idea, but afterwards most listeners had changed their minds, delivering a landslide victory to Lewis and Chan.

Macgregor's unsuccessful line was that art is all to do with ideas, not entertainment - although this hardly squares with her missionary zeal to bring contemporary art to the masses. It seems clear that if contemporary art is not to exclude the 99 per cent, it needs to take itself a little less seriously.

This is one of the reasons that commercial events such as ART HK tend to provide a better snapshot of today's art than the big curator-driven exhibitions. Nowadays, it is shopping rather than ideas that keeps the world of contemporary art turning.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 139 THE NEW YORK TIMES 'Hong Kong Art Fair Reels in the Million-Dollar Deals', 21 May 2012

By JOYCE LAU

HONG KONG — “Money Creates Taste” read the ART HK tote bags and T-shirts being hawked at the Hong Kong International Art Fair, a five-day event that ended Sunday.

The fair certainly had plenty of the former. While ART HK doesn’t release revenue figures, it has always had a large number of million-dollar transactions; the city is now the world’s third-largest art auction market behind New York and London. Sales at the 266 galleries participating in the fair seemed to be healthy, particularly for Chinese works.

Lin & Lin Gallery from Taipei sold all 15 of its Liu Wei paintings. “We were not surprised because people were waiting for his new works for a long time,” said Fang-Yu Liu, a gallery representative, who added that most of the buyers were Asian.

Gagosian, which opened a Hong Kong gallery last year, sold out a series of rare pencil drawings by the Chinese painter Zeng Fanzhi, as well as a Zeng painting. Nick Simunovic, Gagosian’s managing director, said sales had “exceeded expectations.” Gagosian was also showing Picasso, Monet, Giacometti, Lichtenstein and Murakami. A Damien Hirst dot painting remained available as of the second day of the fair. The gallery had put more than 300 similar works on a polka-dotted around- the-world tour that included Hong Kong.

Major galleries tried to lure Asian buyers with generally colorful and upbeat works that were easy on the eye, with plenty of Pop Art and celebrity names. David Zwirner Gallery from New York unveiled a 2012 portrait of Lady Gaga by the Chinese-French painter Yan Pei-Ming, who is known for his portraits of Mao.

Not all galleries were sanguine. Alex Logsdail, the international director of the Lisson Gallery in London, said sales were “very patchy.” Lisson, which was showing works by Ai Weiwei, Julian Opie and Anish Kapoor, has been at ART HK since it began in 2008 and has done better in past years. Mr. Logsdail said ART HK’s new layout, in which smaller, younger galleries were mixed among major international ones, may have hurt sales.

The Hong Kong cultural scene was ignored for so long that the sighting of any high-profile designer or artist still causes waves. Journalists milled around Galerie Gmurzynska, hoping for a promised word with Zaha Hadid, who had designed the booth, and who was running late, as was everyone else that hurried first afternoon.

Aside from big-name artists like Botero and Warhol, the Zurich gallery was showing about two dozen rather beautiful works by the late Wifredo Lam, a Cuban-Chinese artist and Picasso contemporary. “There’s no other 20th-century modern master like him of Chinese origin, but he has never really shown in Asia,” said Mathias Rastorfer, the gallery’s director, who described renewed interest in modern works as a sign that the Asian market was maturing.

“We’ve had lots of interest from Chinese museums,” he added.

Two booths over, there was such a large group of cameramen that one could be forgiven for thinking that Warhol himself had appeared instead of just a BMW art car that he had designed. The most interesting, interactive work was found in the nooks and crannies upstairs. It was where gallerists carried iPads instead of bulky glossy catalogs, and where Chinese artists hung out with friends.

Peng Yu, half of an art duo with Sun Yuan, wandered around their lifesized rhino sculptures at Platform China, a Beijing gallery that just opened a new Hong Kong space.

Jin Jiangbo, a Shanghai artist at the booth of the Starkwhite Gallery in Auckland, played a zither connected to a digitalized screen, on which black and white brushstrokes ebbed and flowed with the music. Mr. Jin said that it was his first time at ART HK and compared it favorably to a similar event in Shanghai. “It’s much bigger and of very high quality,” he said. “It’s much more international.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 140

Last year, ART HK took place just as the dissident artist Ai Weiwei disappeared into Chinese custody, and all eyes were on the city to see if it would dare show his art. The sole Ai piece in 2011 was a sculpture showing a hand making a vulgar gesture.

This year, ART HK took a bigger leap. Before the festival, it released only a partial list of the large- scale installations, which were curated by Yuko Hasegawa of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. It was not until the fair’s opening that it unveiled Mr. Ai’s “Cong” (2008) from Galerie Urs Meile, of Beijing and Lucerne. The large wooden structure is neatly lined with letters and lists naming the thousands of students who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and is significant because he allegedly drew the ire of the authorities for asking whether shoddy school construction added to the deaths in the disaster.

For its annual debate at ART HK, the forum Intelligence Squared Asia chose the theme “Contemporary Art Excludes the 99 Percent,” an apt topic for an event that is trying to balance being a local cultural event — with plenty of free talks, tours and small galleries — and a marketplace for sophisticated international buyers.

Maybe because of the Art Basel association, or maybe because there are simply higher-quality galleries, ART HK saw a good number of new overseas visitors.

Victoria Love Salnikoff, an art consultant in New York, visited the fair for the first time. “Looking over the roster of galleries participating,” she said, “I felt it was a strong representation and felt the quality of works would be quite high. I wasn’t disappointed.”

It remains to be seen how ART HK will fit into the international circuit, especially after Art Basel begins running it next year. This year the fair was run by local management.

“I still don’t feel that the standard of the fair is close to the Art Basel or Art Basel Miami,” Ms. Love Salnikoff said. “If the date for this fair moves close to the Art Basel dates I will probably choose Art Basel over the Hong Kong fair.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 141 ARTNET.COM 'Art HK 2012: Post-Colonial Contemporary Art', 18 May 2012

by Barbara Pollack

Now in its fifth edition, Art HK, May 17-20, 2012, with 260 galleries from 38 countries, is better than ever, transforming Hong Kong overnight from a sleepy backwater of contemporary art into Asia’s art capital. It will never compete with a city like Beijing that, at last count, had tens of thousands of artists, a major art school and over 300 galleries. But Hong Kong, due to its colonialist history, is a very comfortable place for foreigners to spend money, and that’s exactly what is making Art HK such a success.

This year in Hong Kong, Emmanuel Perrotin and White Cube opened lavish galleries at 50 Connaught Street, a brand new office tower that mimics the look of colonialist architecture. Perrotin opened with graffiti artist KAWS, who already has a following and his own souvenir shop in Tokyo. White Cube unveiled new works by Anselm Kiefer, inspired by his 1993 trip to China. Kiefer’s appeal to Chinese collectors was evident at the opening, with several mainland buyers picking up works before the evening was over.

Several blocks away crowds lined up to enter the much more cramped Pedder Building, where Gagosian Gallery, which has been open in HK for over a year, showed a mini-retrospective of Andreas Gursky and Pearl Lam inaugurated her new space with abstract paintings by Chinese artists. Lam, who has several galleries in Shanghai and comes from a HK real estate development family, packed her space with even more visitors than Gagosian, despite the proliferation of billboards around the city featuring an image of Gursky’s emblematic 99 Cent Store.

Art HK opened the next day, on May 16, with a vernissage that delivered collectors from throughout the region, from Indonesia to Australia, as well as visitors from Europe. Only a few Americans showed up, perhaps squeezed between Frieze NY in early May and Art Basel in early June, or perhaps from lack of interest. With 266 galleries filling the convention center -- half from Asia -- it was a great way to get a sense of art in the region, usually not included in New York fairs. (Only two Chinese galleries were included in the Armory Show in New York in March -- Shanghart and Tang Contemporary -- a ridiculous oversight, given the scale of the market here and the wealth of local talent.)

Art Basel has bought a controlling interest in Art HK and takes over in 2013, so there was much speculation among visitors about the tenor of the fair. One Paris journalist complained to me that the fair was too western. I thought, how interesting, just what is she missing? A tourist experience, perhaps? Interestingly, many local dealers participating did not seem concerned and were thrilled to finally be included in an arena the scale and quality of Art Basel.

Fair director Magnus Renfrew, who is remaining in his position under the new regime, assured me that the show would continue to be 50 percent Asian, including its fantastic Asia One section, which this year had 49 galleries presenting solo shows of artists of “Asian origin.”

Marc Spiegler, the high-profile co-director of Art Basel, chimed in that many of the galleries participating in Asia One have already graduated to the main gallery section, demonstrating how much the fair is encouraging development of the gallery system in the region.

Indeed, as opposed to fairs in Europe and the United States (which presume to be international despite ignoring three-quarters of the world), Art HK truly had a global feel, with western galleries trying to find the right balance for Asian collectors and Asian galleries similarly negotiating cultural differences to satisfy the many foreigners attending the event.

Pace Beijing sold a major work by Li Songsong and had a bidding war going on over a Zhang Xiaogang, but Gagosian was attracting equal interest with a magnificent butterfly painting by Damien Hirst, as well as a small painting by its single Chinese artist, top seller Zeng Fanzhi.

Many western galleries were out in force: Acquavella with a monumental James Rosenquist, Sean Kelly with an Anthony McCall light installation, White Cube with a $500,000 Hirst spin painting, and

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 144 Marianne Boesky, Marian Goodman, Leo Castelli, Cheim & Read, Paul Kasmin, Lombard-Fried, Sikkema Jenkins and many others from New York.

L&M Arts successfully bridged the cultural divide by placing mural-sized wall labels on the gallery walls, spelling out Koons, Picasso and Warhol, for buyers unversed in English. The gallery also brought out a large ash painting by Zhang Huan, Youth (2007), from a private collection, and a painting by Chinese modernist Zao Wouki, who recently sold for $8.8 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong.

I went out of my way to ask more local galleries if the fair seemed too western, or threatening to them. The answer was a resounding “no”! “To a Singapore collector, is Michael Joo Eastern or Western? Is Murakami Eastern or Western?” asked Lu Jei, director of Beijing’s Long March Space sarcastically. “Anyway, is this the number one question? I don’t think so. I think number one is how are the sales and more importantly, what is the quality.”

Hong Kong dealer Robin Peckham, who just opened his alternative Saamlung space earlier this year, also praised the fair. “This fair made the Hong Kong art scene,” he commented. “None of these galleries, like Gagosian and White Cube, would be in Hong Kong without this fair.”

Art HK is undoubtedly a superior fair to many of the more local Asian fairs, especially those in mainland China. I spent two days wandering the aisles trying to discern whether it even makes sense to think about things as an East-West divide.

One of my favorite booths was Aando Fine Art, based in Berlin and founded by Wonkyong Byun, who is Korean. He was showing inflatables by Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa, priced between $20,000 and $45,000. The artist had a large-scale installation on the outside of the Los Angeles County Museum a couple of years ago, and was at the fair on his way to the Kiev Biennial.

Meanwhile, Beijing gallery Pékin Fine Arts was stealing the show with a $213,000 plastic rotating musical sculpture of Mickey and Minnie Mouse holding machine guns, the work of the Hungarian artist Kata Legrady. I would have sworn it was Chinese.

Pearl Lam Gallery paired a big blue slather of paint by London artist Jason Martin with an abstraction on rice paper mounted on canvas by Zheng Chongbin. Lehmann Maupin filled its booth with an installation by Korean artist Lee Bul and Sean Kelly had a series of gold leaf canvases by Terence Koh for $30,000 each.

The Richard Long floor sculpture at James Cohan Shanghai sold before the fair opened and the artist was a big hit when he had a solo show at the gallery last year. Chambers Fine Art had already sold most of its watercolors by rising star Guo Hongwei, for up to $30,000, while a big bird by Will Ryman had become one of the fair’s many photo opportunities with a continuous stream of young visitors snapping their pictures at Paul Kasmin’s booth.

“We are just beginning to learn about this market,’ said Michael Lieberman of Harris Lieberman. Interestingly, the gallery was doing good business with works by Los Angeles artist Karl Haendel, whose drawings priced from $6,000 to $17,000. Just a couple of years ago, an emerging American artist would have found no buyers at this fair.

But Lieberman laid the groundwork by coming over a month ago to meet with new clients, using the show as his entry into the region. A mid-level gallery like Harris Liebermann in the past would have kept its focus squarely in the west. “I don’t think that that’s it anymore,” he said to me, “You would be foolish to ignore this trend.” As far as the art market goes, this is obviously advice well-taken.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 145 LES ECHOS 'Hong Kong nouvelle place de l'art contemporain', 18 May 2012

By JUDITH BENHAMOU-HUET

Cette semaine, le galeriste français Emmanuel Perrotin -il représente entre autres artistes Takashi Murakami et Maurizio Cattelan -a inauguré à Hong Kong une galerie de 650 mètres carrés au 17eétage d'un luxueux bâtiment de Connaught Road. Un investissement colossal si l'on tient compte de la cherté des loyers dans cette ville chinoise. « Hong Kong est un hub pour toute l'Asie.« Les hommes d'affaires y viennent couramment depuis Singapour, Taiwan, la Corée ou les Philippines. » Aujourd'hui l'un des plus gros acheteurs de la galerie Perrotin est Budi Tek, un milliardaire indonésien d'origine chinoise qui a fait fortune dans le commerce du poulet et qui devrait ouvrir à Shanghai un musée privé. Hong Kong, le port franc, où tous les nouveaux milliardaires chinois viennent dépenser leur cash, est aussi un lieu où la censure communiste est bien moins présente qu'en Chine continentale.

Euphorie des Occidentaux

C'est aussi pour cela qu'en à peine deux ans le paysage du marché de l'art de la ville s'est radicalement transformé. L'an dernier, la puissante galerie « globale » de l'Américain Larry Gagosian y a ouvert un grand espace. Depuis cette semaine, elle y expose en primeur le travail de la star internationale de la photo Andreas Gursky avec des tirages à vendre à partir de 400.000 euros. Le Français Edouard Malingue a inauguré un espace en 2011 avec une exposition Picasso. Cette semaine, encore deux galeries de Londres, la célèbre White Cube et Simon Lee inauguraient des espaces comme la Chinoise Pearl Lam. Le courtier français Mathieu Ticolat, qui vient aussi de s'installer à Hong Kong après Tokyo, observe cependant : « Si ce n'est pour la production chinoise, le marché de l'art contemporain est quasi inexistant. " Le patron de l'Asie chez Christie's, François Curiel, remarque néanmoins : « A chaque nouvelle vente, nous découvrons de nouveaux acheteurs comme récemment un Chinois propriétaire de mines. "

En fait tous les acteurs du marché anticipent un mouvement : l'entrée des Chinois continentaux dans le marché de l'art contemporain international. Le Suisse Lorenz Helbling, qui a ouvert il y a quinze ans une galerie à Shanghai, émet des doutes sur cette euphorie occidentale : « L'Europe enregistre une baisse d'activité, alors tout le monde se presse ici. Les marchands croient que l'intérêt pour l'art actuel se développera rapidement, mais je n'en suis pas si s ûr. » Ils se servent aussi de Hong Kong comme d'une plate-forme qui permet de ne pas payer de droits à l'importation (de 25 % à 33 % en Chine). Mais jusque-là les observateurs comptent à peine une dizaine de collectionneurs de niveau international pour toute la Chine continentale.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 147 ART IN AMERICA 'Hong Kong Art Fair Erases Borders', 17 May 2012

by Richard Vine

Globalism is alive and well in Asia, at least for the next few days. Art HK 12, the fifth edition of the Hong Kong International Art Fair (May 17–20), has presented its May 16 preview crowd of journalists and decked-out VIPs with a one-world vision that defies the post-2008 retraction into distinct East- West art world spheres.

Some 266 galleries from 38 countries are tendering works in two enormous exhibition halls at the futuristically designed Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center on Victoria Harbor. At the center of each of the two levels is the Asia One section, encompassing a total of 49 regional galleries offering one-artist displays, while numerous other Asian galleries—especially those like Kukje (Korea), Boers-Li (China), Lin & Lin (Taipei) and Tomio Koyama (Japan), boasting internationally recognized rosters—are sprinkled throughout the fair among scores of dealers from abroad. Western participants include Acquavella (U.S.), Simon Lee (UK), Andersson/Sandström (Sweden), Nara Roesler (Brazil), and Joan Prats (Spain). Adding to the mix, Art Futures, with 35 booths on the periphery of the upper hall, features artists under 35 years of age from galleries that are not more than eight years old. One of the Art Futures artists-to be chosen by veteran museum director Lars Nittve, art magazine publisher Elaine Ng and international curator Okwui Enwezor-will receive a cash prize of $25,000.

Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, has organized the Art HK Projects—10 installations drawn from participating galleries and positioned, island-like, here and there in 1,100-square-foot spaces. Selections include pieces by Japan's Yayoi Kusama, Indonesia's Handiwirman Saputra, Brazil's José Patrício and China's Yin Xiuzhen. Ai Weiwei, still deeply embroiled with authorities in Beijing, is represented by a wall of 120 letters he has received from the Chinese government.

A global nomad, Hans Ulrich Obrist, director of London's Serpentine Gallery, is on hand to promote his latest publishing venture, The Future Will Be . . . China: Thoughts on What's to Come, a compilation of brief comments on impending developments—or, in many cases, the nature of futurity in general—by dozens of artists and other cultural workers, almost all of them Chinese.

To judge by the marketing strategy favored by gallerists in Art HK 12, that future will be culturally hybrid at every level. Berlin dealer Michael Janssen traveled to Hong Kong with work by, among others, Indonesian artist Dita Gambiro, who dangles swaths of synthetic hair from brass versions of human rib cages. Tokyo's ShugoArts has architectural interior photographs by Germany's Carsten Höller. Arndt, from Berlin, is showing photo installations by Britain's Gilbert & George along with paintings by Indonesia's FX Harsono. Pi Artworks, an Istanbul gallery, has mounted images from Turkish artist Ahmet Sel's black-and-white photo series "The People of Moscow" (2000).

This kind of borderless mash-up is great fun and even heartwarming in its world-community evenhandedness. But finding the right global business model may be more of a trick. Some Western dealers who brought big-name, big-ticket items to previous Hong Kong fairs have scaled back to a mid-range or lower-upper price level. Many offerings are respectable but not really top-notch examples from the respective galleries' stock.

This approach may succeed in the short term, but it carries a serious perceptual risk. Yes, many Asian collectors are relatively new to the market, but that doesn't mean that they—to say nothing of their more experienced regional peers—want to be sold down to. As one Chinese-born, internationally active private dealer put it to me bluntly: "Do Western dealers think Asian buyers are stupid?"

Striking the right transactional balance, accommodating sensibilities formed on opposite sides of the earth—these are among the challenges facing the Art Basel organization, which recently bought 60 percent of Art HK and will undertake its first edition of the event next year. Magnus Renfrew, the Hong Kong fair's longtime director, will remain in place, becoming one of the Basel organization's three top figures. He states that the rechristened Art Basel Hong Kong will retain its regional character, and its regional commercial dominance, by continuing the current 50-percent-Asian participation ratio. Selectivity, evidenced this year by winnowing some 700 applicants down to 266

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 150 participants, is likely to increase, especially if Art Basel exercises its option to purchase the remainder of the Hong Kong operation in 2014. After all, as Renfrew points out, Art Basel has "the art world's greatest Rolodex."

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 151 BBC.COM 'The biggest names in art come to Hong Kong', 16 May 2012

By Hana R Alberts

Once a year the biggest names in the art world flock not to Basel or Venice -- but to Hong Kong. Springtime ushers in ART HK 12, an international art fair that this year will play host to 266 galleries from 39 countries.

Held 17 to 20 May at Hong Kong's Wan Chai convention centre, visitors can browse works from prestigious international galleries like London’s Gagosian and White Cube (both also have branches in Hong Kong) and Paris’ Tornabuoni Art. Among the artists showcased are contemporary masters such as Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella, as well as newer, influential players like Anish Kapoor and Ai Weiwei. In addition, large-scale installations will be scattered around the exhibition halls, including a psychedelic polka-dotted piece by 83-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, a quirky boundary breaker known for her use of repetitive patterns.

Now in its fifth year, ART HK's prominence has grown measurably since its inception. Attendance rose 38% between 2010 and 2011, with last year's festival welcoming more than 63,000 visitors, professional curators, hardcore collectors and lay art buffs.

What sets the fair apart is its insistence on giving an equal weight to artists from Asia (in a special section called Asia One), as well as emerging artists under 35 and those represented by galleries less than eight years old in the Art Futures section. Some artists to watch include Hong Kong native Lee Kit, who repurposes mundane objects in his almost sculptural works; Adrian Wong, a Yale MFA whose installations bear the imprint of Hong Kong culture; Cary Kwok, a London-based Hong Kong artist who uses everyday ballpoint pens to create a distinctive drawing style; and He Xiangyu, a mainland Chinese artist perhaps best known for creating a corpse of Ai Weiwei in an attempt to laud Ai's stance against the Chinese government.

ART HK 12 already vaulted the month of May to the top of Hong Kong's cultural calendar, but next year promises to shine even brighter. Though Art Basel already owns a majority stake in ART HK, on 8 May it announced plans to incorporate Hong Kong's fair more formally among its own slate of internationally renowned events. That means, starting in May 2013, we should expect even more from Hong Kong's art scene.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 153 FINANCIAL TIMES 'The Hong Kong Moment', 12 May 2012

By Jan Dalley

Art Hong Kong’s founders have an impressive sense of timing

The founding of Art Hong Kong just five years ago seems to have been a perfect piece of synergy: if only life had more of those. The coming of the fair, the growing wealth of potential collectors, the immediate interest from gallerists and auction houses, the burgeoning supply of interesting art from the area, the official attitudes – all seemed to catch light at the same moment, and grow and change together and feed each other with almost baffling speed.

As the fair’s fifth edition opens on May 17, with 266 galleries from all over the world, the pace shows no sign of letting up. To take a small but telling example: a leading gallerist reported that five years ago, only a tiny percentage of his sales of Chinese contemporary art were to Chinese buyers; now the figure is closer to 80 per cent. Expect more such shifts as Asian economies flex their muscles.

The reasons why Hong Kong has become such a significant hub for the art trade of the region are explored in this supplement. We also look at the trend towards setting up private museums and galleries, some of the significant players, and, as westerners flock in, other facets of a sparkling but unpredictable market.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 156 TIMEOUT 'New owners get ART HK supersonic', 8 May 2012

Whitney Ferrare

Gearing up for an art fair is like preparing for a public stock offering. If there is one way to relate this to my friends working in Hong Kong’s financial sector – this is it! As any gallerist knows, art fairs are the marathons of our industry.

On May 17, all eyes are on Hong Kong as the city takes centre stage for the fifth installment of the Hong Kong Art Fair (better known as ART HK). In July last year, MCH Swiss Exhibition Ltd, the organisers of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, acquired a 60 percent ownership stake in Asian Art Fairs Ltd, which produces ART HK. If the penny hasn’t dropped yet, it’s basically the equivalent of IBM saying to Samsung ‘hey, love what you’ve built, we want in.’

The huge success of ART HK has solidified the city’s stronghold as Asia’s continental and strategic arts hub – besting Singapore and a struggling Shanghai. Part of this is due to the extraordinary efforts made by the satellite event organisers that greatly add to the holistic experience, and the immensely strong direction of Magnus Renfrew, ART HK director. Critically hailed curator, David Elliott (and point man on the Central Police Station project) notes: “Under Magnus Renfrew’s excellent direction it has become the major art fair east of Switzerland and west of Miami.” You betcha.

This year, with over 260 galleries participating under one mammoth roof, the feel is likely to be quite Euro-American, despite ample Asian art on show. There will be some concern that, with new ownership, the fair may lose its quirky Hong Kong touch. Who could forget Chinese performance artist Li Wei cracking out of his glass mirrored suit at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery’s booth in 2008? And raise your hands if you have a photo on your phone of Nadim Abbas’s gorgeous and seemingly never-ending neon fake coral corridor from last year?

I’m in agreement with Alan Lo, member of ART HK Advisory Group, when he exclaimed: “I hope the new owner won’t just see Hong Kong as an Asian spin-off of the Art Basel franchise.”

Yet Elliott sees another aspect: “I think that the Miami/Basel Art Fair is extremely well run and there are obviously economies of scale in combining contacts and logistics. I am a great believer in making comparisons when looking at art and the big fairs certainly offer plenty of opportunities for doing this.”

Many early ART HK exhibitors claim the new owners are ‘picking favourites’ and under pressure from long-term international exhibitors at Basel, Switzerland, and their second outpost, Basel Miami, to show in Hong Kong. As more and more top galleries apply, pressure is on for the younger, lesser- known galleries to put on fantastic booths. And as we know, it certainly isn’t inexpensive to exhibit! So, are they going to strike the right balance? We shall see.

But let’s put art politics aside for truly the best week of the year for art in Hong Kong. Forget the Rugby Sevens, this is going to be a supersonic event and I’m riding shotgun. Plus it’ll be one hell of a party!

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 157 THE KOREA HERALD 'Hong Kong Art Fair aims for more than sales', 22 March 2012

Director says expectations high for gallery exchange programs and curated Art HK projects

The art industry can no longer be discussed without mentioning Hong Kong Art Fair. Also known as Art HK, the fair, inaugurated only in 2008, has rapidly grown into one of the most influential art events not just in Asia, but the world.

Last year 260 galleries from 38 countries participated in the fair, introducing more than 1,000 artists. It attracted more than 63,500 visitors, a 38 percent increase from the previous year.

¡¡ This year, 266 galleries from 39 countries ― chosen from among some 630 applicants ― will attend the fair being held May 17-20 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center. The participants list is star-studded as usual, including prestigious galleries such as White Cube, Gagosian Gallery and James Cohan Gallery. From Korea, 11 galleries including CAIS Gallery, Gana Art, Hakgojae and Gallery Hyundai will be present.

Magnus Renfrew, director of the fair, finds many reasons for the success so far including great organizers, Hong Kong’s tax-free policies, and especially the location in the heart of Asia.

“It (Hong Kong) also has a shared history with the West, and is a place where people both from the East and the West feel equally at home,” Renfrew told The Korea Herald.

The whole point of Art HK, after all, was to create something different, something that reflects reality ― which is that Asia can no longer be neglected.

“In most art fairs, Western galleries take up 80 to 90 percent. We try to maintain a balance of 50-50 (Western galleries-Asian galleries),” said Renfrew, though he added that in this case “Asia” is a broad definition, including countries as far apart as Turkey and Australia.

The Swiss exhibitions group MCH, organizers of Art Basel, bought the majority stake ― 60 percent ― of Asian Art Fairs Ltd, owner of Art HK, in July last year. It is a fascinating thing, said Renfrew.

“Art Basel is without doubt the leading art fair in the world. It is really going to help develop the audience from outside of Asia to attending the fair. We are expecting greater attendance from the U.S. and Europe. It will also be an interesting opportunity to globalize Asian art,” he said.

Refurbished, this year’s Art HK aims for something more than simply remarkable sales. It appointed Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa as the first-ever curator for the ART HK Projects, a side program of the fair. Hasegawa will direct the display of ten large installation works, which will serve as landmarks for visitors during the fair as well as give new artistic inspiration.

“Art fair is a commercial event, but the best art fairs can also be of cultural significance,” said Renfrew.

Another interesting program to be introduced this year is an exhibition network initiative through which ART HK will link participating galleries from the West with the East and help them communicate and work with each other in the future. The program is already receiving a great response.

Art HK also hosted seminars in Miami, Florida last December to help Western galleries do business in Asia and learn about cultural differences.

“Once, an Asian buyer requested an ambitious discount, and the Western gallery got upset. We hope to educate the audience’s cultural differences, explaining what is possible and not possible, and to respond in a possible way rather than getting upset,” explained Renfrew.

Mentioning how he was struck after seeing the applications for this year, Renfrew promised the best quality fair ever, and affirmed it would mark strong sales.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 160 “In the medium term, it will become Art Basel Hong Kong, so it will be a leading art fair. There is no doubt that the Earth is tipping this way (toward Asia) in all parts of the world, and equally in the art world,” he said.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 161 DEPARTURES 'The Hong Kong Art Fair has transformed the city from a cultural desert to a major hub', October 2011

By Alexandra A. Seno

At an entrance to this year’s Hong Kong International Art Fair stood Paul McCarthy’s 60-foot-tall inflatable sculpture of a ketchup bottle. The piece by the L.A.-based contemporary artist was whimsical, unforgettable and symbolic of the global reach the fair has achieved since launching only four years ago. “McCarthy’s work spoke to a universal audience and captured the excitement and ambition of the fair,” says Neil Wenman, director of London, New York and Zurich gallery Hauser & Wirth, which arranged the installation.

In the last few years, the reputation of Hong Kong’s art scene has gone from “not” to blazing-hot. The city, a thriving global financial center with excellent international shipping infrastructure and no export or sales taxes, has become the world’s third-largest auction market and home to what many now consider to be the world’s most important art fair.

“Hong Kong was a cultural desert, but this event has changed that. The city is becoming a major art hub,” says Chinese art star Zhang Huan, whose first solo show in Hong Kong was organized by New York’s Pace Gallery and local dealer Edouard Malingue Gallery to coincide with this year’s fair. Today, about 20 auction houses hold marketing exhibitions and sales in Hong Kong twice a year. And Art HK, as it’s commonly called, has become a highlight on the global art calendar, attracting leading art dealers, artists, collectors, critics and advisors, surrounded by throngs of the socially active and curious. The event’s renown was further enhanced when the organizers of Art Basel, who run some of the world’s most prestigious art fairs in Switzerland and Miami, purchased a controlling stake earlier this year.

“Asia is playing a more important role in all our lives economically and, increasingly, culturally,” says Art HK director Magnus Renfrew. “In a very short space of time, the fair has built the reputation for being a place to discover and learn more about work from a huge variety of cultural backgrounds, in addition to showcasing the very best galleries from the West.”

Spread across two floors of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, each the size of several football fields, were 63,500 visitors—a nearly 38 percent increase from 2010—who browsed works by more than 1,000 artists from 260 galleries—from the Gagosian Gallery to David Zwirner to Acquavella Galleries and White Cube. For four days, the city hosted prominent Chinese artists like Zhang Huan, Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong. Zeng Fanzhi, whose work commands some of the highest prices for a living artist, dropped by since François Pinault’s art foundation sponsored a solo exhibit of the Chinese painter’s expressive work next door at the convention center, with the French luxury goods tycoon personally officiating. International art stars like David LaChapelle and Takashi Murakami wandered the halls and dropped by many of the parties, while mega-collectors such has Miami’s Don and Mera Rubell (who own one of the world’s largest assemblages of contemporary art) mingled with Asia’s major art patrons, like real estate heiress Pearl Lam. Hans Ulrich Obrist, a director at London’s Serpentine Gallery—2009’s “most powerful man in the art world,” according to Art Review magazine—was ubiquitous as a judge of the fair’s Art Futures, which awards emerging talent. He has called Hong Kong “the art world miracle.”

Though dealers and collectors voiced concerns that not enough artists from the region were getting the spotlight, Valentine Willie, an important art advisor and gallerist in Asia, says, “Hong Kong is the teat to which the world will come to suckle China’s riches. Proof of that can be seen in the number of leading Western galleries rushing to open branches here.” Gagosian has an outpost in the city, and London dealer Jay Jopling, godfather of the Young British Artists movement, will open the 6,000- plus-square-foot White Cube next year in a new Robert A. M. Stern–designed building. A number of other dealers are looking for space to rent.

As Sean Kelly, owner of the gallery bearing his name in New York, makes plans to return in 2012 (works by such legends as Marina Abramovic, Tehching Hseih and Rebecca Horn drew collectors to his booth this year), he says Hong Kong “presents an extraordinary opportunity to observe a new market emerging and forming in a single moment, rather like seeing a galaxy being born. The advantage to us is its ability to expose us to so many new collectors from such a large and diverse,

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 163 cultural, demographic and geographic area.” Adds Andy Hei, founder of the art and antiques fair Fine Art Asia, which takes place every October, “We are showing clients from China what else they can buy, who else they can collect and invest in. Because it’s all happening in Hong Kong now.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 164 BBC.COM 'High-end art in Hong Kong', 27 June 2011

By Hana R Alberts

Hong Kong has never been known for the arts. Shopping, yes. Cheap, delicious food and a rowdy bar district, definitely. But art? Not unless you count streets brimming with shops peddling questionable antiques and curios.

Hong Kong’s reputation as a capital of kitsch is clearly fading, though. This year's Hong Kong International Art Fair, a four-day affair held at the end of May, attracted more than 63,000 visitors – a nearly 38% increase over the previous year, which puts it in the same attendance ballpark as Switzerland’s Art Basel, an annual contemporary art fair that the Daily Telegraph once called "the Olympics of the art world". In April, at a Sotheby's auction in Hong Kong, a new work by pioneer video artist Zhang Peili sold for $23 million Hong Kong dollars, more than nine times its estimated value. And recently, it was announced that a former police station and prison in the middle of SoHo will house a contemporary arts complex, opening in 2014.

"The earth is clearly tipping eastwards on its axis, and Asia is playing a more important role in all our lives, be it economically, politically or culturally,” said Magnus Renfrew, director of the Hong Kong International Art Fair. “The art market tends to follow the money and there is immense wealth being created in the region.”

Even further along the horizon is a new cultural district in West Kowloon, set to be completed in stages between 2012 and 2026. Despite multiple delays, criticism and turnover in project leadership, $22 billion Hong Kong dollars have been allocated to develop a 40-hectare area devoted to the arts, including a new museum called M+, which is being led by Lars Nittve, founding director of the Tate Modern in London. The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority plans to build a temporary pavilion for M+ in 2012, and the main building is set to open after 2016. The district is a large step for a former colony whose government generally caters to real estate moguls' high-rise towers and shopping malls.

Over the last few years, Hong Kong’s growing interest in the arts has most visibly manifested itself in the arrival of several internationally-recognized galleries. Increasingly curious buyers, growing affluence, low taxes and low import fees have all combined to create an environment amenable to gallery owners. And until the museums open, these dynamic Hong Kong galleries are a visitor's best hope at catching a glimpse of coveted works from emerging and established western and Asian artists.

One of the early arrivals, back in 2007, was Sundaram Tagore, a gallerist with outposts in New York and Beverly Hills who focuses on the intersection of Western and non-Western art and shows pieces that further a global dialogue.

"[Hong Kong is] the hot spot for an international gallery. That's the truth in what I've experienced," Tagore said. "What's happening in Asia is, because of the boom, there is a voracious appetite, and that's very positive."

The most recent exhibition was a collection of striking black-and-white prints by photographer Sebastiao Salgado, who highlights issues of poverty and globalization in striking landscapes and emotional portraits.

London gallery Ben Brown Fine Arts turned up two years later, in 2009. Though he was born in Hong Kong, Brown waited to start a gallery in his hometown until he felt the market was ripe and that buyers had gained a real appreciation for western art. Large abstract paintings by Spanish artist Miquel Barceo are on display until 29 July, their thick texture belying the artist's background as a sculptor who works with metals.

Next came Edouard Malingue, a French art dealer whose focus is on selling Impressionist and Modern works to Asian buyers. Opening with a bang last September, Malingue curated the biggest Picasso show Hong Kong had ever seen, and a subsequent exhibition showcased the likes of Magritte, Ernst and Pissarro. On view through 30 June in Malingue's white, sunny space are works by

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 167 contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Huan, who uses ash to craft paintings and sculptures that denote the impermanence of human life.

Art behemoth Gagosian Gallery opened its doors in January with a widely lauded exhibition by Damien Hirst. In a city where space is hard to come by, the high-ceilinged 5,200-square-foot gallery is making the statement that Hong Kong is worth the investment. Director Nick Simunovic said the gallery's goals mirror its ones in other parts of the world: to mount "museum-quality exhibitions" and to help serious collectors add to their coffers. But Gagosian also aims to represent a wide range of artists of interest to both Asian and Western collectors. "I have been fielding requests for artists as diverse as Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, Roy Lichtenstein, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, among many others," Simunovic said.

In March, Pascal and Sylvie de Sarthe brought a branch of their flagship Phoenix, Arizona gallery to Hong Kong. The gallery highlights works ranging from Abstract Expressionism to Pop. The couple is the exclusive dealer for photographer and surrealist artist David LaChapelle in Asia and launched their Hong Kong outpost with a successful show of Chinese artist Zao Wou-ki's colourful abstract canvases.

Art world mainstays agree: Hong Kong still has a long way to go before it can be seen as a hub on par with New York, Paris or London. But it is clear that a city oft criticized as commercial and superficial is finally developing some cultural depth.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 168 SYDNEY MORNING HERALD 'Art Hong Kong 2011', 4 June 2011

John Mcdonald

It is scarcely believable that the Hong Kong Art Fair is only four years old. As the infant prodigy among the many, many fairs that have been breeding, virus-like, in all parts of the world, Hong Kong’s growth has been freakish. It started out as a shrewd, optimistic idea in 2008; struggled through the GFC and a SARS epidemic in 2009; and had its ‘coming of age’ in 2010, as the world’s top dealers began to take an interest. This year, regardless of the fickle nature of the art market, it has blossomed.

After the first day of Art HK 11, French gallery, Emmanuel Perrotin, had sold a large Pop-style painting by Takashi Murakami for US$2.2 million. At the same time L & M Arts of Los Angeles disposed of a hideous picture by Jeff Koons called Monkey Train (Orange), for a sum in the vicinity of US$3.5 million. Taste was left at home, but fashion prowled the corridors. For some unknown reason a European collector even decided to relieve Sprüth Magers, of Berlin and London, of a big Andreas Gursky photo of a Grand Prix pit-stop for a mere US$700,000. It was the third print in an edition of four.

Prices of US$100,000 to 200,000 were almost commonplace, with much larger sums being forked out for works by recognised superstars. No wonder the Australian art dealers were lining up to show their wares. With no sales tax or import duties, and an international clientele, Hong Kong puts the poor old Melbourne art fair to shame.

This year, Sydney was represented by Roslyn Oxley9, Conny Dietzschold, Dominik Mersch, Sullivan+Strumpf, Barry Keldoulis, Tim Olsen, GRANTPIRRIE and Annandale Galleries; along with Tolarno, Sutton Gallery, Tristian Koenig and Anna Schwartz, from Melbourne. Starkwhite was, once again, the sole New Zealand exhibitor. Everyone seemed remarkably up-beat about their prospects.

Tim Olsen hosted a show of large, lyrical watercolours of the Australian desert, by his dad, John Olsen. After the first day he had made four sales. Sullivan+Strumpf were doing a roaring trade in small paintings by last year’s Archibald prize winner, Sam Leach. Annandale was going equally well with British-Israeli sculptor, Zadok Ben-David. A beaming Barry Keldoulis, if that’s not a tautology, announced he would not be bringing very much home from this Fair.

Dominik Mersch was savouring a special accolade, as his installation of wild, stream-of- consciousness drawings by Locust Jones, had come in at number three on a list of must-see galleries compiled by the Fair’s major sponsor, Deutsche Bank. Jones has often been treated as a marginal artist in Australia, but his work looked compelling in this company.

In 2010 there were 155 galleries included in Art HK, this year the numbers had risen to 168, plus another 92 in two new sections on an upper floor. In previous years the top floor had hosted conventions for wine and funerals. This time it was wall-to-wall art, edging up towards the 300-plus exhibitors who take part in the annual Basel Art Fair – the acknowledged market leader.

The first new section was called Asia One, and consisted of galleries that couldn’t be squeezed in downstairs. The second was Art Futures, in which dealers were obliged to show the work of no more than two artists, with an age limit of 35. This was a useful rule that generated some excellent projects. It was hard to go past a massive photomontage landscape by Yang Yongliang at Shanghai’s 18Gallery, and a frenetic display of cartoon-style pictures by a Japanese Irishman, Atsushi Kaga, at the Dublin gallery, mother’s tankstation.

A US$25,000 award for best project in this section went to Gao Weigang, for an oblique but oddly impressive installation put on by Magician Space of Beijing, in which a traditional silk scroll painting of a tiger skin was placed alongside a stainless steel, A-frame sculpture. Gao was giving nothing away when confronted with the probing questions of the arts journalists.

Reporter: “Mr. Gao, how do you feel to have won this award?” Gao: “Happy”.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 169 The Asia One section was also devoted to solo shows, reputedly by “artists of Asian origin.” It was an expanded definition of Asia that ranged from New Zealand to Turkey and Dubai. In one fell swoop this ‘Asia Major’ resolved a thorny problem for Australians, who have argued for years over whether or not we are an Asian nation. When I mentioned this to Magnus Renfrew, the popular director of Art HK, he said: “Well I’m glad I sorted that out for you.”

Along with the shows by Asian artists such as John Olsen, Sam Leach and Locust Jones, this section featured a show-stopping installation of large paintings, sculptures and puppets by Indonesian artist, Heri Dono, at Edwin’s Gallery of Jakarta. While Dono is an old hand at these big international events, it was exciting to see some of the projects undertaken by lesser-known artists. China Art Projects, run by Aussie expats, had an lively display of paintings done on the inside of bottles by Liu Zhuoquan, whose work has been seen at Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery. A bottled portrait of the late Osama Bin Laden was the obvious centre of attention.

Even more ambitious was Wu Jian’an’s room-sized paper cut installation at Chambers Fine Art of Beijing. Viewers found themselves enclosed in a mountainous panorama made up of 18,000 brightly- coloured silhouettes, clustered together to form bands of earth and sky.

It was widely feared that the division of Art HK into two separate floors would create a gulf between haves and have-nots, with the rich and powerful galleries on the main floor, and the emerging ones upstairs. To a certain extent this was true. All the big names in art were on the ground floor: Gagosian, Pace, Hauser & Wirth, Aquavella, Castelli, David Zwirner, Marian Goodman, White Cube, Bruno Bischofberger, and so on. But there, in their midst, were gallery Barry Keldoulis and GRANTPIRRIE.

It was not just wealth and power that got galleries onto the ground floor; it was also long-term loyalty, innovation and initiative. But being upstairs was not a significant handicap. After sampling the unlisted prices on the ground floor, buyers with small-to-medium-sized budgets attacked the top floor with relish. Pieces priced at $30-40,000 suddenly seemed like extraordinary bargains. In many cases this was true, as some of this year’s novices will be next year’s stars. They may, however, have shifted allegiance to a more prestigious gallery.

This successful arrangement might not last, as it was announced at the beginning of Art HK that the company behind Art Basel and Art Miami has just bought a controlling stake in the Hong Kong fair. The first impact is that next year’s show will be held in February, not May, to create a more even spread with the other two fairs. It remains to be seen whether the Basel group will follow its usual pattern and concentrate on the richest galleries at the expense of variety.

Perhaps the best aspect of Renfrew’s fairs has been the broad geographical spread of participants and the mix of established and younger dealers. It would be foolish to sacrifice this in favour of a concentration on European and American heavyweights, as many wealthy Asian collectors are less concerned with western blue chip art than with the art of their own region. This trend will only continue to grow and Art HK must be sensitive to the signs. Nevertheless, it will get harder for Australian galleries to command so many places.

The big dealers are already aware of the escalating strength of Hong Kong, and have opened local branches. Gagosian’s impressive space at the top of the Pedder Building is leader of the pack, although it is hard to imagine HK collectors forking out huge sums for the current exhibition of bad jokes and blown-up photos from old biker magazines by New Yorker, Richard Prince – virtually unbeatable for the title of the World’s Most Overrated Artist.

It was more fun at ArtisTree, a new initiative by the Swires Property Group, on the east side of the island. The show, Memories of King Kowloon, celebrated Tsang Tsou-choi, (1921-2007) the legendary graffiti artist who spent fifty years covering the walls of Hong Kong with his calligraphic claims to be the rightful monarch of Kowloon. Of 55,000 examples of Tsang’s work, only a handful remain intact on the streets, but the show at ArtisTree contains hundreds on sheets of paper. Their meaning may be incomprehensible to most westerners but the power of the King’s brushwork requires no translation. This is the other side of Hong Kong’s culture – a dynamic folk art that defies the slick irony of the international product shown at galleries such as Gagosian. Why hang out with the American Prince when you can enjoy an audience with the King of Kowloon?

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 170 ARTNET.COM 'Art Hong Kong: Scenes from ART HK 2011', June 2011

by Barbara Pollack

Cultural historians, mark your calendars. 2011 was the year that Art HK, May 26-29, 2011, became a stop on the global art tour to rival the Venice Biennale and Art 42 Basel. With 260 participating galleries (up from 150 in 2010) and attendance of over 63,000, Art HK has now far outstripped and outsold SH Contemporary, the Shanghai fair that takes place each September, Art Singapore, which took place in October, and two more local art fairs in Beijing.

While some U.S. dealers may be skeptical of the fortitude of Asian buyers, many prominent New York galleries turned up for Art HK, toting works by Chinese artists that proved sure sales in this context. David Zwirner sold Yan Pei Ming like hotcakes, Marian Goodman offered works by Yang Fudong, Lombard Fried brought Cao Fei, Galerie Lelong sold works by Lin Tianmiao and Sperone Westwater boasted sales of Liu Ye.

Pace, which now has a major outpost in Beijing, came fully prepared with works by Zhang Xiaogang and Zhang Huan, as well as Korean-born artist Lee Ufan -- who opens a solo show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, June 24-Sept. 28, 2011-- and found buyers for all at prices ranging from $100,000 to $750,000.

"Asian collectors are building great collections of Asian art," says Pace director Peter Boris. "They may want to understand Western art, but they don't need to, not in the way that Western collectors are discovering that they need to understand Asian art."

The artist of the hour was “Mask Series” painter Zeng Fanzhi (b. 1964), whose paintings occupied several booths at the fair, all priced at well over $1 million (his auction record is $9.7 million). Acquavella Galleries, which for the moment represents the artist in New York, offered a 2007 painting for $3.5 million -- but refused to comment on rumors that Zeng would soon be showing at Gagosian Gallery’s brand new space in Hong Kong's Pedder Building.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong's Schoeni Gallery sold the artist's Mask Series No. 16 (1996), for $2 million. Beijing gallery F2 -- which also has a space in Los Angeles and oversees dozens of works by the artist thanks to a long-term relationship with him in China -- offered one of his triptychs for over $1 million.

But Zeng Fanzhi shone brightest at the Christie's Hong Kong evening sale on May 28, 2011, which coincided with the fair. Christie's holds its sales in the same convention center as Art HK, and brought in a total of $227 million for a week of sales, including $63 million for Asian 20th-century and contemporary art -- its highest total ever in this category.

Zeng had the top lot in the sale when his 1996 Self-Portrait, consigned by New York collector Howard Farber, sold for over $4.8 million. The artist's more recent painting The Leopard, which was done in 2010 and was featured in a solo show of 39 works that Christie's sponsored during the sales, sold for over $4 million. Zeng consigned the work himself, with the proceeds earmarked for the nonprofit Nature Conservancy.

The buyer, Chinese entrepreneur Zhao Zhijun -- an active representative of the new surge of philanthropy in China -- said of his purchase, “Zeng Fanzhi’s act of generosity is tremendously moving. I, like him, also wish to contribute in my own way to help protect the environment.”

But more than just Asian art was selling at Art HK. Gagosian Gallery found a buyer for Damien Hirst's Immortal Life, a massive collage of butterflies, for $1.4 million, in addition to selling several works by Takashi Murakami. Brent Sikkema of Sikkema Jenkins proved an unlikely success story with a booth devoted to works by the much-liked Los Angeles African-American abstractionist Mark Bradford (b. 1961): a painting sold for $400,000, and a wall installation from the Merchant Poster series brought in $600,000.

"Asia is no longer out of the loop," said Sikkema. "This is a very international community of buyers smart enough to know they need good art advisers." According to Arthur Solway, who heads the

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 171 Shanghai branch of the James Cohan Gallery, "We are building a broad market here -- we are definitely getting people interested in Western art."

Hong Kong has very few galleries and no well-regarded contemporary art museum, and recent cultural enhancement plans for the West Kowloon district -- which are sure to include a museum -- seem permanently stalled by political turmoil. For these reasons, a huge general audience, including dozens of school groups, flocked to the fair to take advantage of this chance to view contemporary Asian art.

Particularly popular were the fair's upstairs sections -- Asia One and Art Futures -- which offset the Western domination of the main gallery section downstairs. Local dealers worried about their place in the mix, especially in the future plans of Art Basel, which announced its purchase of Art HK a month ago. A new iteration of the Art Basel-Art HK collaboration, with or without a contingent of local dealers, is scheduled to open in February, just after the Chinese New Year.

"It’s important to convey a different voice. It would be good to have even more of that," says David Chan of Hong Kong's Gallery as he successfully found buyers for local artist Kit Lee, who recently showed with Lombard Fried in New York.

"Clearly, Asia makes a lot of sense," says Magnus Renfrew, Art HK’s director from the start. "There are now more billionaires in Asia than there are in Europe. The balance of power is really tipping this way; I think that Asia is coming of age and there's a need for an art fair on Asia's doorstep and on Asia's terms."

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 172 INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE 'Hong Kong Art Fair Reaches Out into the World', 26 May 2011

By JOYCE LAU

HONG KONG — It’s no surprise that Hong Kong’s art fair has taken another bound forward, given its quick growth since it began in 2008. But the rising number of galleries taking part — now at 260 — is not the only reason that 2011 is turning out to be a watershed year.

Internationally, the owners of Art Basel are now majority stakeholders in the Hong Kong event, it was announced at the start of May, a turn that promises to give the fair more prominence.

Locally, ART HK, which opened to the public on Thursday, has spread beyond the confines of the exhibition and convention center. The large number of outside events has created for a first time what feels like a real citywide art week.

The fair has already succeeded in pulling in top galleries and orchestrating million-dollar sales of works by celebrity artists like Damien Hirst. The Hong Kong market is awash in cash, particularly that of newly moneyed collectors from China and other parts of Asia. Auction houses are getting into the act too.

Christie’s is the most prominent among them, and has a casual partnership with ART HK to hold its spring auctions in the same venue, at about the same time. From now until June 1 at the convention center, Christie’s will have 13 sales of art, antiques, wines, watches and jewels. Other companies, particularly smaller Asian auction houses, are following suit, with sales planned at hotels around town.

Local galleries also have waited for this week to open new spaces or major shows.

Hanart TZ Gallery — run since 1983 by Johnson Chang, an established dealer of contemporary Chinese art — opened its new space on Tuesday with a ribbon cutting by David Tang, the founder of Shanghai Tang, the luxury goods chain, who has been a busy man. The day before, Mr. Tang had opened a show for 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Both galleries are participating in the fair.

New galleries not officially part of ART HK are also using this week to raise their profiles.

The most booked man in town seems to be David LaChapelle. This week, Mr. LaChapelle, the New York fashion and art photographer, unveiled a 3-meter, or about 10-foot, collage inspired by Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” for his first Hong Kong solo show at de Sarthe Fine Arts, which opened in March. Mr. LaChapelle then held a private film screening, served as host for a party at a nightclub called Privé, and showed up at a Champagne breakfast a few hours later. On Friday, he will be debate whether art must be beautiful at Intelligence Squared, a British debating association.

Edouard Malingue Gallery, which opened late last year, worked with the Pace Gallery of New York this month to install a massive Buddhist-inspired sculpture by the Chinese artist Zhang Huan at a harborside hotel and shopping complex. “Three Heads Six Arms” will be showing in the courtyard outside the complex, Hullett House, a renovated 18th-century colonial building, through the end of June.

But the main buzz has been over the buyout of Asian Art Fairs, ART HK’s owners, by the MCH Swiss Exhibition Group, though the deal will not be official until July. The Basel-based company said that it would keep the local management basically intact through 2012. The only immediate change will be moving ART HK from its May slot to February, to fit in nicely between Art Basel’s events in Miami Beach, usually each December, and in Basel, Switzerland, each June.

Marc Spiegler, a co-director of the two Art Basel events, said by telephone from Switzerland that the goal was to have “three events on the arts calendar covering four continents, with Art Basel Miami Beach representing both North and Latin America.”

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 174 “We are not interesting in just copying and pasting the same fair in three locations,” he said. “Along with greater interest from China, we are looking at many rising art markets from Australia and New Zealand, to Singapore and Indonesia,” Mr. Spiegler said. “The Asian market is developing so quickly, it’s hard to say what it’s going to look like in five years.”

Annette Schönholzer, another co-director, added that the Hong Kong fair would eventually be rebranded as an Art Basel event.

“Art Basel’s involvement will bring unparalleled expertise and contacts that will take ART HK to a new level,” said Magnus Renfrew, ART HK’s director. “It will make us the third most important art fair in the world.”

There was unprecedented interest in ART HK, even before the Art Basel announcement, he said. “We were inundated with about 500 gallery applications and only accepted about half,” Mr. Renfrew said. “And while there are big names from New York and London, we’ve made sure to preserve the Asian flavor of the fair.”

One new feature at the fair this year will be the Asia One section, with 47 galleries representing a dozen nations, from the Turkey to India, Japan to New Zealand. “Because Asia One will consist of solo shows, it will give viewers, particularly collectors from the West, a more in-depth view of what is on offer,” Mr. Renfrew said.

Corporate interest has not lagged, either. DeutscheBank, a longtime sponsor, continues to be involved with the fair. Then there are quirkier offerings from companies like BMW, which is bringing in a Jeff Koons-decorated “art car,” or the Mandarin Oriental, which has afternoon tea cakes co- designed by the Chinese artist Zhou Tiehai.

G.O.D., the upscale local retail chain that specializes in homewares and interiors, created the fair’s V.I.P. lounge. And if you can’t afford the minimum entrance fee of 7,500 Hong Kong dollars, or $960, for a group of five, you can hang out with the plebeians at the Veuve Clicquot Champagne bar next door.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 175 WALL STREET JOURNAL 'The Transformation of a 'Cultural Desert'', 23 May 2011

By AMY MA

Growing up in England as the son of two archaeologist parents meant that Magnus Renfrew spent much of his childhood in museums.

"At first I was dragged in kicking and screaming," he says. "Then the kicking and screaming stopped."

Mr. Renfrew—the director of Art Hong Kong, the city's largest annual art fair, now in its fourth year—says he doesn't remember a time when art hasn't impacted his life. It even played a part in meeting his wife, who like Mr. Renfrew was an art history major at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. "On the first day of class, the professor said, 'look around you, your future husband and wife could be in this room,' " he says.

Mr. Renfrew—who now lives in Hong Kong with his wife and son—shares the moment when he realized Hong Kong's potential in the art world.

It all started for Chinese art in 2006. It was Sotheby's first sale of contemporary Chinese art in New York. At that auction a Zhang Xiaogang [Yunnan-born painter] painting sold for six figures. In an industry that was so focused on European artists, this put China on everyone's radar.

I was holding in my hands two of the four known paintings by [Spanish Renaissance artist] El Greco. Of course, I had to have white gloves on. That was during the seven years I spent working at Bonhams auction house, where I had the opportunity to see anything from old masters to contemporary works of art. In June 2006, I put together Bonhams first Asian collection, and that opened up my eyes to China and the East.

My first impression of China was shock. I spent the year from June of 2006 to 2007 in various cities, from Kunming to Chongqing, to source art for Pearl Lam [a curator, dealer and collector of Chinese art]. It's just so big and vast.

Even when you try to the leave the cities and go to a quieter place like Hangzhou, that's still got a population of a couple million people. One of the strangest works I saw that year was an artist who had built these Gaudi-like buildings that were a system of interlocking ant hills made from bricks in the middle of nowhere.

The term "cultural desert" came up in every conversation about Hong Kong at first. I moved to Hong Kong in June of 2007. The idea of this ultramodern city, where you can walk from one end to another completely air-conditioned, like a space hub, was so intriguing. But people were quite down on the city from a cultural and artistic point of view. In a place with such bright lights and busy people, it's really hard to get people to stop and pay attention to art.

The first year for Art HK took me on 40 flights in six months. We didn't have an established reputation and so it took being there face-to-face. Manila, London, Paris, Melbourne, New York, Miami, Beijing, Shanghai—the list goes on. We managed to sign on 101 galleries from 19 countries. This year, it's more than 260 galleries from 38 countries. We've come a long way.

I'll never forget the first gallery we signed. We were in Shanghai and the owner signed up on the spot. There was a pretty obvious case for why Hong Kong could be a major art hub one day. It's one of the only places where Westerners and Asians feel just as much at home. And with tax and bilingual-language advantages, it had so much potential.

I dabbled in painting in my youth, but the last time I painted was Christmas of 2010. Our company went out together and did an art jam. My work was…abstract.

I'm most looking forward to all the stands being up for Art HK. We work on it for 51 weeks of the year, but only in our imagination. Those 24 hours when all the stands are built, and then the 24 hours afterwards when everything is placed in—it all becomes real then.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 176 FINANCIAL TIME 'The new world's fair', 20 May 2011

By Susan Moore

Visiting an international art fair is not unlike waking up in an international hotel: it is not immediately obvious where you are. There is the generic prefabricated building and minimalist design, and – at the fairs – the same dealers showing the same artists to the same collectors. It can seem as though we’re trapped in some never-ending art-world Groundhog Day.

There are, perhaps, just two ways to overcome fair fatigue. The first is to encounter an astounding work of art; the second is when the organisers make a real effort to ensure their event engages with, and reflects, the region in which it takes place.

This year’s expanded Art HK launches Asia One, an additional dedicated platform for the display of solo shows of new art drawn from across the entire continent. It promises to be a diverse and generous offering with 47 participating galleries from 12 territories. They range from Turkey and the Middle East to Australasia; half of the 168 galleries exhibiting in the fair’s main section are Asian too. Art Basel’s parent company, MCH Group, has bought a 60 per cent stake in the Hong Kong fair. Marc Spiegler, co-director of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, says: “We have no intention of doing a ‘copy-and-paste’ fair in Hong Kong. Each of our shows has to have a unique core. Basel and Miami are siblings, not twins.” Co-director Annette Schönholzer says: “In the coming months we will be developing a concept that reflects the Asian market and the needs of the western galleries.” In the meantime, Art HK, which will move to February 2-5 next year, will continue under the directorship of Magnus Renfrew.

The Art Basel team has been considering staging a fair in Asia for a decade. “The region has tremendous potential in the long term,” Spiegler says. “We have seen the number of Asian galleries in our fairs double in the past decade and more of our exhibitors show in Art HK. We think Asia has the same potential as Latin America to progress from a regional to a more international collecting style.”

“Potential” is the word inevitably used in relation to this and any other emerging art market. It explains why Art HK has so quickly gained in stature, reputation and scale since its launch in 2008. Each year, ever more impressive galleries have swelled its ranks. Now blue-chip modern art dealers have also signed up, among them Acquavella, L&M Arts, Bruno Bischofberger, Galerie Gmurzynska and Van de Weghe. Many big-hitters in the field were conspicuous by their absence at TEFAF Maastricht in March.

It is little wonder that the world’s leading modern and contemporary art dealers are looking east. A flurry of reports published this spring charts the meteoric rise of China’s domestic market. TEFAF’s “The Global Art Market in 2010”, for instance, recorded that sales of art and antiques in China more than doubled in value from 2009 to 2010 and that China had now overtaken the UK to become the world’s second largest art market after the US with a global share of 23 per cent.

Add to that the projected rise in the number of Chinese billionaires – 20 per cent by 2014 – and the fact that for the first time the Asia-Pacific region now has as many rich people as in Europe, and the shift in power between west and east seems seismic. Even if one treats the statistics supplied by Chinese auction houses with due scepticism, it is clear that Asia is in the ascendancy. What is equally clear is that, for the time being at least in China, it remains a very small market for works of western art in particular and contemporary art in general.

Even so, perhaps the most fascinating statistic to emerge from these recent reports is that China is the fastest growing market for contemporary art. Moreover, of the top 10 artists ranked by auction revenue in 2010, six are Chinese. Looking at the results of Sotheby’s recent record-breaking sale in Hong Kong of the Ullens collection of Chinese art, it seems that bidders have become even more enthusiastic and sophisticated, as the highest prices were paid not just for works by the big names but ones painted at key points in their careers.

The challenge for the Hong Kong fair is to make its market grow at every level – locally, regionally and globally. Part of the appeal of a partnership with Art Basel, organisers of two of the world’s most

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 177 important contemporary fairs, is the access it offers to a global audience. The key to expanding and developing its domestic market, which includes turning investment-oriented buyers into real collectors, is education.

From the first, Art HK has worked in association with the estimable Asia Art Archive to “educate the educators” (there is no fine art education in Hong Kong schools), and to provide talks, panel discussions and tours, in English, Mandarin and Cantonese.

Director Magnus Renfrew has also consciously structured the fair to develop it as an educational tool, not least by encouraging galleries to present in-depth offerings by a single artist rather than the usual piecemeal fare. “If you see seven or eight works by one artist it gives you a frame of reference, a better chance of understanding the artist’s intentions,” he explains. The ploy has also paid off commercially for the dealers (expect shows of Louise Bourgeois, Olafur Eliasson and William Kentridge this year).

Asia One, with its solo presentations of artists of Asian origin, was similarly devised and it reflects a desire to illuminate a western audience as much as an Asian one about work created in a different cultural and aesthetic environment. China, Japan and Australia will be fielding the most galleries, followed by Taiwan and Indonesia. Chambers Fine Art from Beijing, for instance, will present a series of bronze and paper-cut works by Chinese artist Wu Jian’an. Its centrepiece “Rainbow, 201”, a free- flowing paper-cut installation was created specifically for the fair. “We want to help develop the art scene in Asia and that can feed back into the other Art Basel fairs,” says Renfrew. As the western art trade beats its path eastwards, it is important to realise that it is not a one-way street.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 178 FINANCIAL TIMES 'Art Basel buys Hong Kong art fair', 6 May 2011

By Georgina Adam

The Swiss exhibitions group MCH, organiser of the leading art fairs Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, is buying a majority (60 per cent) stake in Asian Art Fairs Ltd, owner of the Hong Kong International Art Fair, HK11. The deal, due to be finalised in July, extends Basel’s reach into the potentially hugely lucrative Asian market. Earlier this year it was revealed that China has leapt to the number one place in auction terms, knocking out the traditional US/UK dominance of the art market.

One of the owners of the Hong Kong fair, Tim Etchells, told The Financial Times, “It makes perfect sense to partner with Basel; it has an unrivaled VIP database and enormous brand value. But we are not selling out and will remain very involved.” While the amount of the sale has not been disclosed, Etchells said, “We are very happy with the consideration.” He said he was “now working on new plans” which he couldn’t yet reveal.

The Hong Kong art fair, which launches its fourth edition on 26 May, has quickly established itself as the leading international modern and contemporary art fair in Asia and was already dubbed the “Art Basel of Asia”. This year’s edition is the largest so far and boasts a swathe of major international galleries including Zwirner, Acquavella, Blum & Poe, White Cube, Pace (which is already present in Beijing) and Gagosian. A separate section, Asia One, features Asian galleries showing solo shows of artists of Asian origin.

Under its new Swiss management, the Hong Kong fair will be moved to new dates and will be held in early February 2012. Its current director, Magnus Renfrew, will remain in that post. “Magnus has a contract to stay with us, certainly for the medium term,” said Etchells.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 180 WALL STREET JOURNAL 'Road Warrior', 24 September 2010

Magnus Renfrew, Director, Hong Kong International Art Fair

Up in the air: On average ten days a month.

Areas of travel: Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, Jakarta, London, Paris, Bangkok, Delhi, New York, Miami and Athens.

Favourite airport in the region: Hong Kong both for arrival and departure. On arrival as an Hong Kong resident you are immigration checked by thumbprint and very rarely have to queue.

Best check-in process: Hong Kong has the best of anywhere in the world. To be able to check in your luggage in the center of town and then turn up to the gate 30 minutes before departure is extremely civilized.

Best taxis: Shanghai—for the thrill of the ride and the sheer gratitude of arriving at your destination in one piece.

Best journey from airport to city: Taxi from airport to Chongqing. Seeing the skyline at night, it gives you a sense of your relative insignificance within the world.

Best frequent-flyer lounge: I cut things too finely for lounges in general, but Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong and Virgin at Heathrow are very comfortable.

Favorite business hotel:The Grand Hyatt in general for consistency although Sofitel Wanda in Beijing is a particular favorite for its high standards and exceptional value for money.

Favorite family/leisure hotel: We rarely vacation in the same place twice but the Ruijin Hotel in Shanghai was an ideal choice for a long weekend break in Shanghai. A historic building set in beautiful grounds in the heart of the French Concession.

Best luggage: Anything sturdy rather than glamorous as I tend to come back stacked up with exhibition catalogues and books.

Most comfortable airline seats: The nearer the front of the plane the more comfortable they get.

Best coffee in Asia: Xiang Xie coffee in Taipei, a little place recommended by a friend for its atmosphere and sheer delight of the owner in his connoisseurship of both coffee and tea.

Best tip for staying fit on the road: Walk up the escalators.

How to beat jet lag: Swim. If you have a flight change at Singapore Changi make use of the airport pool.

Essential travel gadgets: BlackBerry, iPod, laptop.

Websites most visited: There's a service called Guanxi in Shanghai and Beijing—text the name of a restaurant or club to a number and within seconds they text you back the address. If you text back the letter 'C' they send you through the address in Chinese to show the taxi drive

Travel tip 101: Preparation. Call contacts and friends in advance for tips on where to go. You can't beat local knowledge. However short your trip do one thing that makes you feel that you have experienced that place.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 184 THE NEW YORK TIMES 'Stars Shine East to West in Hong Kong', 1 June 2010

By Joyce Lau

HONG KONG — The photographer Andreas Gursky’s “Hong Kong Börse II,” a snapshot of a stock market in action, was a wry addition to the annual art fair here, where eye-popping amounts of cash were being spent.

It was part of the celebrity roll call — Warhol, Freud, Hirst, Quinn — at the booth of Ben Brown, a London gallery that opened a Hong Kong branch late last year.

Nearby was the London-based White Cube, which had the first Damien Hirst formaldehyde work to be shown in China. It sold at the fair for a cool £1.75 million, or $2.5 million, to an unidentified Asian buyer.

Crowds gathered around Mr. Hirst’s “The Inescapable Truth” — a white dove suspended prettily in sky-blue liquid over a human skull — and marvelled at how, reportedly, Elton John had one just like it.

The big sales were not just limited to Western artists and galleries, though. Pace Beijing gallery sold Zhang Xiaogang’s “Green Wall — Husband and Wife” (2010) for $1 million.

Given the growth in the Asian market, it was expected that the Hong Kong International Art Fair would get bigger and flashier as it entered its third year. (It had 155 participating galleries from around the world, and drew more than 46,000 visitors, compared with more than 27,000 last year.)

As a pleasant surprise, it also became more fun. The best elements at the fair, which ended Sunday, happened on the sidelines — away from the wheeling and dealing — in talks, tours and performances that elevated the event from being a mere trade show to something more inclusive and interesting.

In one room, 400-plus people packed a noisy debate between the artist Antony Gormley and other cultural figures — laughing, applauding and jostling to ask questions.

(Mr. Gormley’s argument that “you don’t need great skill to be a great artist” won by an audience vote of 248 to 157, with 6 abstentions.)

Another crowd-pleaser from the fair came from the Hong Kong-based Sovereign Art Foundation, which sponsors prizes in Asia and Europe.

On the opening night, it had the filmmaker Baz Luhrmann spray-painting a mural covered with Bollywood-inspired graffiti.

Mr. Luhrmann, known for extravagant movies like “Moulin Rouge” and “Australia,” was the one being directed this time. Vincent Fantauzzo, a fashionable young Australian painter — he was named artist of the year by GQ magazine — stood by, giving directions like “Drip is good. More drip.”

The project came out of a trip that the two took to India, where they worked with local children. “It’s spontaneous,” Mr. Luhrmann said of this kind of art. “It’s quick. It’s credible and genuine.”

The two also collaborated on “The Cellar 1977.” The installation was in a long, dark space roped off by black curtains, with small black-and-white childhood photos lit up with tea candles. Eerie music played as viewers made their way to the front, where there was a Caravaggio-like painting of a man dying in another’s arms, only the rescuer was a police officer and the setting was modern. It had the cinematic drama expected from Mr. Luhrmann. He explained that it was inspired by his own childhood in rural Herons Creek, Australia, where his family ran a gas station.

There was plenty at the fair to encourage the uninitiated. Over five days, dozens of artists stood by their works, answering questions. Free bilingual guided tours were organized by Para/Site, a

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 186 nonprofit art group, and Time Out Hong Kong magazine. The Asia Art Archive held talks and seminars.

There were shows to watch and darkened booths to duck into. A robot banged a snare drum at Ark Galerie from Jakarta. Installation, performance, video and digital works were as represented as traditional media like painting, illustration and sculpture.

In a bid to attract novice collectors, there were some works selling for $1,000 to $2,000.

“In the West, there’s a sense of art fair fatigue; you tend to see the same works by the same artists,” Magnus Renfrew, the fair’s director, said about Hong Kong’s inclusion of lesser-known names. “It is very important to us that there is art available to the majority of people who want to buy.”

“This gives smaller galleries a chance that they might not have in Europe or the United States,” added Richard Chang, a well-known collector who has collaborated with the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate in London.

The Art Futures section was for galleries under five years old. “There were many interesting young galleries,” said Hans-Ulrich Obrist of Serpentine Gallery, after viewing that section.

Mr. Obrist, who was ranked No. 1 in Art Review’s 2009 listing of the 100 most influential people in the art world, said he saw changes to Hong Kong’s art scene, compared with his first trip here in 1996.

“At that time, the art scene was very small, and now it has critical mass,” he said, adding that China was not the only focus. “Japan has long has an important art scene, as do Korea and Indonesia. India is interesting, and I saw a few new Indian galleries at this fair. Thailand and Vietnam are emerging.”

Photography, in particular, stood out at the fair this year. It dominated the exhibit of recent acquisitions by Deutsche Bank, the fair’s sponsor and the owner of what it says is the largest corporate art collection in the world.

There was a wonderful array at Michael Hoppen Gallery, which had journalistic black-and-white photos of Beijing and Inner Mongolia from the 1950s and 1960s by Marc Riboud, one of the first professional European photographers to go to China. On the other side of the stylistic spectrum was a vividly colorful Ellen von Unwerth portrait of two beauties looking as if they were in a fashion ad.

Numerous galleries made their Hong Kong debut, like ShugoArts of Tokyo. It had sharp, black-and- white self-portraits of Yasumasa Morimura. He had dressed himself up as various celebrities, from Salvador Dali (in an uncanny likeness) to Marilyn Monroe (not so uncanny).

Another newcomer was Galerie Paris-Beijing, which specializes in photography. Going in the opposite direction of most galleries, it started first in Beijing, then moved to Paris.

“A long time ago, photography wasn’t considered ‘art”’ said Romain Degoul, the gallery’s director. “Now, the photo market is hot.”

Galerie Paris-Beijing had beautiful work by Yang Yongliang, a Shanghai native who was originally trained in traditional Chinese painting.

From a distance, they look like black and white ink landscapes, on long scrolls. Up close, it emerges that they are collages of hundreds of digital images of construction cranes, skyscrapers and streets signs — all elements of the new Chinese cityscape.

Two installations had pride of place at the entrance to the fair.

Near Mr. Hirst’s preserved avian specimen was its foil: tall bamboo cages of chirping, fluttering birds, by Rirkrit Tiravanija, a Thai-Argentinean artist based in New York. Viewing the two works in close proximity — the dead dove and the live songbirds — was like seeing the past and future of conceptual art.

M a g n u s R e n f r e w press archive 187 BLOUINARTINFO ' Profile: Magnus Renfrew+Stephanie Dieckvoss’, December 2008

This past May, the first edition of the Hong Kong International Art Fairbrought in some 19,000 visitors and about $20 million for its 101exhibitors. Not bad for a first run. Many market observers were quickto attribute the fair’s success to Hong Kong’s almost total lack of taxon art sales—but not so fast. The steam engines driving this event areits two tireless directors, Magnus Renfrew and Stephanie Dieckvoss.

In 2007 the British-born Renfrew, who caught the art bug at a young agefrom his archaeologist father, moved to Hong Kong from Shanghai, wherehe had spent the previous year working for the peripateticart-and-design dealer Pearl Lam at her Contrasts Gallery.In performing that job, he visited China’s major cities and met bothyoung and established Chinese artists. “I started to understand notjust the art scene but the people,” Renfrew says. Before his stint withLam, he’d been a specialist at Bonhams in London, where in June 2006 he assembled the auction house’s first sale of contemporary Asian art.

Renfrew has found his perfect complement in the German-born Dieckvoss,who brings to the partnership three years of experience as manager ofLondon’s Frieze Art Fair. “Marcus didn’t have fair-managementexperience,” she says. “I make sure shipments arrive, run the vipprogram, structure events and basically take care of all these tinydetails that are crucial.”

Perhaps the directors’ most impressive achievement is how quickly theyput the event together. Renfrew started recruiting galleries only inearly June 2007. He vaunts as his greatest success keeping dealershappy enough to want to return. He says that 90 percent of the dealerswho responded to a postfair questionnaire reported that they had metnew clients, who were the source of 60 percent of all sales.

While Renfrew looks after galleries from the Asia Pacific region, Dieckvoss, who worked for Gagosian in New York and for Paris’s Karsten Greve gallery before going to Frieze,handles those from the U.S., Europe and South America. Next year, shewants to bring more Western dealers to the fair, which will double itsfloor space to accommodate larger booths. “We proved that we could dowhat we set out to do,” she says. “Out of nothing, we created an eventthat shows that Hong Kong will be an international fair destination andwill develop into a cultural hub for Asia.”

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