Art Basel HK talks went online

Art Basel Hong Kong put part of its talks program online after the fair, so people who never set foot in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre could watch the same panels that ran during the March 25 to 28 program. The videos now include sessions with artist Shahzia Sikander, collector Uli Sigg, and art-market economist Clare McAndrew. (artbasel.com) That sounds small until you remember how art fairs usually work. A fair is built like a temporary private city of booths, previews, and invitation lists, and most of the best conversations disappear as soon as the chairs are stacked. (artbasel.com) Art Basel calls Conversations its flagship talks program, and in Hong Kong this year it ran in an expanded four-day format with 11 talks. One of those was the fair’s traditional Premiere Artist Talk, which in 2026 featured Shahzia Sikander. (artbasel.com) Sikander was not a random booking. Her animated work “3 to 12 Nautical Miles” was also projected on the facade of M+, Hong Kong’s museum of visual culture, starting March 23 as a co-commission with Art Basel and UBS. (artbasel.com) Uli Sigg’s presence points to the other half of what these talks are really about: not just artists, but the people who build markets and institutions around them. Sigg is one of the best-known collectors of Chinese contemporary art, and the 2026 program framed discussions around patronage, market creation, and legacy building. (artbasel.com) One full day was guest-curated and moderated by Venus Lau, the director of Museum MACAN in Jakarta. Her three panels focused on how exhibitions travel, how institutions shape art history, and how Asia’s art scenes are being narrated across borders. (artbasel.com) The scale of the fair helps explain why Art Basel bothered to post the talks instead of letting them vanish. The 2026 Hong Kong edition brought together 240 galleries from 41 countries and territories, with more than half operating spaces across Asia-Pacific. (ubs.com) So the online archive turns a closed-room fair perk into something closer to a public record. If you wanted to hear how a major artist, a major collector, and a major market analyst think about power, money, and institutions in Asian contemporary art, you no longer needed a fair badge to do it. (artbasel.com)