Success of ‘Art March Hong Kong’ reaffirms city’s status as dynamic international art hub
Patron Alia Al-Senussi and painter Fatina Kong praise government efforts to boost appeal among world’s artists, collectors and curators
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Major events reaffirm Hong Kong as a global art hub
Visitors to Hong Kong last month would have seen first-hand how the dynamic metropolis has fully embraced art.
Major international events, including the 12th edition of Art Basel Hong Kong and the city’s own Art Central fair, had – very visibly – taken up residency in the heart of the city, at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre and Central Harbourfront, where local galleries hosted exhibitions and parties.
Other activities including special auctions under the “Art March Hong Kong 2025” celebration initiated by Hong Kong’s art and culture hub, the West Kowloon Cultural District, and the fourth Museum Summit, organised by the city’s Leisure and Cultural Services Department, emphasised how Hong Kong has achieved its aim to become an international art hub. It is now also the third-largest centre for art auctions in the world.
Organisers say this year’s three-day Art Basel Hong Kong drew an estimated 91,000 visitors, including “prominent private collectors and art patrons from over 70 countries and territories”, who came to look at artworks from the collections of 240 galleries from across the globe.
Among them was collector and art patron Alia Al-Senussi, who has also served as Art Basel’s United Kingdom, Middle East and North Africa representative for over a decade. She believes international art galleries and artists are drawn to Hong Kong because it offers both inclusivity and opportunity.
“People travelling to a new place often get intimidated by the idea of something foreign or different to them,” she says. “But when artists and collectors in the art world come to Hong Kong, they understand how to make those connections to people, even from their own hometowns – and so, being in Hong Kong makes the world small, but in the most special way.
“Whether it’s at Duddell’s over lunch, or in the convention centre at a booth, or over a drink at Dragon-i late at night … it’s a really perfect place to come and be able to make those connections.”
Her Libyan heritage and education in the UK and the United States have made her an ideal interlocutor for the global art scene. For years, she has visited Hong Kong for art collaborations and curated exhibitions, including one at restaurant and cultural space Duddell’s in Central, featuring Saudi Arabian artist and doctor Ahmed Mater, believed to be the first artist from that country to showcase his work in the city.
Al-Senussi has witnessed the growth of Hong Kong as an art hub, including the opening of M+, regarded as Asia’s global museum of contemporary culture, which forms part of the West Kowloon Cultural District alongside the performing arts venue, the Xiqu Centre, and the Hong Kong Palace Museum.
The art precinct enjoys an excellent synergy with the city’s existing venues such as the Hong Kong Museum of Art, established in 1962, which is the custodian of more than 19,500 artworks representing Hong Kong’s unique East-meets-West history.
“Over all these years, as I returned to the city for Art Hong Kong [which later became] Art Basel Hong Kong, I have grown to understand this evolution and this kind of continuous change and flux and development,” Al-Senussi says. “I have really appreciated what Hong Kong offers to its own community [and] also what the city offers to the art world.”
Hong Kong’s rich cosmopolitan heritage has nurtured worldly artistic talent including Fatina Kong, whose paintings often use her home city as both a backdrop and inspiration, and draw on the influence of traditional Chinese painting and Western media. “Nothing stays the same and nothing is permanent,” she says.
Kong, a graduate of Hong Kong’s Academy of Visual Arts, says the first time she exhibited her work, at Art Central in 2021, proved a transformative experience.
“At the art fair or an exhibition in a gallery, I need to talk to different strangers and different collectors,” she says. “Maybe they have different backgrounds or come from all over the world and after talking to them, I will know more about my painting, actually from different perspectives.
“I think that gives me confidence because it makes me think of myself as an artist, not just some random person doing art at the studio and no one sees it.”
Kong also received funding from a government-sponsored programme to visit Shanghai on a cultural exchange with her counterparts in the central Chinese metropolis. “Before that experience, I always used one perspective to depict the landscape,” she says.
“After I went to Shanghai, I saw many beautiful thangka paintings on a really big scale. There are, like, 30-metre-long paintings that tell a really long Buddhist story. They use different dimensions to tell the story and different angles to paint the different elements. It’s really interesting.”
The valuable experiences she gained from this exchange and the international exposure of exhibiting her work at events such as Art Central make Kong optimistic about working as an artist.
She says both public and private sector support for the city’s art community continues to grow, providing artists with many opportunities to shine.
“Hopefully, Hong Kong artists will have their really iconic style, or not just a style, [but] a place in the world,” she says. “Hong Kong has always been known as a city of finance, but I hope it will also be known as a city of art.”
Watch the video to listen to a conversation between Al-Senussi and Kong to learn why they are both excited about Hong Kong’s future as a global art hub.