Lee Kai-chung, artist, Tabula Rasa
Pu Yingwei, artist, Hive Contemporary
Ming Wong, artist, Ota Fine Art

Moderated by Kathleen Ditzig, Curator, National Gallery Singapore

Across Art Basel Hong Kong, artists are exploring the Cold War and its spectres as an unresolved historical chapter that continues to impact international geopolitics. Why do artists feel compelled to centre this period of 20th Century history? What have they learned about the world in the process?

Venue: Auditorium, N101B, Level 1, Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre

Lee Kai-chung is an artist based in Hong Kong and London. Lee performs artistic research on historiography, ideology, and affect. Accolades include Honorable Mentions at Sharjah Biennial 15 and Taoyuan International Art Award (both 2023). Lee received the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography (2022) from Harvard University's Peabody Museum and the Altius Fellowship (2020) from the Asian Cultural Council. Recent exhibitions include Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023) and ‘Walking, Wandering’ at Gwangju Asia Culture Center (2023). His work The Retrieval, Restoration and Predicament is in the permanent collection of the M+ Museum.

Pu Yingwei lives and works in Beijing. As a representative artist of the new generation of political conceptual art, Pu Yingwei has creatively inherited and developed the visual and ideological lineage of socialist art and Chinese avant-garde art. His practice spans multiple media. Recently, Pu Yingwei has further immersed himself in the world scene, traveling to many countries in Africa, Europe, and Central Asia, including Ukraine and the Balkans, which are still in a state of conflict.

Ming Wong's artistic practice explores the politics of representation and how culture and identity are reproduced and circulated, through re-readings of world cinema and popular culture. Recent exhibitions include Sydney Biennale (2024); "Signals: How Video Transformed The World" at MoMA, NYC (2023); Aichi Triennale (2022); Hawai’i Triennial (2022); Seoul MediaCity Biennale (2021). His performance "Rhapsody in Yellow" was shown at steirischer herbst, Graz (2022), Berliner Festspiele and SpielArt Festival, Munich (2023) and will tour to Singapore in 2024.

Kathleen Ditzig is a Singaporean art historian. She writes about global histories of culture, finance, and geopolitics through the lens of Southeast Asian Modern and contemporary art. She received her PhD from Nanyang Technological University for the dissertation, ‘Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War: Geopolitics of Regional Art Exhibitions (1940s-1980s)’. She has an MA from Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York. She is a curator at National Gallery Singapore.



This talk was conducted in English and Mandarin, with simultaneous interpretation available in Cantonese.

The Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 Conversations program is curated by Stephanie Bailey.