A spirited, diverse audience brought a palpable buzz to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre as Art Basel Hong Kong 2025 got its VIP day underway on March 26th. The 12th edition of the fair features 240 galleries from 42 countries and includes 23 debuting exhibitors. And if a city’s tentpole art fair reflects the character of its art community, then Hong Kong is witnessing the growth of a young, community-minded collector base.

“Younger generations of buyers [are] coming back from COVID-19, and they are bringing new friends,” Angelle Siyang-Le, director of Art Basel Hong Kong, told Artsy at the fair. “Younger generations are very big on community building, and that is definitely what we’ve been observing. They’re not just collecting on their own; they like to share.”

To cater to this “young vibe,” Art Basel Hong Kong has tailored its programming this year, Siyang-Le explained. This includes everything from the fair’s Artist Night celebration, hosted in collaboration with the city’s Tai Kwun art complex, to a curatorial focus on performances, DJs, and public programming and installations.

At the fair, two key themes were prominent: a strong presence of Western modernists, from Giorgio de Chirico to Salvo, and renewed emphasis on digital art. A notable highlight of the latter is Chinese artist LuYang’s massive installation Doku the Creator (2025), a movie theater space designed to immerse fairgoers in the narrative of the artist’s digital persona. This work is part of the fair’s Encounters section, which features 18 large-scale installations supported by galleries.

“We are seeing more digital art coming back,” Siyang-Le said. “That could be partially because the younger generations are very digital and tech savvy, so artists such as LuYang have a huge following of young collectors. The young collectors love to engage with these new ideas and concepts, as well as with digital art. The definition of digital art is being expanded and further challenges itself.”

Another key thread of the fair is the championing of artists and galleries from the Asia Pacific region. More than half of the galleries at the fair are from Asia Pacific, and its Insights section features 24 galleries presenting solo projects by artists from the region. Additionally, of the 38 Kabinett presentations—dedicated sections of gallery booths featuring curated presentations—21 spotlight Asian Pacific artists.

Art Basel Hong Kong 2025 arrives at a moment of cautiousness for the city and its market. However, as the mood on the VIP day of the fair illustrated, Hong Kong remains a vital nexus for the regional art world.

“March is not only an Art Basel thing anymore,” she said. “If you want to see the greatest art from Asia, [collectors] have definitely marked March to come here, and a lot of the collectors actually tie in a greater Asia trip before or after coming to Art Basel Hong Kong to learn about the different regions of Asia. For us, it’s great that international audiences now have a better understanding of the diversity of this region.”

The VIP day kicked off with a bounty of reported sales, led by a $3.5 million Yayoi Kusama work titled INFINITY-NETS [ORUPX] (2013) sold by David Zwirner (all prices and sales are listed in U.S. dollars). Read our roundup of day one sales from the fair here, and stay tuned for our comprehensive recap of reported sales from the fair on Monday.

Here, we present the 10 best booths from Art Basel Hong Kong 2025.

Booth 3D14

With works by Ann Leda Shapiro, Bosco Sodi, El Anatsui, Jaffa Lam, Kimsooja, Norio Imai, Peter Buggenhout, Shi Zhiying, Sopheap Pich, Waqas Khan, and Zoran Music

The centerpiece of Axel Vervoordt Gallery’s standout booth is Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich’s massive sculpture of gnarled branches, The Absent Tree (2024), constructed from aluminum, fiberglass, and synthetic resin. Widely regarded as Cambodia’s most prominent contemporary artist, Pich developed a sculptural practice using found objects. In 2013, he started incorporating old rice pots and various aluminum kitchenware to create these scrap metal sculptures. This work is in the price range of $150,000–$200,000.

Meanwhile, the gallery is presenting a selection of mystical watercolor paintings by 79-year-old American artist Ann Leda Shapiro in the Kabinett section of its booth, dedicated to thematic presentations by modern and contemporary artists. Since the 1970s, the painter has addressed themes of gender and sexuality, so the gallery is presenting works spanning her five-decade career. This includes Giving Birth to Myself (1971/2017), a painting of a hermaphroditic figure that was once censored at her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973. “Her work is a combination of social interference or engagement with a very tender and soft observation on people’s bodies, on her own body, and her own identity in a way,” said the gallery’s art advisor Dylan Shuai. These works are priced at “around” $15,000 apiece.

Other highlights include El Anatsui’s Blue Moon (2025), a sculpture made from bottle caps, printer plates, and copper wire hanging on the wall above Pich’s work. This work is priced at just under $2 million. In the other corner, the gallery presents Chinese artist Jaffa Lam’s Mobile Wisdom (2025), a hammock-like sculpture made from recycled colorful umbrella fabric and rope.

Booth 1D01

With works by Vũ Dân Tân, Wang Keping, Josephine Turalba, CHAN Dany, Huang Rui, ANUnaran Jargalsaikhan, Dinh Q. Lê, and Laurent “Lo” Martin

The back left corner of 10 Chancery Lane’s booth is devoted to the late Vietnamese artist Vũ Dân Tân. Here, the gallery presents the artist’s Money series/ Hong Kong Dollars – Charlie Chaplin subset (1997), a selection of 15 monoprinted fake Hong Kong dollar bills, each with a sketch of Charlie Chaplin in the middle. These are priced at $25,000. This satirical body of work is presented alongside three works from the artist’s “Fashion” series, a collection of female forms and clothing made from decorated cardboard, priced at $32,000 apiece.

“He’s one of Vietnam’s most important and underrecognized artists,” said Katie de Tilly, 10 Chancery Lane’s founder. “He was a real pioneer from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, moving into contemporary art. For Southeast Asian art history, the contemporary art history is very young, so we really wanted to show a very important figure from Vietnam.”

Other highlights in the Hong Kong gallery’s booth include Dinh Q. Lê’s Untitled 11 (from Vietnam to Hollywood Series) (2004), a “photo-weaving” in which the artist interlaces documentary photographs of the Vietnam War with American film stills, interrogating how real-life suffering is sensationalized.

The presentation also features a work by Huang Rui, a rare abstract painting titled Courtyard in the Summer No. 1 (1983), and sculptures by Wang Keping, including Couple (嘀嘀咕咕 di di gu gu) (2015), which sold on the fair’s VIP day for $120,000. “[Huang and Wang] are like the pioneers of Chinese contemporary art after Mao died,” noted de Tilly.

Booth 3D12

With works by Sanyu

Despite the all-red walls, HdM Gallery’s solo booth is a quiet counterpoint to the explosive colors that characterized much of this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong. The presentation spotlights Chinese artist Sanyu, with a strong focus on the artist’s time in Paris. Often referred to as the “Chinese Matisse,” Sanyu is best known for his series of sensual works on paper using ink and charcoal. Here, the gallery presents more than 20 examples of these intimate drawings.

Sanyu’s journey also reflects a broader cultural exchange between East and West, which is particularly notable for the French-owned gallery, which has locations in Beijing and Paris. “In this day and age, where people are becoming more closed up and more self-centered and so on, to have this Chinese guy who lived in Paris in a century where it was very difficult to move to the other side of the world, it’s quite a good message,” said Olivier Hervet, partner at the gallery. “There’s a certain insouciance—a carefree, relaxed feel about these works,” he added.

These simplified works often depict fleeting moments over and over again, such as women drawing, bent nude bodies, or two women seated close together. The gallery sold most of these works for €20,000– €30,000 ($21,500–$32,380) apiece.

Booth 3D10A

With works by Aubrey Levinthal, Andrew Cranston, Lorna Robertson, Hayley Barker, John Joseph Mitchell, Catherine Ross, Johanna Unzueta, Brandon Logan, James Hugonin, David Austen, Rob Lyon, Jonathan Owen, and Andrew Miller

Philadelphia-based painter Aubrey Levinthal’s dreamy paintings command attention at Ingleby Gallery’s booth, where a carefully curated selection of her work had sold out entirely by the fair’s VIP day. Her pieces, often self-portraits or depictions of close friends and family, capture the essence of everyday moments—a son bathing, a partner on the stairs—yet infuse them with an unsettling, ethereal quality. For instance, Night Mirror (C’s Bath) (2025) features a self-portrait of the artist where the mirrored reflection is slightly turned away from her. These works at the fair were priced at $20,000 for smaller pieces and $50,000 for larger works.

“They have a very beautiful quality that’s a combination of what you think you know and what you’re surprised by,” Richard Ingleby, co-founder of the gallery, told Artsy. “When you look at them, first of all, you see the image, and it’s quite clear. The more you look at them, the more they become harder to place. There’s a slight sense of dislocation, of strange perspective, of things being not quite what you thought they were when you first saw them.”

The Edinburgh-based gallery is also presenting several other works in small clusters, inspired by the gallery’s “Instalments” programming, where it irregularly showcases works to introduce new artists to the roster. In that spirit, the gallery is showing a suite of miniature landscapes by British painter Catherine Ross, including the icy blue mountainside Venture (2025). Immediately to its right is a selection of small, textured paintings by American artist John Joseph Mitchell, including Oranges (2025), depicting a table with three oranges on a gridded blue tablemat.

The most expensive painting in the booth is American painter Hayley Barker’s Mountain View Cactus (2025), featuring a cactus in an alpine environment in the foreground of a remote property. This work was priced at $130,000.

Booth 3D23

With works by Yu Peng

The late Taiwanese artist Yu Peng taught himself to make art by sketching in local parks. Borrowing from traditional Chinese landscape paintings, his ink-based works on paper feature intricate linework and meticulously decorated environments. However, unlike traditional landscapes, his works were often littered with nude bodies. These sensual, erotic works are the subject of Taipei’s Yi Yun Art’s solo presentation of works by the artist.

Works like the diptych Clouds, Rocks, Trees, or Flowers (雲耶 石耶 樹耶 花耶) (2003) feature Yu’s signature style: complex black-and-white Edenic landscapes where nude figures are subtly embedded. These pieces, reflecting his early training in sketching and classical brushwork, integrate lived experience, creating a narrative and poetic atmosphere that blurs the lines between reality and fantasy.

Meanwhile, the booth also features several softer, figurative works, such as Moonlit Fate and the Ties of Love (2006). Works in the booth range in price from $20,000–$50,000.

Booth 3C12

With works by Alec Egan, Caleb Hahne Quintana, Sarah Lee, Jenny Morgan, Jordan Nassar, Soumya Netrabile, Meeson Pae, Neil Raitt, Gideon Rubin, Sigrid Sandström, Sarah Ann Weber, Ming Ying, Alejandro Cardenas, Marc Dennis, and Anna Freeman Bentley

One of the most photographed corners of this year’s fair is Los Angeles–based gallery Anat Ebgi’s Kabinett presentation—a space adorned with bright, polychromatic floral wallpaper. This wallpaper is the backdrop for Alec Egan’s “Before the Fire” series, featuring five paintings that explore the artist’s familiar motifs of interiors of the home. However, after Egan lost his home and studio in the Palisades fire earlier this year, these new works carry an additional weight of loss and renewal. These paintings include Sunset Car (2025), featuring a split canvas where the left side depicts a sunset-lit sky and the right shows a rippled floral curtain. Prices range from $25,000 to $40,000.

“The works are hung on a supersize scaled wallpapering of the pattern that was prominent through the paintings that were lost in the fire, a motif that Alec has carried into his new suite of works as a quiet thread between what was lost and what he is building anew,” said Anat Ebgi partner Stefano di Paolo. “These new works create tension between interior and exterior, familiarity and distance—images at once dreamlike and eerily evocative of the Palisades fire, transforming the view beyond the window into something hauntingly sublime yet strangely comforting. It’s a scene where the glowing patch of sky seems to hover between revelation and erasure, both a beacon of hope breaking through and a memory on the verge of being swallowed whole.”

Other standout works in the booth include Caleb Hahne Quintana’s Secrets of the Drowsing Tree (2025), featuring two lounging young adults in a tranquil park, priced at $26,000, and Meeson Jessica Pae’s futuristic abstract painting Drift (2025), featuring a vulgar organic form and priced at $34,000.

Booth 1C12

With works by Kim Yun Shin, Park Seo- Bo, Ha Chong-Hyun, Jae-Eun Choi, Kibong Rhee, Kyungah Ham, Lee Kwang-Ho, Haegue Yang, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Candida Höfer, Jenny Holzer, Julian Opie, Ugo Rondinone, and SUPERFLEX

One year after Kukje Gallery mounted its inaugural solo exhibition with 90-year-old artist Kim Yun Shin, the South Korean powerhouse devoted its Kabinett section at Art Basel Hong Kong to the artist. The incredible selection of featured works includes a recent abstract painting by the artist, Waves of Joy (2024), depicting oscillating blue and green colors in a layered pattern. The paintings are accompanied by a selection of smaller wooden sculptures and a lesser-known Brazilian sculpture from 2002, which is part of the artist’s ongoing “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One” series.

“Her unique philosophy, ‘Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One,’ captures the cosmic significance of two entities coming together and forming a union as one, and this union becoming divided into two again, encompasses Kim’s artistic philosophy and a way of life,” explained Hei Jeong Yoon, the gallery’s senior managing director of public relations. Her wooden sculptures and paintings have “a kind of primordial energy,” she added.

Elsewhere, the gallery’s booth is packed with standout pieces from across its program, including Kyungah Ham’s Phantom and A Map / poetry 01WBL01V1T (2018–24), a triptych where two abstract embroideries flank a striated textile. Ham’s process involves designing the textiles and then tasking North Korean artisans with their creation, necessitating the smuggling of both design plans and finished works across the Demilitarized Zone. The central panel signifies the waiting period and the distance between the North and South Koreans working together to create the final artwork.

Booth 3C08

With works by Chan Ka Kiu, Hou Jianan, Lov-Lov, Ma Sibo, Mak2, Caison Wang, Wang Jiajia, Wang Xin, and ZhongWei

Inside a small room lined with golden curtains at Hong Kong–based DE SARTHE’s booth, fairgoers are invited to play a video game. The game in question is conceptual artist Mak2’s newest project, Home Sweet Home Backyard (2025), where players become virtual gold diggers searching for treasure within digital landscapes.

The catch: The better players perform throughout the fair, the higher the price of Mak2’s accompanying suite of seven paintings offered for sale by the gallery. As more people play and discover gold, the game and paintings’ value increases, triggering 5% hikes in price with a 20% cap (the paintings are initially priced at a 10% deficit for $27,000 apiece). “It’s a comment on how the market works,” said founder Pascal de Sarthe. “The gallery has always been pushing away all the speculators [over the last few years]. I don’t want my artists to be the victim of the speculators because it is short-lived, it’s not good, and against the market.” Midway through the fair’s VIP day, the score was nearing 5%.

Mak2’s paintings are a set of seven triptychs, each of which comes with a copy of the video game and will switch out throughout the fair. These works, part of her “Home Sweet Home” series, are dreamlike, Hong Kong–inspired environments from the video game The Sims 4, which are then translated into triptych paintings by artists from Taobao, an online shopping platform. On VIP day, Home Sweet Home Backyard: Golden House 3 (2025), featuring a couple philandering in a yellow-toned office, was hung outside the video game section.

Other standout works in the booth include Hou Jianan’s The Sun Elsewhere and Cutting Fantasies (both 2025), priced at $10,000 apiece. On the outside of the booth, Wang Xin’s sculpture Chasmic Mirrors: Oracle of the Embodied Self (2025), featuring a criss-crossed, praying figure holding an orb in front of glowing LED lights, is priced at $12,000.

Booth 3C40

With works by Eduardo Terrazas, Gabriel de la Mora, Abel Quezada, and Circe Irasema

In the 1970s, the Mexican artist Abel Quezada visited China with Mexican president Luis Echeverría. While here, the illustrator and caricaturist meticulously detailed his time in the country. These drawings, depicting and critiquing daily life across China through his eyes, are documented in the book 48,000 kilómetros a línea, and those drawings have been translated onto giant Tibetan hand-knotted tapestries more than three decades after the artist’s passing. Examples include Recepción en Pekín, el 19 de abril de 1973 (1973–2024), a centerpiece of Proyectos Monclova’s standout booth.

The Mexico City–based gallery is presenting three additional Mexican artists alongside Quezada. Gabriel de la Mora is presenting works from two series: In “Lepidóptera,” the artist employs fragments of Papilio ulysses butterfly wings to create intricate designs. In the other series, “In-Between What I Reflect and What I See,” he uses shards of silver Christmas ornaments to create optical illusions through convex and concave reflections in works such as 21,481, from the series “In-Between What I Reflect and What I See” (2025).

In the center of the gallery’s booth, textile works by the 90-year-old artist Eduardo Terrazas are showcased. His geometric blue and white fabric works, crafted with wool yarn using the indigenous Huichol method, were featured in the main show of last year’s Venice Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere.” On the exterior of the booth, Circe Irasema’s Oh Fortuna! vol 1. / O Fortune! vol 1 (2022–25) investigates the origins of the fortune cookie by translating a series of phrases from the wafers into Chinese in 25 oil paintings with engraved brass plates. All the works in the show are priced in the range of $20,000 to $190,000.

Booth 1B17

With works by Martin Wong, Katharine Kuharic, Daniel Correa Mejía, Joe Houston, Owen Fu, Grace Carney, Harry Gould Harvey IV, Srijon Chowdhury, Elizabeth Glaessner, and Robin F. Williams

In the Kabinett section of P·P·O·W’s booth, a mini retrospective of the late American artist Martin Wong is an immediate highlight. The tightly curated collection features some of Wong’s earliest ceramics experiments, characterized by the artist’s severe gothic style. For instance, the artist’s Untitled (Love Letter Incinerator) (1970), which features three conjoined furnace shapes with the artist’s initials carved into the side, is situated on an exterior corner of the booth. According to co-founder Wendy Olsoff, the ceramics were previously living in Wong’s mother’s garden in San Francisco.

Accompanying these early ceramic works are the artist’s cacti paintings, completed in the final years of his life. Just above the incinerator sculpture, the artist’s Double Lithops (1997–98) depicts two lithops, a succulent plant of southern Africa that often has a pair of thick, shield-like leaves. The prices for Wong’s works range from $20,000 to $125,000 apiece, with Olsoff noting significant demand from local collectors during the fair’s VIP day.