A citywide rally on December 8, 2019, marked six months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. 800,000 people attended—a tenth of the total population. When I arrived the following weekend, the streets were quiet. I wasn’t there for the protests—I was there to see art. Yet I couldn’t escape the feeling that we were, as Allan Sekula wrote of the 1999 Seattle protests, “waiting for teargas”—in the lull, anticipating the moment when revolution and counter-revolution show their true selves. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong police were thinking about art, too. On December 12, they posted a parody of Maurizo Cattelan’s Comedian sculpture (2019) to social media; in their version, instead of a banana, a teargas canister is duct-taped to the wall. This is possibly the most pitch-perfect, frank response from the government so far: lobbing riot grenades is a day job for some, but only an artwork can express the underlying depths of official apathy. The Hong Kong “banana” joined the graffiti along the roadways in Central, slogans like “thx president trump / make hk great again” and “je me révolte, donc je suis”: messages meant, on some level, for outsiders like me. The art scene, too, seemed to be steeling …

Despite this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong taking place over the coldest and wettest Easter experienced in Hong Kong since 1978, the buffeting winds and rain did little to deter the audience from exploring beyond the confines of the Convention Center. Rather, the weather provided a common topic of commiseration between people with umbrellas lost, broken, and unlawfully gained. In these exchanges often lay the contrasting perspectives of a city held in a delicate balance between the celebration of possibilities and entrepreneurship, the oft-perpetuated stereotype of being exotically between the East and West, and the anxious foreshadowing of an impending loss of governmental and personal autonomy in light of an encroaching mainland China. This heady mix of apprehension and celebration became apparent in the different energies and temporalities channeled into events and exhibitions outside of the fair—a mixture of elation, of adulation, and of consideration. One of these events was Alexander Geist and Ming Wong’s performance for the album launch of That Girl (2016), a commission by UBS, which the duo presented twice in one night—first at a private party hosted by UBS at Ping Pong, and secondly at a public “Emergency Party” hosted by Flash Art, ArtReview Asia, and LEAP. Geist …