This year's Hong Kong International Art Fair (Art HK) hosted 266 galleries from 38 countries, 67,000 visitors and - a downside of such globalised international events - a display of homogenous art that dominated over regional and local creativity. One Hong Kong artist described last week's event as a 'visual merry-go-round'.
International art fairs induce conformity, and Art HK is no exception; this will be reinforced when the fair is renamed Art Basel. The oddity of 'Asia's world city' hosting an art fair bearing the name of a Swiss city (population: 170,000) cannot be overstated. It is the sort of confused identity Hong Kong experienced as a 'British Crown Colony' until 1997.
The British founders of Art HK, Asian Art Fair, announced last year that they had sold a majority (60 per cent) shareholding to the MCH Group, owner of Art Basel.
The MCH Group organises, besides Art Basel, 95 worldwide trade exhibitions and fairs including Auto Basel and Baselworld (for the watch industry), attended by more than two million people. The majority owner (with about 40 per cent) of the publicly listed MCH Group is the city of Basel (Canton Basel-Stadt), and the city appoints five directors to MCH Group's board. Renaming next year's event will place it on par with the company's Art Basel edition in Miami in the US.
Hong Kong's art community, institutions and government have generously supported aspects of the current Art HK, most prominently through Home Affairs Bureau funding of the Asia Art Archive-organised 'Backroom Conversations', a series of roundtable discussions, talks and presentations by art professionals. With Art Basel's spreading umbrella, the fair's future sponsors will undoubtedly consider their branding concerns and maybe next year's events, including 'Conversations', should emphasise a stronger Hong Kong profile.
Over the past five commercially successful editions, Art HK has slowly weaned itself from the need to coincide with the seasonal auction house sales. Now attracting major galleries, international collectors, party-goers and art world players, Hong Kong's liberal tax and business environment has allowed the fair to grow and independently become a magnet for visual art and commerce for five days every year. And Hong Kong galleries and art institutions (including the first dedicated exhibition by West Kowloon Cultural District's planned museum, M+) have astutely ridden on the coat tails of the art week to add necessary depth in presenting other visual art exhibitions around the city. However, the art fair's monetary success has rarely trickled down to Hong Kong's artists and non-participating galleries.
Art fairs are seldom places for intellectual enquiry and Hong Kong's only moment of such refinement was in the 2009 edition with Charles Merewether's curated 'Crossing the Persian Gulf' exhibition of six artists from Iran, Iraq and the UAE. Since then, the fair has provided project space for galleries or sponsors to mount an individual artwork by one artist.