Shinya Azuma
‘The Grammar of Looseness: Slack Figures in the Age of Distant Empathy’
COHJU contemporary art (Kyoto)
Insights

In Shinya Azuma’s paintings, a lone, balding everyman drifts through a sequence of quietly absurd scenes: clumsily kicking a training dummy in a karate gi, driving a yellow convertible with a lit torch, or standing still as an oversized bird vomits onto his head. Rendered with loose brushwork and flattened color, these figures seem caught somewhere between meme, dream, and confession. Humor arrives first, but it carries a strange tenderness. At a moment when the world often feels overwhelming, Azuma allows for small ruptures of levity. His accompanying sculptures – a man, a baby, a dog – extend this mood into three dimensions, as if these slightly bewildered characters have wandered out of the paintings and onto the show floor. A.R.

Ciwas Tahos
‘Kindom’
PTT Space (Taipei)
Discoveries

At PTT Space’s booth, follow Indigenous Taiwanese Queer artist Ciwas Tahos on the pathway toward Temahahoi, a mythical feminist utopia rooted in Atayal folklore. The body of work charts the flying paths of native bees through ‘pswagi’, a technique which utilizes the Indigenous knowledge of sunlight and shade to trace the locations of wild bees through sounds produced by a self-invented ceramic wind instrument. Set against the intertwined histories of colonial and imperial incursions, the two-channel video work Perhaps, She Comes From/To ____ Alang (2020) associates bee die-offs with communal barrenness. Within this tension, Tahos reveals both the possibility and the challenges of queerness. This body-centered ‘Kindom’ invites reflection on how we position ourselves in an increasingly unwelcoming world, and on the companions we might encounter in a shared search for refuge – a space vast enough to hold both the familiar world and the one we long to sustain. A.S.

Stephanie Temma Hier
‘Factory’
Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal)
Discoveries

Stephanie Temma Hier’s work invites viewers to question the culture of relentless consumption that overwhelms the world with products, often at the expense of meaning, necessity, and ethics. In her sculptures, she stages unsettling contrasts: stoneware chunks of raw salmon resting among old shoes, exposed teeth, and sharp tools slicing into bright red shrimp. The scenes feel both seductive and disturbing. The six glossy ceramic sculptures seen here mimic the allure of consumer goods. They are presented alongside abstract oil paintings set within three-dimensional ceramic frames, creating a mix of allure and discomfort. L.Y.

Yan Xinyue, Elizabeth Jaeger, Leelee Chan
‘Somewhere, Not Here’
Klemm’s (Berlin) and Capsule Shanghai (Shanghai)
Echoes

Leelee Chan, Elizabeth Jaeger, and Yan Xinyue come from distinct geographies and pursue different aesthetic positions and practices. Yan’s paintings blur the boundaries between interior and exterior worlds; Chan’s new bronze sculpture, which interlaces architectural fragments with branch-like forms, contrasts with the fragility in Jaeger’s darkened flowers ‘potted’ in earthen forms that are balancing on elongated, blackened steel legs. Their works will be presented by Capsule Shanghai and Klemm’s, converging through a shared inquiry into place as an evolving field of relations – where material, emotions, and ecological systems intersect. P.L.

Sin Wai Kin, Virtue Village, Francesco Jodice, Kansai Noguchi, Ryoho Otake, Syotatsu, Yuka Mori
‘Undoing Power: Performance, Identity, and the Collapse of Archetypes’
Film

Curated by artist Ellen Pau, this year’s Film program dedicates a full day to questioning forms of power across four screenings, bringing together works by Sin Wai Kin, Virtue Village, Francesco Jodice, and a collaboration between Kansai Noguchi, Ryoho Otake, Syotatsu, and Yuka Mori. The selection explores how authority is staged and how artists can confront and reshape it. A highlight of the program, The Fortress (2024) by Sin Wai Kin, is set in Lahore, Pakistan, and follows a performer rehearsing the role of a symbolic universal protagonist. As the character begins to unravel, the story becomes a dreamlike journey, gently dismantling the idea of a single identity and opening space for fluidity and multiplicity. P.S.

Suki Seokyeong Kang
Kukje Gallery (Seoul)
Kabinett

The multidisciplinary artist Suki Seokyeong Kang, who passed away last year, spent her career revisiting Korean culture with ingenuity and poise. No single medium was enough for Kang: she explored painting, sculpture, installation, video, and even choreography. The stories she told through her works were intricate and elegant, opening new perspectives on Korean history and language. Kang incorporated everyday objects such as hwamunseok, a traditional Korean handwoven floor mat (Mat 120 × 165 #23-78, 2023), and found inspiration in jeongganbo, a musical notation system developed under King Sejong during the Joseon Dynasty (Jeong – head 3-2 #19-02, 2019), as well as mora, a linguistic unit smaller than a syllable (Mora 210 × 163 #05, 2022). Kukje Gallery’s Kabinett presentation pays tribute to Kang’s life of exploration and search for conceptual freedom by showcasing these pieces from various series. J.A.

Christine Sun Kim
A String of Echo Traps (2022–2026)
White Space (Beijing)
Encounters (offsite at Pacific Place, until April 12)

Anyone who visited artist Christine Sun Kim’s 2025 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York may have spotted three small cubes, strung up on wires, in the museum stairwell. Radiating dynamic black-and-white digital animations of shapes and stars amid an eerie soundscape, the Whitney installation, A String of Echo Traps (2022/2026) was a take on the artist’s recurring explorations of the distortions inherent between audible language and ASL. For Art Basel Hong Kong’s Encounters offsite location at Pacific Place’s Park Court – supported for the fourth time here by Swire Properties, and part of their Arts Month programming of large-scale art in public space – the piece takes on another new form. This time, the artist’s whimsical animation dances across a three-meter cube that is sure to stop visitors and shoppers in their tracks. K.B.

Masaomi Yasunaga
‘A Certain Trajectory’
Lisson Gallery (London, New York, Shanghai, Los Angeles)
Encounters

The Japanese sculptor Masaomi Yasunaga has built a name for himself as one of the great innovators in contemporary ceramics. In fact, whether you could describe what he does as ceramics at all is a moot point. His unique process reverses one of the discipline’s core structural principles, with works built from glaze, not clay, into which he might embed stones or metal, before firing the amalgam in an earthy crust. What emerges from the kiln resembles barnacled rocks or ancient tree bark, a thrilling combination of radical thinking and apparently primeval matter. It is no surprise to learn that Sodeisha, the groundbreaking movement for non-functional ceramics that he trained in, translates as ‘crawling through mud.’ ‘A Certain Trajectory’, his presentation of large-scale mosaic vessels for Encounters, explores the work’s temporal presence and the transformative power of the kiln’s fires. S.S.