If there is one place in Asia that comes fully alive every March, it is Art Basel Hong Kong. Within three hours of the doors opening on March 25th, fairgoers had already spotted Chilam Cheung and his wife Anita Yuen, Lin Chi-ling, Yang Caiyu, Feng Tang, Yuan Hong, Zhang Zetian, Uli Sigg, Zhang Han — the roll call went on. But the real news this year was the fair itself. After more than five years in the making, a brand-new sector called Echoes made its debut, a structural response to where mid-career artists and mid-size galleries now stand in today's ecosystem.
At the same time, Zero 10, the fair's digital-art sector, made its Asian debut, following its launch in Miami in 2025 — itself a response to the accelerating rise of AI. What excited us more was that Encounters, long the fair's most influential sector for large-scale installation, adopted for the first time a curatorial logic built around five elements — void, water, fire, wind, and earth. Visitors could hunt across different floors for each element scattered through the works, and the whole experience suddenly felt elevated.
"2026 is a year of refresh — a year in which the entire art ecosystem, after several rounds of adjustment, sets out again wearing an entirely new face," Angelle Siyang-Le, director of Art Basel Hong Kong, told us. From Reopen to Reconnect to Reshape, and now to this year's Refresh, that sequence of words is itself close to a summary of the past four years in the global art world.
At the fair's opening, we sat down with Siyang-Le and with Eli Scheinman, curator of the new Zero 10 sector, to talk through what had changed — and we bring you the first-day sales report as well. Walking into Basel's ground-floor hall, visitors were greeted head-on by an enormous black sphere at the Taro Nasu booth, drawing a steady crowd; on a facing wall, a green bubble hung fixed against the ceiling.
That same curatorial instinct showed up in the numbers. Beyond the usual sales of paintings and sculpture, interest in installation, textile-based work, cross-media pieces, and digital art kept climbing. Works changed hands at every price point, from entry-level pieces to works over RMB 20 million, with blue-chip 19th- and 20th-century material, postwar work, senior contemporary artists, and younger artists each finding their own audience. The single highest price of the fair went to David Zwirner, which sold Liu Ye's 2006 painting Snow White for roughly RMB 27.36 million; the gallery's other major sale was a 2002 painting by Marlene Dumas, which went for about RMB 25.2 million.
Other sales above RMB 5 million included a new 2019 work by Michaël Borremans, at roughly RMB 7.92 million, and a 1999 work on paper by Yoshitomo Nara, at about RMB 6.48 million. At the Hauser & Wirth booth, the gallery's director told us that both Louise Bourgeois pieces on view had sold out — a four-panel work for RMB 21.24 million, and a woven installation for about RMB 15.84 million, acquired by an Asian foundation.
George Condo's Prismatic Head went to an Asian private collector for roughly RMB 16.56 million. A work by Rashid Johnson sold for RMB 5.4 million, and a large painting by Qiu Xiaofei went to an Asian private collector for RMB 2.844 million. Two works by Lee Bul — who currently has a major retrospective on view at M+ — sold for RMB 1.98 million and RMB 1.872 million respectively, both acquired by Asian private museums and collectors.
Bastian, a gallery built around masterworks, sold Picasso's 1964 painting The Painter and His Model for about RMB 27.3 million. Among Asian artists, the strongest showing came from Waddington Custot, which sold a Zao Wou-Ki and a Chu Teh-Chun for roughly RMB 20.16 million and RMB 9.36 million respectively.
Thaddaeus Ropac's top sale was an untitled 2021 painting by Martha Jungwirth, at about RMB 3.588 million. The gallery's Asia director, Zhu Duanli, told us: "Collectors are more deliberate in how they decide now. They're willing to spend time really looking at and understanding the work in person — which reflects a shift over the past few years. The market is no longer just about a first-day burst of activity; viewing and buying keep unfolding steadily across all five days of the fair."
White Cube's top sale was Tracey Emin's Take Me to Heaven (2024), at about RMB 11.04 million. Gladstone Gallery's best-selling piece was Alex Katz's Flowers 1 (2011), at roughly RMB 9.36 million; Perrotin sold several Takashi Murakami works, priced between RMB 4.32 million and RMB 5.76 million.
Other notable sales included Galerie Maeght's sale of an Anne Imhof work for about RMB 1.716 million; Eslite Gallery's sale of a Zhan Wang piece for about RMB 1.512 million; Jessica Silverman's sale of a Judy Chicago work for RMB 1.188 million; Kwai Fung Hin's sale of a Zhang Yongcheng piece for RMB 552,000; and Yiri Arts' sale of an Xu Jiong work for RMB 450,000.
In the new Zero 10 sector, Plan X sold a work by ThankYouX, Perspective (2026), for about RMB 360,000. We noticed American and European collectors returning to the fair in greater numbers, joining a strong contingent of Asian institutions and collectors to form a market that felt increasingly healthy, measured, and rational. If there was one sector everyone was talking about this year, it was Zero 10, the fair's new home for digital art.
One booth in particular, SILK Art House, drew both the longest line and the loudest laughter — the undisputed star of the sector. The artist behind it, Jack Butcher, had already had a breakout moment at Zero 10's Miami debut the year before. His piece here, Luck, was a highly interactive performance installation that turned every visitor into a gambler for a moment.
"Visitors can roll the dice, and if they roll six different numbers, they get a free set of transparent dice — and can even get the artist, who's right here at the booth, to sign it," Scheinman told us, laughing. Strangers who'd never met struck up conversations while trading dice with one another.
"Over the course of the fair, every 3D-printed die that gets rolled accumulates in an installation on the left side of the booth. The transparent 3D-printed dice and the stainless-steel dice above are the ones visitors can actually buy," he explained. Beyond the international artists, Zero 10's Asian debut also brought in a number of Asian digital artists.
"Digital art and traditional contemporary art are conceptually quite different. This sector, from planning through selection, was put together by a dedicated new team, with support from OpenSea, and a lot of Asian digital artists are part of it," director Siyang-Le told us. Take the Chinese artist Sougwen Chung, who is from Hong Kong and grew up in an immigrant family in Canada: she has spent fifteen years painting alongside machines that mimic her own hand gestures and draw in sync with her.
"Her work is very direct, even subversive at times — it speaks to the audience while also commenting on the relationship between humans and machines. Over the past few years she's developed a method where she doesn't pull the robots out of their own 'state' but works alongside them instead. The piece gets built up gradually, through that collaboration," Scheinman said. Another showstopper at the fair was a massive robotic-woman sculpture by Tim Yip, the Hong Kong artist who won an Academy Award for his work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
"You might ask why a sculpture like this belongs in Zero 10, a sector built around digital art and new technology. Most visitors walk into a space like this expecting to see 'digital art' or 'video art' in the traditional sense — something playing on a big screen. But we wanted to push against that expectation, to show artists who work within a digital creative context but express themselves through painting, ink, sculpture, and other media.
This piece, called Lily, is Tim Yip's meditation on an imagined dystopian future — a world shaped, to a great extent, by technology and digital reality," Scheinman told us. The Korean artist DeeKay, who also debuted globally at Zero 10's Miami edition last year, works in the visual language of early video games, turning the things contemporary people silently say to themselves into floating, readable speech bubbles.
"Five or six years ago, DeeKay was still a commercial designer. He might have thought of himself as an artist, but he wasn't a professional one — no gallery representation, no sales to collectors. The arrival of blockchain and NFTs let artists like him find audiences and collectors, and go full-time. There really are artists using these technologies to make pure digital art sellable," Scheinman said. At the fair, people always seem to enjoy seeing themselves.
Botto, an artist generated entirely by AI with no direct human authorship, turned the crowd at its booth into raw material for its own creation.
"There are two cameras watching the audience, capturing facial images, which get processed algorithmically and layered onto the central image at the heart of the piece. That image shifts every two hours based on what it takes in," Scheinman explained. The project is presented by Botto DAO — DAO standing for a decentralized autonomous organization. Botto DAO has 28,000 members, who collectively decide what Botto makes.
The artist Robert Alice was on hand demonstrating how visitors could input their own seal designs and take part in the work themselves. His piece explores the relationship between Chinese seal culture and blockchain.
"In China, collectors have stamped their seals onto artworks for two thousand years. Blockchain's provenance system is remarkably close to that tradition. Every seal in this piece is algorithmically generated — a visitor types in any text, the system generates a seal, records it on the blockchain, and adds it to this scroll here on site. The cheapest seal costs eight dollars; the largest, two thousand. The difference is that traditionally a seal sits at the edge of a work, while here it becomes the work's core," he said.
Scheinman told us that any visitor at the fair could take part in making the piece. At Zero 10, you could watch the very idea of "authorship" and "co-creation" in contemporary art shifting under your feet. An artist might collaborate with AI, or with a network of visitors. And the whole sector felt deeply tied to Asian and Hong Kong culture.
In June, Zero 10 travels on to Art Basel in Switzerland, where it will take an entirely different form. The sector is, in its own way, the fair's answer to the full-scale arrival of AI in art-making. "AI won't replace artists — it will amplify their creativity," Siyang-Le told us. This year's other new sector was Echoes.
Echoes focuses on work artists have made in the past five years, organizing small curated groupings of up to three artists to rebuild the way visitors move through and look at the work. Why the five-year window? Siyang-Le explained: "We wanted this to be a freshly curated conversation, not a historical retrospective." What's on view here isn't art history — it's art still in the process of happening. But to call Echoes simply a new sector understates the point. More precisely, it is Art Basel Hong Kong's structural response to where mid-career artists and mid-size galleries now sit within the current ecosystem.
"We've actually been planning this sector for a very long time — the idea goes back to before 2019," Siyang-Le told us in the interview. "This year finally felt like the right moment." But why now? Because the center of gravity in the art system has been quietly shifting. She went on: "This sector focuses on mid-career artists and mid-size galleries, giving them more room to show their work. We feel that within the current ecosystem, they're the ones who most need support."
The ten Echoes booths were not simply a set of solo shows strung together, but followed three distinct curatorial structures: a solo presentation of a mid-career artist; a dialogue between a mid-career artist and a younger or more senior one; or a narrative spanning three generations of artists, turning the relationships between generations into part of the viewing experience itself. Double Q Gallery, a Hong Kong gallery showing at the fair for the first time, brought an immersive installation by the Polish artist Natalia Załuska that delivered an almost limitless visual charge; the Madrid gallery Max Estrella presented Tiffany Chung's embroidered maps tracing spice routes alongside Miler Lagos's carved book sculptures.
Capsule Shanghai, familiar to many, teamed up with the Berlin gallery Klemm's to present a dialogue among three mid-career artists at the height of their practice: the Hong Kong artists Leelee Chan and Yan Xinyue, together with Elizabeth Jaeger.
"In this sector, people are seeing a lot of artists they used to know well but may have half-forgotten, presented again. All of the curated sectors across our fairs are part of a long-term plan, and we hope Echoes will keep going for years to come," Siyang-Le told us. Another major shift this year touched Encounters, the sector long known for its large-scale installations: for the first time, it was jointly curated by four Asian curators, led by Mami Kataoka, director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, together with curator Hirokazu Tokuyama, Isabelle Tam of M+ in Hong Kong, and Alia Swastika from Jakarta — bringing a new layer of curatorial perspective to the sector.
More interesting still, this edition of Encounters built its curatorial logic around the five elements — void, water, fire, wind, and earth — with each floor tied to a different element and each installation mapped onto one dimension of the natural world. The Korean artist Suki Seokyeong Kang rendered "air" through a textile installation; the Indian artist Parag Tandel used a yarn installation to tell a story of the ocean and of ancestry, standing in for "water."
The Japanese artist Masaomi Yasunaga used glazed ceramic forms to symbolize "fire"; Geraldine Javier's towering columns of ecologically printed fabric, shaped like trees, stood for "earth." Textile and weaving techniques were given real prominence throughout — yarn weaving, bamboo and rattan weaving, the woven construction of Japanese-style structures, and more.
"If your time at the fair is limited, let Encounters be your main thread — it runs across two full floors and holds together as a whole in a way few sectors do," Siyang-Le suggested. Outside the fair halls, as night fell, the facade of M+ played a rolling animation of Seascape Wandering, a work by the Pakistani-American artist Shahzia Sikander, which projected her hand-painted watercolors across the building's exterior wall in animated form, tracing a long history of power, trade, and global exchange.
The 2026 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong may not have been the largest in the fair's history, but it was the one in which structural change was most visible. We felt a market finding its footing again, watched the fair formulate its answer to the arrival of the AI era, and sensed curatorial thinking being given a more central role — one oriented more directly toward visitors and collectors alike. Outside the fair, meanwhile, art was happening across the whole of Hong Kong.