By Clara Che Wei Peh

A calligraphic scroll might not immediately suggest the kind of boundary-pushing work associated with Zero 10, the new global initiative dedicated to new media and digital art, making its Asian entrance at Art Basel Hong Kong, with presenting partner GoTone Privilege Club. Yet the 10-meter scroll that the London-based artist Sougwen Chung will be completing live at the fair as part of her Zero 10 exhibition ‘RECURSIONS’(2026), rethinks its medium for a technologically mediated present. Rather than traditional ink on paper, Chung incorporates biometric signals, chemically incompatible ink systems, and custom brainwave interfaces to guide her mark-making and extend the calligraphic traditions developed by her ancestors.

Staging ‘RECURSIONS’ (2026) in Hong Kong feels fitting, Chung explains by email, because her relationship with the city is itself recursive, ‘a point of origin I return to again and again, each time changed by separation.’ In this context, the scroll format becomes not simply a reference to tradition, but a living surface on which memory, lineage, and machine collaboration converge.

It’s a distinct shift in tone from works like Beeple’s robot dogs with the heads of tech billionaires and famous artists, which did the rounds for weeks on social media when Zero 10 launched at Miami Beach in December last year. While its first iteration leaned into scale and buzz, Zero 10’s Asian debut promises something more subtle and specific. Both editions aim to raise broader questions about what artworks engaging with technologies look like today and how they can inhabit the context of an art fair. Eli Scheinman, the initiative’s curator, affirms in a video call, ‘Hong Kong will be much more nuanced.’ The goal with this edition, he explains, is to ‘shape an experience that is suited to the region and platforms a different cohort of artists.’ Visitors will encounter more ‘wholly digital artworks’ Scheinman notes, including large LED-based installations and interactive works that unfold in real time.

Newcomers to the fair, drawn in by Zero 10, are Fellowship and ARTXCODE, who together are presenting Chung’s work – a partnership between the gallery dedicated to artists working with advanced technologies like algorithms and AI and the artist management and advisory service for generative artists, respectively. ‘Zero 10 takes seriously the relationship between artistic process and presentation,’ says Frédéric Arnal, cofounder of Fellowship, via email. ‘That attention is crucial when you’re showing work that involves live robotic systems and custom brainwave sensors.’

Alongside these investigations of the cutting edge, Scheinman points out many of the featured artists are asking ‘incisive questions about the use of emerging technologies that are increasingly ubiquitous in daily life.’ In Asia, where surveillance technology, digital-only infrastructure, and AI are already deeply embedded and growing exponentially, those questions may resonate with particular immediacy.

One such example is the Swedish artist Jonas Lund’s Network Maintenance (2025) presented by the Berlin-based Office Impart. It features six wall-mounted sculptures: working display screens with button controls, which each function as a node within an interconnected network. An individual’s interactions with one device will directly influence the functionality of the broader system, presenting art ownership as an ongoing commitment, rather than a passive state.

A similar interest in a collector’s relationship with an artwork – and the influence they may have over its future – appears in a new body of work by Robert Alice, the first artist to auction an NFT with a major auction house, Christie’s New York, in October 2020. SEAL (2026) connects blockchain verification systems with the ancient Sinosphere tradition of collector seals, carved stamps historically used to authenticate and accumulate ownership marks on artworks.

During his time spent working in Hong Kong, Alice developed a fascination with the ritual of seal inscription and collector stamping, and the way collectors can physically alter the face of an artwork through this addition. In parallel, he became increasingly engaged with blockchain – the decentralized digital ledger that records transactions and interactions automatically and transparently – as a tool for recording provenance and ownership. SEAL merges these trajectories. Collectors are invited to generate a unique cryptographic fingerprint derived from I Ching hexagrams, the 64 configurations echoing the hexadecimal code underlying contemporary computation. In doing so, the work links historical traditions of inscription to digital authentication protocols, reflecting on blockchain not only as a rupture from traditional collecting, but as a potential part of a longer continuum of marking, verification, and exchange.

For Alice, Zero 10’s Hong Kong debut is an apt setting to introduce this new body of work pairing the use of blockchain in tracking and authenticating ownership with the historic practice of affixing collector seals onto a work. ‘I have been mulling over this connection for seven years,’ he says via email. ‘It wasn’t until now that I felt like I had the perfect venue. Hong Kong is where I once lived and worked, and it’s a chance to engage with collectors that deeply understand this tradition.’

It’s the second Zero 10 presentation for Onkaos, the digital platform showing Alice’s work. To Elena Carbajal, Head of Digital Arts at the Madrid-based organization, Hong Kong is an opportunity to deepen their engagement with the region. ‘Asia plays a central role in the global technological infrastructure that shapes many of the digital practices we work with,’ she notes in our interview. It’s about approaching Hong Kong’s context from within, she explains, building conversations across technological and cultural perspectives rather than merely exporting a format.

Alongside its traditional white cube galleries, Zero 10 continues to expand the definition of what an exhibitor at an art fair might be. Digital-native platforms such as Art Blocks and AOTM gallery will also build on their presentations at Miami Beach. BottoDAO, an online community which governs the ecosystem around Botto, an autonomous artist created in 2021 by German artist Mario Klingemann and software collective ElevenYellow, will be one of the first DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) to formally participate in an art fair.

‘One thing we’re trying to do with Zero 10 is give these hybrid galleries and exhibitors a home,’ Scheinman explains. ‘This is not to denigrate the important brick-and-mortar physical spaces that many Zero 10 gallerists also have, but to ask what it is to be an exhibitor today in an increasingly digital world.’

If Zero 10 reflects structural shifts in artist representation and distribution, it also responds to evolving collector behavior in the region. Mimi Nguyen, cofounder of New York- and London-based gallery Nguyen Wahed, has attended Art Basel Hong Kong since 2022 and sees it as a strategic entry point into Asia. ‘I follow closely how Asian collectors are really championing digital art,’ she says, noting the rise of private foundations and digital-focused programming by museums such as M+. ‘There’s an emerging group of young individual collectors who aren’t afraid of more experimental works.’

Her decision to present German artist Kim Asendorf reflects that appetite. His new series ‘PXL Duo Pod’ (2026) furthers his longstanding interest in the pixel, the most fundamental unit of the digital image, treating it as both material and metaphor. For Asendorf, the pixel becomes ‘a utility, an asset, a currency,’ Nguyen explains. Like Lund, Asendorf will position viewers as active participants with his interactive installation where individual economic choices generate immediate consequences within blockchain-mediated ecosystems. In a region often characterized as technologically accelerated, his gallerist believes the work will ‘resonate with the digital transformations so prominent in Asia.’

Zero 10’s arrival in Hong Kong extends its dialogue centered on evolving modes of making, distributing, and collecting. ‘Ultimately,’ says Scheinman, ‘we want to platform the most important artists working in the digital medium and create the conditions to do so. In Asia, the foundation for those conditions has long taken shape. It’s a region that has always looked to the future and finds itself, perhaps, at the very center of this next chapter.’