The internet is what keeps the world spinning—or so Covid-19 makes it seem. Even as museums and galleries around the world are closing or limiting access to their physical spaces, many platforms are shifting to presenting virtual programs. The problem is not everything in this burgeoning online arts realm is deserving of your screen time. Here’s a selection of viewing rooms, videos, and publications that you could peruse whether you’re under lockdown, self-imposed quarantine, or simply prefer looking at art on a screen. 

Many of the 234 exhibitors who had planned booths for the Hong Kong fair are exhibiting works in Art Basel’s inaugural online viewing rooms instead. That means this year you can use search filters and Ctrl + F to navigate the abundance of artists, galleries, and projects normally assembled at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. The platform will be accessible to the public starting on March 20, 6pm HKT until March 25, 6pm HKT. It’s not quite the same as strolling down the aisles of Art Basel and grazing on international art while looking out for local celebrities, but maybe you’ll rub shoulders on a virtual Zoom tour from one of the galleries. (We’ll publish more about the online viewing rooms after we’ve taken our own tours.)

Cross Generational Displays

For a showcase of fiber arts, click on Bank gallery. The presentation features works by Maryn Varbanov, who appropriated decorative tapestries for his soft sculptures, and his student Shi Hui, a contemporary textile artist who is credited with propelling the development of the fiber-art medium in China.

Gallery Exit has a mix of contemporary ink and oil paintings by Hong Kong- and China-based artists—from veteran Wilson Shieh’s delicate gongbi renderings to Lulu Ngie’s expressive canvases exploring the human psyche.

Young and Emerging

Leelee Chan’s sculptural assemblages of urban detritus and organic elements will be highlighted by Capsule Shanghai.

Musquiqui Chihying’s black-and-white video The Sculpture (2020), showcased by A+ Contemporary, focuses on the circulation of African artifacts, and through this lens, traces Sino-African relations since the 19th-century. 

The Modern 

If 20th-century art is more to your taste, check out Fergus McCaffrey’s presentation “Japan is America”—the provocative title of which is drawn from an Ed Ruscha drawing—focused on the developments of Japan’s avant-garde movements and the mutual influences between Japan and the United States in the postwar period. 

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) runs a slick-looking YouTube channel with plenty of video content already on there, even before MMCA closed because of Covid-19. You can take curator-led tours of recent exhibitions like “Unearthing the Future” at MMCA Deoksugung, which took place on the palace grounds in central Seoul, and watch interviews with leading Korean artists such as Cody Choi, Jewyo Rhii, and international artists like Ho Tzu Nyen and Akraam Zaatari.  

If you normally find yourself hunkered down at talks as opposed to ambling around fairs, there are online alternatives for that as well. This Art21 video follows Jes Fan to his Brooklyn glassblowing studio and Muay Thai class, and shows the process behind the artist’s sculptures incorporating estrogen, testosterone, melanin, and fat isolated from the body. Fan questions the significance of these materials in forming who we are, and poses the question: “How can we be absolutely certain that the binary can satisfy us?”

Artists have long been sharing their work via the internet. Slavs and Tatars, for one, have an online repository of their publications, including the monograph Mouth to Mouth (2017), which bundles ten years of the collective’s witticisms on language, politics, and history into one package.

Slavs and Tatars took their inspiration from Lawrence Abu Hamdan who posted three of his recent works on YouTube, including his investigation of sound recording and surveillance Walled Unwalled (2018), which showed at the Venice Biennale in 2019, and Once Removed (2019), about a historian who believes he is the reincarnation of a soldier who died in the Lebanese Civil Wars.

Enjoy these materials, and we’ll keep our eyes out and browser tabs open for the next edition of Coronaviewing.

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