Art Basel Hong Kong

Upcoming
Mar 28 – Mar 30, 2025
Hong Kong

ART FAIR DETAILS

Art Basel Hong Kong
Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Center
Booth 1D27
Mar 28 – 30, 2025

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Pace is pleased to announce details of its presentation for the 2025 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong.

The gallery’s booth will spotlight a large-scale painting by Matta alongside contemporary works by Loie Hollowell, Alicja Kwade, Lee Ufan, Li Hei Di, Arlene Shechet, Kiki Smith, and other artists.

Pace’s presentation will also bring together works by artists living and working in China, including Hong Hao, Li Songsong, Song Dong, Yin Xiuzhen, and Zhang Xiaogang.

Solo presentations by Alicja Kwade at Tai Kwun in Hong Kong and Kiki Smith at Yi Space in Hangzhou will be on view during this year’s edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, and a new installation by Yin Xiuzhen—commissioned by the UBS Art Collection—will be unveiled in the UBS Lounge at the fair

An exhibition of work by American artist Robert Indiana—who emerged as a key figure in the Pop art movement in the 1960s—will be on view at Pace’s Hong Kong gallery during the run of the fair.

Highlights on Pace’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong include:

Tail-cock party (1970), a vibrant, large-scale painting by Matta, one of the great surrealists of the 20th century who profoundly influenced the development of Abstract Expressionism

A 2008 painting from Lee Ufan’s Dialogue series

A new painting by Li Hei Di, who joined Pace’s program in 2024 and will open their first solo exhibition with the gallery at its Hong Kong space in May

A group of wall-mounted, mixed media installations by Yin Xiuzhen, whose new installation Flag Gate UBS (2024–25), commissioned by the UBS Art Collection, will be unveiled in the UBS Lounge at the fair this year

Kiki Smith’s sculpture Consort (2016), which reflects the artist’s enduring interest in embodied experiences of nature

A new installation by Song Dong, who often explores memory, impermanence, and transience in his work

A new painting by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello depicting an undulating, otherworldly landscape inspired by the history, folklore, and spirit of the Caribbean

A sculpture and multiple mixed media works by Alicja Kwade, whose exhibition at Tai Kwun in Hong Kong continues through April 6 and who will present a solo exhibition at Pace’s New York gallery in May

A 2023 painting by Loie Hollowell, known for her works that evoke bodily landscapes

Li Songsong’s Mindscape 1 (2025), a canvas that speaks to the artist’s imaginative and expressionistic approach to painting

A new painting from Mika Tajima’s celebrated Art d'Ameublement series, named for composer Erik Satie’s Furniture Music (Musique d’ameublement) and featuring vivid, radiant color gradients

Three ceramic and steel sculptures by Arlene Shechet, who uses seemingly disparate shapes, colors, and materials to imbue her works with psychological and emotional resonances

A 2023 sculpture by Joel Shapiro, who has pushed the boundaries of sculptural form over the past six decades with a body of work distinguished by its dynamism, complexity, and formal elegance

A mixed media painting by Hong Hao, who, over the past decade, has increasingly focused on the expressive potential of material itself, continuing his reflection on social constructions of value

A 1979 painting by Yoo Youngkuk, a pioneer of geometric abstract painting celebrated for his distinctive visual lexicon characterized by bold color fields and expressive applications of paint

Role-player (2016), a surrealistic canvas by Zhang Xiaogang

A 2023 Bodyscape painting by Lee Kun-Yong, whose work explores the ways that the body and its movements can be understood across time

Featured Works

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello

b. 1990, Havana, Cuba

Matta

b. 1911, Santiago, Chile
d. 2002, Civitavecchia, Italy

Roberto Matta’s Tail-cock party (1970) is characterized by surreal, biomorphic forms and machinelike elements awash in lush sunset hues and earthen greens. The beauty of his surrealist approach contradicts the deeper existential and philosophical themes embedded in his work. In the present scene, five figures drink tea under the gaze of two semi-formed figures to the right of the composition; the artist’s daughter, Federica Matta, explains that these are ancestral figures, a recurring motif for the artist, who made paintings on the human condition to “protect lost souls through the poetic strength of the ancestors.” Matta always approached his paintings with the Surrealist practice of “automatic painting,” letting intuition dictate form and movement rather than premeditated structure. This spontaneous method allowed his forms to emerge organically, resulting in compositions that feel fluid and otherworldly, as in the ghostly, faintly defined figures in Tail-cock party. The title itself is a playful inversion of “cocktail party,” subverting the notion of a refined social gathering. Matta introduced an element of Surrealist humor and provokes new interpretations—suggesting a scene that is less conventional, more ambiguous, and perhaps even unsettling. Tail-Cock Party exemplifies the complex political, personal, and philosophical layers of Matta’s paintings.

Li Hei Di

b. 1997, Shenyang, China

Li Hei Di’s painting The monstrosity lies between us (2025) draws from the unsettling corporeality of Han Kang’s prizewinning novel The Vegetarian (2007), which traces its protagonist Yeong-hye’s psychological transformation from woman to plant. As Yeong-hye rejects human needs—first renouncing meat, then food, sex, and language—her body becomes a site of both resistance and dissolution. Li’s work is inspired by a pivotal scene in which Yeong-hye’s brother-in-law paints flowers across her bare body before they sleep together—an act she consents to only under the condition that the painted flowers remain untouched. Li explains, “I was drawn to the idea of sex as both a natural and monstrous force—something chaotic, repressed, and yet inevitable, like vines creeping through cracks in a body.” The painting envisions a wild, overgrown garden contained within the body itself, where jewel-toned red flowers bloom amid tangled ivies and vein-like tendrils. At its center, a white, membrane-like form— a placenta, a threshold—pulses with life as shadowy figures move beneath it, half-hidden, caught between emergence and dissolution. A ghostly presence pierces through the composition, evoking both creation and destruction. In The monstrosity lies between us, Li confronts the unsettling nature of desire—its unruly, instinctual force, inescapable as roots breaking through the earth. Li’s inaugural exhibition with Pace, opening in Hong Kong in May of 2025, will likewise include prints inspired by The Vegetarian.

Zhang Xiaogang

b. 1958, Kunming, Yunnan Province, China

Joel Shapiro

b. 1941, New York

Arlene Shechet

b. 1951, New York

Kiki Smith

American, b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany

Lee Ufan

b. 1936, Kyongsang-namdo, South Korea

Dialogue (2008) is a remarkable early example from Lee Ufan’s series of the same name, which the artist began in 2006, deepening his longstanding investigation of painting as a conduit for meditative self-transcendence. Composed of a sculptural column of gradient grey—the first cycle of Dialogue works were rendered in grey palettes—Lee’s process involves several applications of a monochromatic mineral pigment gradually built up into a singular, substantial mark. Painted in a highly controlled method reminiscent of Buddhist practices in which Lee syncs the application of paint to his breath, Dialogue works take up to a month or more to complete and focus on the resonance of space, color, light, and tension. The repetition of minimal marks acts as a record of Lee’s embodied experience of creation as well as the temporal and spatial coordinates of his process. For Lee, blank fields of unpainted canvas are as essential as painted form; rooted in yohaku, or “resonant emptiness,” Lee’s blank fields create a dynamic interplay between center and periphery, painted and unpainted space, fostering a dialogue that extends beyond the painting itself. As Lee describes, “it is possible to sense poetry, criticism, and the transcendent in the space.”

Bodyscape 76-1-2023 by Kun-Yong Lee — Lee Kun-Yong, *Bodyscape 76-1-2023*, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 162 cm × 134 cm × 4 cm (63-3/4" × 52-3/4" × 1-9/16")

Lee Kun-Yong

b. 1942, Sariwon, Korea

Mika Tajima

b. 1975, Los Angeles

Song Dong

b. 1966, Beijing, China

Song Dong’s IGNORANCE... (2023) is one of the 36 glass books in his Ignorance series, a body of luminous works that meditate on the limits of knowledge. Each book is in full compliance with international publishing standards, with its ISBN and other identifying information etched onto the work near the spine. However, this book bears no other words. In the present work, the muted turquoise color is intensely concentrated at the spine, and sweeps out along the arc of the pages to become almost completely invisible at the delicately transparent edges of the work. The crisp edges of the spine and arching pages appear as if they were sliced from the very air. Hovering in front of the viewer, the work appears to occupy the negative space of a book, a mold of what is left behind when words disappear. The slightly frosted surface of the work resembles the texture of paper. Precariously balancing between what is there and what is not, this work quietly unfolds itself in layers of presence and absence. Working with glass is a delicate process replete with contingencies that must coalesce, through skill and chance, into the desired final form. Tiny bubbles, the products of chance but also the bearers of ineffable meaning, shimmer deep within the book. Apparition-like, IGNORANCE... invites contemplation on the “wordless book,” where text dissolves and expressive color and the fragile materiality of glass impart a transcendent spirituality of form. In IGNORANCE..., Song ruminates on the impossibility of complete knowledge, instead gently presenting this book without words as a treatise on the beauty of knowing what you don’t know. Rather than a source of facts and figures, this book offers a different kind of understanding. Song's Ignorance series was first begun for his one-artist exhibition for The Shanghai Museum of Glass's annual Annealing project, in which the museum invites artists to create glass artworks exploring the unpredictable nature of the material Mysterious and depthless, IGNORANCE... is not crystallized as a final state of being but rather accepted as part of a spiritualized process of reflection, where there always exists the illuminating possibility of creating something out of nothing.

Alicja Kwade

b. 1979, Katowice, Poland
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

In Little Be-Hide (2024), Alicja Kwade explores perception and the boundary between reality and illusion. The installation consists of two identical-looking stones—a natural granite boulder and its bronze cast— positioned on either side of a double-sided mirror. Depending on the viewer’s angle, the mirror acts either as a reflective surface or a seemingly transparent pane, revealing or concealing parts of the objects. The illusion blurs the line between the original and its counterpart, challenging the viewer’s sense of reality. By playing with the duality of “being” and “hiding” (Be-Hide), Kwade questions how perception shapes our understanding of the world. The work shifts between the visible and the hidden, inviting us to reconsider not just what we see, but how we see it.

Loie Hollowell

b. 1983, raised in Woodland, CA
Lives in New York

Alizarin crimson and cadmium orange/red and white brain (2025) is a vibrant example from Loie Hollowell’s Brain series, a body of varicolored ovals that symbolize the conceptual space of the brain. In the present work, the titular reds and oranges form a warm-toned, seamless color gradient that vibrates with chromatic intensity. Across Hollowell’s Brain series, the varied palettes evoke distinct psychological states, fostering immersive, phenomenological experiences. The smooth, glossy finish of the abstracted Brains is achieved in a labor-intensive process in which each layer of semi-transparent oil paint is applied during a single, full-day session until the desired saturation is achieved. The resulting sleek finish contrasts with the sculptural bar anchoring each composition—a three-dimensional horizon line rendered in thickly textured, muted paint—grounding the ethereal form in physical space. Ovals have long served as abstractions of the human head in Hollowell’s practice, seen in earlier works like her geometric self-portraits. In the Brain paintings, she magnifies and isolates this elemental shape, stretching it to its fullest possible diameter, as if zooming in on one of her “standing figure” portraits until only the head remains. In the present work, Hollowell’s distinctive manipulation of scale and color offers a dynamic encounter with the psyche.

Yin Xiuzhen

b. 1963, Beijing, China

Yoo Youngkuk

b. 1916; Uljin-gun, South Korea
d. 2002; Seoul, South Korea

Hong Hao

b. 1965, Beijing, China

Our Artists in Hong Kong

Robert Indiana
The Shape of the World

Mar 25 – May 9, 2025
Hong Kong

This exhibition of work by celebrated artist Robert Indiana, who first emerged as a key figure in the Pop art movement, will include important sculpture, paintings, and prints from throughout his career, showcasing his graphic visual vocabulary that made him one of the most inventive and enduring figures in the history of American art.

Learn More

Museum Exhibition

Alicja Kwade
Pretopia

Jan 10 – Apr 6, 2025
Tai Kwun Contemporary
Hong Kong

Alicja Kwade’s inaugural solo exhibition in Hong Kong showcases nine works that span different periods of her career—blending various mediums including sculpture, sound, light, and performative installation—together with newly commissioned installations tailored to the history and architecture of Tai Kwun’s F Hall.

This presentation coincides with Waiting Pavilions, Kwade’s first site-specific installation in Hong Kong, on view at the Prison Yard until late 2026.

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To inquire about any of the artists or works featured here, please email us at inquiries@pacegallery.com.

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Art Basel Hong Kong

ART FAIR DETAILS

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Highlights on Pace’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong include: