Hong Kong art fair pioneers reunite for new Taiwan fair, seeing demand there for ‘high-calibre’ event
Team behind ART HK, which morphed into Art Basel Hong Kong, to launch art fair in Taipei in January, and say they are out to expand the market for contemporary art there, not take business away from existing Taipei fairs
The team that launched ART HK have reunited seven years after their profitable exit from the original Hong Kong art fair to launch a new fair in an unlikely market: Taiwan.
Magnus Renfrew, who will be fair director of Taipei Dangdai (which means contemporary in Mandarin), said on Tuesday that Taipei was chosen because it is has one of the longest-established art gallery scenes in Asia.
Popular Art Central fair adapts to appeal to high-end buyers
“The city boasts world-class museums, a vibrant artist community, an internationally recognised biennial, and one of the most sophisticated collector bases in Asia,” he said.
The fair has yet to finalise the exhibitors for the inaugural show in January 2019. The main sponsor is UBS, the Swiss bank that also supports Art Basel and, in Taiwan, Art Formosa, an existing art fair.
Renfrew is joined in the venture by the three other co-founders of ART HK, which was bought in 2011 by MCH, the Swiss company that runs Art Basel fairs.
Tim Etchells, Sandy Angus and Will Ramsay have been running other fairs in the interim: they founded Art Central in 2015 as a satellite fair to what became Art Basel Hong Kong, which is run by Charles Ross, the former managing director of ART HK; Angus owns photo fairs under his World Photography Organisation umbrella, and with Etchells, founded the India Art Fair, sold to MCH in 2016. There have also been other fairs that ran for just a few editions in London, Melbourne and Istanbul.