Art Basel Hong Kong’s New “Echoes” Section Puts the Last Five Years Under a Microscope
Art fairs can flatten time, compressing years of studio experimentation into a few brisk aisles. At Art Basel Hong Kong, a new curated sector called Echoes leans into that acceleration, limiting itself to works made within the past five years and presented in tightly edited groupings of up to three artists per booth. The result is a concentrated read on what a new generation of galleries is betting on now — and what kinds of materials, histories, and technologies artists are using to make sense of the present.
Among the standouts is Korean artist Hyun Nahm, whose work “Whistle” draws on chukgyeong, an idea of miniaturizing nature’s vastness. Nahm’s materials — epoxy, cement, and polystyrene — carry an industrial bluntness, yet the piece’s sensibility nods to classical East Asian aesthetics. The tension is the point: a sculptural language that feels at once ancient and speculative, scaling down the immensity of digital consumption, telecommunications infrastructure, and global hyperconnectivity into an object you can encounter at human size.
Hong Kong-based artist Leelee Chan approaches the contemporary city through a different kind of devotion. In a joint presentation by Berlin’s Klemm’s and Capsule Shanghai, Chan shows a sculptural intervention that reads like a shrine built from abstraction. The work takes the form of a sharply geometric wall relief in deep black, punctuated by amber-colored glass panes and plant forms that register as spider-like. It lands as a relic from two timelines at once: part mystic icon, part artifact of urban decay.
If Nahm and Chan compress the contemporary world into sculptural form, Vietnamese American artist Tiffany Chung maps it. At Max Estrella’s booth, Chung centers a large embroidered world map tracing historic routes of the global spice trade. The piece turns data into texture and history into a field of connections, linking commerce to culinary tradition, and migration to cultural exchange. What might otherwise read as dry statistics becomes tactile and visually persuasive — a reminder that global systems are also lived, embodied stories.
Kei Imazu, shown by Anomaly, uses the future as a tool for historical confrontation. Working in a mode she has pursued since the early 2000s, Imazu merges digital experimentation with painting, bringing cybernetics into conversation with Surrealism and with references to traditional East Asian art forms. Her new works are aimed at socio-ecological questions in her adopted home of Indonesia, while also reckoning with the colonial history of her native Japan.
For Filipino artist Cian Dayrit, the past is not a backdrop but a structure to be dismantled. In a joint presentation by Catinca Tabacaru (Romania) and Berlin’s Nome, Dayrit shows tapestry and sculpture-based works that draw on the methods of ethnography and archaeology. His stated project is to uncover, disrupt, and “unbuild” colonial foundations — exposing how colonialism has shaped the world and how its afterlives continue to erase marginalized people and narratives.
Echoes also introduces new fair presences. Hong Kong’s Double Q Gallery makes its Art Basel Hong Kong debut with a single-artist presentation of Polish Minimalist Natalia Załuska. The booth is conceived as an immersive environment of geometric abstraction that plays with the boundary between two- and three-dimensional space. Yet Załuska’s approach resists the stereotype of Minimalism as purely cool or mathematical: brush marks and deliberately human touches keep the geometry porous.
London’s Flowers Gallery, meanwhile, frames its three-artist presentation as “palimpsestic” — a term that points to reuse and layering. The booth’s central figure is Jakkai Siributr, whose installation “Despatch” takes inspiration from boro, the Japanese tradition of patchwork mending. In the context of Echoes, the reference feels pointed: repair as method, and reuse as a way to carry history forward rather than discard it.
Taken together, Echoes offers a compact portrait of contemporary practice as it is being shaped right now: by networks and infrastructures, by spiritual and civic ruins, by the aesthetics of data, and by the long shadow of colonial history. In a fair environment built for speed, the section’s tight parameters make room for something rarer — sustained looking, and a clearer sense of what the last five years have actually produced.
