Once a niche corner of collecting, digital art is now gaining real traction in Hong Kong’s art market, finding resonance among the city’s galleries, collectors and institutions.

With Art Basel Hong Kong opening its doors on Friday, that shift takes centre stage with the Asia debut of Zero 10 — a global initiative dedicated to digital-era art, following its launch at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2025.

The programme has been carefully re-contextualised for a city that curator Eli Scheinman believes possesses a unique fluency in new media.

"From the very beginning, Hong Kong has been one of the additions we saw as having this regional context that imbues the presentation of work with a very specific texture," he told RTHK.

"There’s a fluidity and a literacy here that does frankly not exist across some of our other editions."

That local fluency, he believes, makes the city an ideal testing ground for an initiative designed to reshape how digital art is exhibited, contextualised and collected.

Rather than a static travelling exhibition, Zero 10 has been tailored to regional sensibilities.

It features 14 exhibitors, with works ranging from blockchain-based provenance projects to hybrid installations that blend traditional ink painting with artificial intelligence.

The approach, he said, addresses a persistent challenge in the digital art market: collector hesitancy.

Scheinman said he has structured Zero 10 to act as a bridge, showcasing not only purely digital works but also physical manifestations of digital practices — sculpture, painting and ink on paper.

"That’s very intentional so that we can have a conversation and a dialogue with collectors that digital practices do not necessarily only mean video-based works, and that you can collect and experience digital practices in many different ways," he said.

That hybrid model resonates with Tim Yip, the Hong Kong-based artist and Oscar-winning costume designer, who is presenting a work from his “Lili” series within the Zero 10 sector.

His installation pairs a 4.5-metre-high mannequin-like sculpture — a mirror for human experience in a dystopian, artificially shaped future — with two AI films exploring identity and layered realities.

"We have to find a more mature and creative mind to create how to express ourselves, not even culture-wise, but every step of life to sharing what we can feel," Yip said.

Both he and Scheinman acknowledge the challenges posed by generative AI.

Yip warns that as AI accelerates cultural mixing, "originality will become more and more unclear. So for Hong Kong, it really needs to strongly express themselves different from the others".

His answer is a return to the personal: "Calm down, get away from the concept, go back to experience or your personal speciality."

Art Basel will take place from March 27 to 29 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.



Edited by Tony Sabine