Beyond Art Basel: 6 art events around Hong Kong to check out, from a pop-up bar hosted by Art Week Tokyo to a cultural tour of Sham Shui Po and street art festival HKWalls
- While Art Basel Hong Kong has plenty to keep the fine art-minded enthralled, simultaneous off-site events also showcase creative curiosities, writes Aidyn Fitzpatrick
- Francesco Tristano will perform Bach in hipster Sai Ying Pun gin bar Ping Pong 129, while ‘Both Sides Now 9: Generations’ presents screenings of experimental videos on the grounds of a – where else? – former abattoir
You don’t have to jostle the crowds at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC) to enjoy this year’s Art Basel.
Instead, Asia’s biggest art fair meets you where you are, with more than 170 in-house and endorsed citywide events. Many of these talks, exhibitions and tours kick off well in advance of Art Basel’s official dates of March 28 to 30, while some shows will remain in place until long after the art dealers and dilettantes have gone.
The schedule is varied and edgy. In fact, whether you fancy hearing Bach in a ping-pong parlour turned gin bar, touring NoHo street art, or having a vegan lunch at a Sham Shui Po cafe, theatre, and woodblock printing and porcelain studio that bills itself as a “rehab centre for casualties of capitalism”, you might find that Art Basel is a lot more fun when you go off site.
Here’s a round-up of a few imaginative events happening simultaneously that piqued our interest.
1. Francesco Tristano, solo piano recital, March 28
Yes, barroom pianists are a dime a dozen – but it’s not every day that somebody the calibre of Francesco Tristano tinkles the ivories at your local watering hole.
Come to think of it, Ping Pong 129 isn’t just any old bar, either. Imagine a Spanish gintoneria, housed in a former table tennis parlour, and styled according to some old Hollywood director’s idea of Chinatown. This is the delicious setting for a recital by Tristano, a keyboard prodigy from Luxembourg, who is equally adept at classical music and electronica, and has set himself the ambitious goal of recording Bach’s entire piano corpus. He’s already done with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, English Suites and first Partita, along with work by Ravel, Prokofiev and Cage. Expect renditions of Tristano’s original compositions from his albums On Early Music and Tokyo Stories, as well as Bach selections. March 28
2. AWT pop-up bar
Like your art in a tall glass with ice? Then this pop-up bar hosted by Art Week Tokyo at Ronin – a 14-seat Central izakaya – is for you.
As you sip on cocktails inspired by the work of photographer Rinko Kawauchi, painter Masato Kobayashi and installation creators Yuichiro Tamura and Shinji Ohmaki, you can peruse works for sale by British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara, “photogram” maker Saori Miyake, and others.
There’s a special menu to graze on and if the music in the bar seems quirkier than usual, that’s because one of the playlists was curated by Yuko Mohri, an audio artist who will represent Japan at this year’s Venice Biennale with an installation featuring electrodes attached to rotting fruit to produce sound. Through March 29