Art Basel: AI on display
- Art Basel Hong Kong’s 2026 edition put digital art in the fair’s mainline program, with the Asia debut of Zero 10 and a city-center projection commission by artist DeeKay Kwon. - Kwon’s “DeePle The People” ran nightly on the Hong Kong Club Building from March 24 to 29, while the fair itself brought 240 galleries from 41 countries and territories. - The shift extends Art Basel’s digital push from Miami Beach to Hong Kong, folding screen-based, artificial-intelligence, and hybrid works into a blue-chip fair context. (artbasel.com)
Art Basel Hong Kong used its 2026 edition to move digital and artificial-intelligence art out of the margins and into the fair’s public-facing program. (artbasel.com) The clearest example was DeeKay Kwon’s “DeePle The People,” a new commission projected onto the Hong Kong Club Building from March 24 to 29, 2026, each evening from 7 to 11 p.m. (artbasel.com) (aotm.gallery) Art Basel said the animated work covered an 80-meter-high facade and presented Hong Kong through dozens of moving figures, local symbols, and Kwon’s cartoon-like visual language. (artbasel.com) Inside the fair, the bigger structural change was Zero 10, Art Basel’s platform for “art of the digital age,” which made its Asia debut in Hong Kong after launching at Art Basel Miami Beach. (artbasel.com) (artnews.com) Art Basel Hong Kong ran March 27 to 29 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, with preview days on March 25 and 26, and brought together 240 galleries from 41 countries and territories. (artbasel.com) (artasiapacific.com) Zero 10’s Hong Kong exhibitor list showed how broad that category has become: AOTM presented DeeKay, while other booths included bitforms gallery, Botto DAO, Asprey Studio, SOLOS, and TAEX. (artbasel.com) Asprey Studio’s booth mixed large-scale installation, sculpture, traditional ink painting, and artificial-intelligence-generated media rather than treating digital work as a separate silo. (aspreystudio.com) (designobserver.com) That presentation included Tim Yip’s 4.5-meter sculpture “Lili” and works tied to Yaxuan Liao’s “Emotional Algorithm,” a 2025 video project based on machine analysis of emotional language. (aspreystudio.com) (fadmagazine.com) The fair’s 2026 program suggests the market case for digital art is now being made in two places at once: in booths for collectors and on building facades for the broader public. (artbasel.com 1) (artbasel.com 2) By the end of the week, Art Basel Hong Kong had turned artificial-intelligence and screen-based art into part of the fair’s street-level image, not just a niche inside it. (artbasel.com) (artnews.com)
