Usually, when I attempt to describe what’s so thrilling in regards to the artwork scenes in Hong Kong and China, I’ll say that artists right here appear to be asking far completely different questions than these within the US, or arising with utterly out-of-left-field methods of approaching a solution. Hong Kong–based mostly De Sarthe’s presentation, which options artists interrogating how up to date social narratives intersect with new expertise, is an effective instance of what I imply.
Mak2, who final yr had the buzziest work within the truthful’s Encounters part, returns with one other intriguing piece. For the brand new challenge, Dwelling Candy Dwelling Yard (2025), the conceptual artist produced a online game the place fairgoers can play as digital gold diggers. The extra folks play the sport, and discover gold, the upper the value rises for an accompanying suite of seven triptych work. These works, impressed by the online game The Sims 4, had been produced by commissioning sections from artists on Chinese language e-commerce platform Taobao. It’s a humorous metaphor for artwork’s consideration financial system: the extra common folks concentrate, the extra the artwork is value, even when it’s the collectors that reap the rewards—or pay the value. There are additionally unusual, dream-like work “by” Lov-Lov, an AI artist developed by artist Lin Jingjing. For the works, Lin meticulously re-created AI-generated pictures utilizing paint and airbrush, calling consideration to a extra fluid notion of creativity, the place the traces between creator, affect, and creation are removed from clear.
Not within the sales space, however introduced by the gallery to Encounters, is LuYang’s DOKU the Creator, a sensory overload of an set up that blends a video that includes LuYang’s digital avatar DOKU, with LEDs taking part in scrolling textual content and staging evocative of a storefront. There are works out there for buy in “blind bins,” with 108 completely different items hidden inside, laying naked the casino-like nature of the artwork market. In the meantime, the messaging throughout the video and LEDs attracts from philosophy, Buddhism, science fiction, and futurism to query—much like Lin—the character of creativity, authorship, and our more and more digitized consciousness.
