Catch ghosts and cyborgs at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong screenings

Curated by Para Site, this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong Film program has 7 screenings delving into modern life and creative expression

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Art Basel Hong Kong will take place this week. Photo: Art Basel Hong Kong

Published: 8:30am, 26 Mar 2025

Art Basel showcases art in many forms, from sculpture, painting, mixed media and photography, to performance, video and installation. And while many of these art forms have existed for centuries, film and video are still relatively new.

Korean-American artist Nam June Paik is credited with producing the world’s first video artwork in 1965, the year he used a Sony Portapak (a portable, videotape analogue recorder) to film Pope Paul VI processing through New York. The footage was later shown at a cafe in Greenwich Village.

“I want to shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colourfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock, and as lyrically as Jasper Johns,” Paik wrote. Today, filmmaking artists are doing just that as digital innovations and technology push the genre even further.

Art Basel Hong Kong’s Film sector continues to be a highlight of the fair, especially since it is freely accessible to the public and curated for the first time by local independent art institution Para Site.

“It’s been remarkable to see how Art Basel has evolved almost symbiotically with Hong Kong to develop and innovate new formats to support and showcase different types of art,” says Billy Tang, executive director and curator of Para Site. “What’s unique about moving image is its power to instantaneously connect various communities, geographies and languages through its ubiquitous nature and versatility as a medium.”

Titled “In Space, It’s Always Night”, the Film programme features seven screenings and the works of 30 artists. The series was partly inspired by themes in Isadora Neves Marques’ Vampires in Space (2022), which follows a family of vampires as they travel to an Earthlike exoplanet.