Art Basel Hong Kong 2024, March 29

Encounters: Holding Space for Humanity in a Complex World

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Yoan Capote, artist, Ben Brown Fine Arts Tsherin Sherpa, artist, Rossi & Rossi Lí Wei, artist, Tang Contemporary Art Catalina Swinburn, artist, Selma Feriani 
Moderated by Alexie Glass-Kantor, Executive Director, Artspace Sydney and Encounters Curator 
If art is a vital form of communication, how are artists learning to hold space for the complexity that defines our shared existence? Blending geographies and experiences that bridge past, present, and future, artists participating in Encounters at Art Basel Hong Kong share their perspectives on what it means to live together.&nbsp;
Yoan Capote is a Cuban artist whose work spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography. Capote studied and has taught at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana, Cuba. He represented Cuba at the 54th Venice Biennale, was awarded a UNESCO prize and received a fellowship grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. His work addresses political and social issues that are both specific to the Cuban identity and universally relevant. His work is included in notable public collections worldwide. 


Tsherin Sherpa currently works between California and Kathmandu. When he was twelve years old, he began studying traditional Tibetan thangka painting with his father, Master Urgen Dorje Sherpa, a renowned thangka artist from Ngyalam, Tibet. After studying computer science and Mandarin in Taiwan, he returned to Nepal, where he collaborated with his father on several important projects, including thangka and monastery mural paintings. In 1998, Sherpa immigrated to California; there, he began to explore his own style – reimagining traditional tantric motifs, symbols, colours and gestures, which he resolutely placed in contemporary compositions. In 2022, Sherpa represented Nepal at the Venice Biennale. 
Lí Wei was born in Beijing, China, in 1981. He received his BA from the Sculpture department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2007. Lí Wei adopts a hyperrealistic style in his sculptures, focusing on conveying the emotions of the figures. The objective and clinical themes in Lí’s works reveal his doubts in human nature, and of humanity’s cruelty and ignorance. 
Catalina Swinburn has been working with the geopolitical concept of displacement. Her practice of weaving vintage documents paper sheets as support became a manifest of political disagreement by using documents of displaced patrimonial treasures, or musical scores of operas with exile thematics, or geopolitical maps. Her weaving exercise is trespassing by a diasporic feeling with a poetic and subtle aesthetic. She pursues to rescue ancestral rituals related to sacred places, ancestral geography and original memory. 
Alexie Glass-Kantor is a writer, curator, and Executive Director of Artspace, Sydney. Since 1999, she has been active as a curator working across independent spaces, collecting institutions, biennials, and festivals. She has developed curatorial engagement in the Asia-Pacific region throughout her career, and has instigated ambitious exchanges and collaborations in Italy, South Korea, China, Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Malaysia. Recently, she was the curator for the Australian pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale with a project by Marco Fusinato.&nbsp;
The Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 Conversations program is curated by Stephanie Bailey.

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