‘While many art lovers are returning to Art Basel Hong Kong for the first time since the pandemic, I’m excited to say that we have a number of LGBTQ exhibitions within the city. As advanced as Hong Kong is, Queer experience isn’t something that has been addressed in institutions here until now.

Would he like to expand his business in Paris? It is already the case, he says, by way of off-site exhibitions, such as the Carla Accardi show organized at Le Corbusier’s jewel of a building, Maison La Roche, for the first edition of Paris + par Art Basel. He plans to pursue other exceptional projects like this ‘fine example of how art dialogues with architecture.’ This is without doubt one of his mantras – the white cube is not really for him. ‘Architecture is one of the key elements of our activity.’

In each city where he has installed a gallery, De Carlo has selected sites charged with soul. Since 2019, his gallery in Milan has been located in the Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, an icon of 1930s architecture, replete with marble and woodwork. ‘We’ve had it with the cliché of the minimalist space, where the art is supposed to be the sole actor,’ he affirms. In London, he has just restored a Mayfair apartment whose walls he painted a luminous sea-green – the original color dating back to 1723, unearthed in poor condition. ‘Maybe it’s too green? In any case, we’re happy we did it! Our artists adore this kind of context, and that’s all that matters.’

Emmanuelle Lequeux is a journalist based in Paris.

Massimo De Carlo will be part of the Galleries and Kabinett sectors in the upcoming edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, from December 1 – 3, 2022.

Caption for full-bleed images: Massimo De Carlo by Bettina Pittaluga for Paris+ par Art Basel, 2022.

English translation: Jacob Bromberg

Other Queer artists whose work I’m really interested in include Salman Toor, a Pakistan-born painter who lives in the United States and depicts the struggles of gay life with great melancholy, humor, and romance. His exhibition ‘New Paintings and Drawings’ recently opened at M Woods in Beijing (until March 9). My partner at Art-Bureau, Ed Tang, and I have followed his work closely for some years.

I’m also very excited to see what WangShui does next. They’re gender fluid and their work explores identity, the post-human, and collapsing boundaries in some hugely inventive ways, often with advanced technology. Last year, for the Whitney Biennial, they showed paintings that were co-created with AI.

Xie Lei is a younger Paris-based Chinese painter that people may not be familiar with. I followed his work via Instagram for some time before I met him in person. His exhibition ‘Victim’ opens this month at Lyles & King in New York (until April 1). His paintings can be tough to look at. He depicts pain as pleasure. A thumb pushed into a mouth, choking, struggling. It’s always open to your own interpretation: Is the figure in agony or ecstasy?

I’m always interested in how artists from the Asian diaspora bring together the past and present. Julien Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American artist who lives in Los Angeles, draws inspiration from Renaissance paintings, and sometimes his subjects can be non-human, creature-like, as if slipping between myth and reality. He is receiving major attention, both on the market and from curators. It is also nice to witness his high-profile fashion collaborations.

One particular focus for collectors at the moment is female Asian artists. The Taiwanese-American, New York-based artist Brook Hsu is one rising star. The longstanding Hong Kong gallerists Edouard Malingue and Lorraine Kiang recently inaugurated their new gallery space with her 2022 exhibition ‘Oranges, Clementines and Tangerines’. It’s definitely a space to go visit. What first got my attention about her work is that she paints primarily in green. This might be on wood, or ink on canvas, and she switches between figuration with abstraction. Some of her works have depicted Cantonese megastars from the 1990s. Growing up in the States, she did not necessarily know the works of these actors or singers first-hand but captures an abstracted sense of their importance. She told me it’s more like a cultural memory than a tribute to them.

Christine Ay Tjoe is a leading artist from Indonesia, and I have been an admirer of her work since I first discovered contemporary art. She addresses fluidity, be it that of water or creature symbiosis. She is the first contemporary Indonesian artist ever collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Dominique Fung, meanwhile, is a unique painter with her own interpretation of Chinese histories, artifacts, and mythologies, not just how they look but what they meant. One six-panel work about migration and dispersion, where people come to new lands from the sea with their histories and cultural artifacts, was itself dispersed between different museums and collectors – a wonderful idea.

Finally, I’d like to mention the Singaporean-British sculptor Kim Lim, who passed away in 1997. Alongside her husband William Turnbull, she drew on ancient cultures outside the West and created abstract works that looked to nature. M+ and Tate have many of her works in their collections and this is now being appreciated in a new contextthanks to our current reckoning with art history’s traditional hierarchies and discriminations.

Skye Sherwin is an art writer based in Rochester, UK. She contributes regularly to The Guardian and numerous art publications.

Published on February 24, 2023.