Painting on a global scale: Discover six emerging artists at Art Basel Hong Kong

This year’s Art Basel Hong Kong is a bastion of creativity. The artists highlighted below – all presenting work in Discoveries, the sector dedicated to emerging artistic voices – provide a welcome chance to see how fresh talent from far-flung locales resonates and diverges in its approach to style and theme.

Finland’s Galerie Forsblom brings a new selection of works by Reima Nevalainen (b. Finland, 1984) to Hong Kong. His pieces combine elegiac figuration, indeterminate interiors, and the textures of collage. Tell Me What You See (2018) shows a person’s face split into two, the eyes and nose clearly detailed while curled markings drift over the space where the chin should be. Ebb (2019) plays with depth perception, showing the inside of a red-walled room interrupted by scraps of paper and patches of acrylic and sand. The tactile qualities emphasize Nevalainen’s point that, just like the figures and spaces depicted, the artworks themselves are subject to the evanescence of the material world.

The latest work by New York-based Ella Kruglyanskaya (b. Latvia, 1978), showing with Kendall Koppe (Glasgow), continues both the artist’s and the gallery’s foregrounding of marginalized gender perspectives. Kruglyanskaya’s paintings are saturated with an intriguing eroticism and populated by gestural, feminized figures, their oil-stick lines left sketchy. This visual effect expresses the unresolved place of traditionally subjugated gender positions: Are these women receding into the background, or are they, in the process of being fully realized, about to jump off the canvas?

Few artists deliver the feeling of depersonalized observation that’s endemic to our web-based era like Celia Hempton (b. United Kingdom, 1981). ‘Surveillance Paintings 2020-2021’, Southard Reid’s (London) presentation of her work, gathers Hempton’s laptop-sized paintings of screenshots pulled from an international directory of active security cameras. Each represents a time and place that Hempton plucked from endless livestreams of mostly nothing happening, watching from her studio until a moment prompted her to paint. These are works of highly mediated impressionism, hazy swaths of color that are at odds with the precision of their source. The greens of Yokohama, Japan, 21st March 2021 (2021) evoke an empty park at evening; Couva, Trinidad and Tobago, 5th May 2021 (2021) shows an orb and streaks of light in an otherwise inky night. Together the pieces gather a charge of the global unconscious straining against the dulling effects of surveilled isolation.

For Teppei Takeda’s (b. Japan, 1978) first solo show outside Japan, the artist’s painstaking process is presented by Maho Kubota Gallery (Tokyo) through a series of paintings it has titled ‘Face to Face’. The pieces appear at first to be abstracted portraits, the outlines of figures filled in with thick, random brushstrokes. However, each is a numbered Painting of Painting (2020-2021). They start as quick sketches on paper, which Takeda digitally scans and manipulates on a screen to depict the squishy heft of material pigments. He then replicates the digitally imagined strokes with real acrylics and oils. The results are strikingly colored, eerily inviting, and wholly impressive for their unique craft and ingenuity.

Ken Kagami (b. Japan, 1974) has garnered an international reputation with his multimedia art by playing for laughs. His presentation with Misako & Rosen (Tokyo and Brussels) announces its self-knowing playfulness through its name, ‘Masterworks’. Included are winking commentaries, such as Picasso with Pushpin (2018), a series of Picasso reproductions affixed with thumbtacks, and I Can’t Make Painting (2020), a canvas featuring the title written in marker pen. Also on display is a selection of Kagami’s ‘Charpee’ drawings, which mix and match the iconic drawn lines of Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and his latest video collaboration with the artist known as COBRA, called The Painter (2020). These works make the case that while the exceptional value attributed to art objects can seem absurd, it would be doubly so to think that art is anything but indispensable.

The Berlin-based artist Xavier Robles de Medina (b. Suriname, 1990) paints unnervingly meticulous replications of archival photographs. In keeping with its evocative title, ‘What if the tongue is cut out?’, his presentation with Catinca Tabacaru (Bucharest) is full of pictures rooted in invasion and excavation. Gorillas in the Mountains of Southern Nigeria: World’s rarest great ape pictured with babies (2021) catches its subjects in the bright white of a camera flash. Wayana facial painting. French Guayana. 1953. (photograph by Dominique Darbois) (2021) shows the downcast eyes of a child indigenous to the artist’s Suriname homeland. The original position of the skeletons from the double burial from Grotte des Enfants. Upper Paleolithic, Italy. c. 24000–20000 BC (2021) forces the question of archeology’s basic, interfering premise. By rematerializing the images as artworks, Robles de Medina confronts the presumed right to intrude that is common to the histories of photography and colonialism.

Top image: Detail of Ella Kruglyanskaya, The Flowers of My Secret, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Kendall Koppe, Glasgow.