ART BASEL HONG KONG 2026

 Chen Yujun (b. 1976) graduated from the Integrated Art Department at China Academy of Art in 1999. From 1999 to 2014, he has taught at the Integrated Art and the Oil Painting Departments at China Academy of Art. He is currently living and working in Shanghai. As a representative artist born in the late 1970s, Chen Yujun has grown up during the historical stage when Chinese society underwent a multitude of radical transformations. Through meticulous reflection and exploration, the relationship between individual genes/characteristics of life and the natural and cultural environment has increasingly become the driving force of Chen’s creations. Themed from the Mulan River in his hometown to the Mother River that nurtures Asia and the whole world, his imagination and brushstrokes implicitly follow the footsteps of overseas Chinese who left their hometowns in the early days. Chen intends to ask for the way out of self-redemption and the direction of human nomadism towards a further future.

Chen Yujun’s L'Étranger series originates from his experience in Hengdian, Zhejiang, in 2020, where an unfinished luxury villa became a fragment of a particular historical moment. The traces of its abandoned interior embody aspirations toward an idealized life, while simultaneously revealing the disjunction between aesthetic desire and lived reality within a globalized context. As vegetation gradually overtakes the architecture in the paintings, the boundary between human-built space and nature begins to dissolve, forming a metaphor of the “outsider”—a reflection on how individuals seek a sense of belonging amid the dispersal of shared values.

Chen Yujun has held solo exhibitions in major art institutions internationally including Long Museum West Bund (Shanghai, China, 2025; 2021), SHIXIANG Space & West Bund Art Fair (Shanghai, china, 2022), Long Museum (Chongqing, China, 2022), ZiWU Beijing (Beijing, China, 2021), Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangzhou, China, 2021), Arario Gallery (Seoul, Korea, 2020), Tang Contemporary Art (Beijing, China, 2019), Rén Space (Shanghai, China, 2019; 2018), Arario Gallery & BANK (Shanghai, China, 2017), James Cohen Gallery (Shanghai, China, 2015), Boers-Li Gallery (Beijing, China, 2012), etc. Chen Yujun has been on show at Long Museum (Shanghai, China, 2020/2014), Beijing Minsheng Art Museum (Beijing, China, 2019/2017/2015), Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts (Taipei, 2018), OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Shanghai (Shanghai, China, 2017), Today Art Museum (Beijing, China, 2016), Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art (Guangzhou, China, 2015), Si Shang Art Museum (Beijing, China, 2015), Guan Shanyue Art Museum (Shenzhen, China, 2013), Groninger Museum (Groninger, Nederlands, 2013), Galeri Nasional Indonesia (Jakarta, Indonesia, 2013), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, China, 2013), Veneto Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts (Venice, Italy, 2012), Times Art Museum (Beijing, 2010), etc. He has also participated the 2nd Anren Biennale (2019), the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2014), the 2nd Chengdu Biennale (2005), etc. Public collections include ARARIO Collection, Brooklyn Museum, DSL Collection, Guangdong Museum of Art, He Art Museum, He xiangning Art Museum, Long Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M+ Sigg Collection, TANK Shanghai, White Rabbit Collection, Yuz Museum, etc.

LEE Jinju (b. 1980) creates landscapes where memory and the unconscious, reality and imagination, and suspended time intersect. Each figure and object in her paintings carries the artist’s gaze, reawakening memory through acts of encounter. Her work begins with persistent, introspective questions that evolve into visual expressions of internal reflection. These emerge as sharp, geometric, or deceptively ordinary forms, meticulously drawn from the layered fabric of everyday life and personal memory. LEE's canvas becomes an in between space where boundaries between life and death, surface and depth, day and night dissolve, revealing a layered and fragmented world sustained by dense metaphor. In these realms, the movements of existence slip beyond the limits of time and place, weaving through the fissures of memory. For LEE, memory is constantly rekindled by sensory impressions, which sharpen awareness of both the visible and the invisible and serve as a catalyst for her creative process. Trained in East Asian painting, LEE applies its refined coloring techniques to uncanny scenes and objects drawn from daily encounters. Her shaped canvases collapse conventional ideas of time, space, and perspective, opening up complex, interwoven narratives within a single visual field. In contrast, her black paintings, where fragmented body parts emerge from pitch-black darkness, convey a more dramatic, haunting presence. The intricate details in her work reflect not just a heightened sensitivity to her subjects, but a sustained gaze and deeply thoughtful engagement with the world around her.

LEE Jinju has held solo exhibitions at ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (Seoul, Korea, 2025, 2017), Yuz Museum Project Space of Art (Hong Kong, 2025), ARARIO MUSEUM Tapdong Cinema (Jeju, Korea, 2022-2024), ARARIO MUSEUM in SPACE (Seoul, Korea, 2020), Triumph Gallery (Moscow, Russia, 2019) and Edwin's Gallery (Jakarta, Indonesia, 2018) among others. LEE has participated in group exhibitions at numerous venues including Esther Schipper (Berlin, Germany, 2024), Marres, House of Contemporary Culture (Maastricht, The Netherlands, 2022), White Cube Seoul (Seoul, Korea, 2023), SONGEUN (Seoul, Korea, 2023, 2022), Jeju Museum of Art (Jeju, Korea, 2023), Korea Cultural Center (Brussels, Belgium, 2021), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (Seoul, Korea, 2021), Jeonnam International Sumuk Biennale (Jeonnam, Korea, 2021), Museum of Moscow (Moscow, Russia, 2021), ARARIO GALLERY CHEONAN (Cheonan, Korea, 2021), Gyeongnam Art Museum (Changwon, Korea, 2021), Asia Culture Center (Gwangju, Korea, 2019), Gangwon International Biennale (Gangwon, Korea, 2018), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2015), Doosan Gallery New York (New York, USA, 2013), OCI Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2011), Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2010). LEE Jinju received Second Prize of JoongAng Fine Arts Prize in 2009 and Second Prize of SONGEUN Art Award in 2014. LEE's works are in public collections in Korea, in the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeongnam Art Museum, ARARIO Collection, SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, and OCI Museum of Art.

PARK Wunggyu (b. 1987) has consistently presented works that explore the painterly possibilities of Oriental art by creating a symbolic order of positive and negative through subjects that evoke ambivalent emotions.  He specialized in Oriental painting, captures images on canvas that evoke ambivalent characteristics, based on his artistic responses to classical Buddhist paintings from Korea and Japan. Particularly, he refers to the 'Hwayukbeop' (畵六法, Six Principles of Painting) of Oriental painting, constituted by imitation, composition, form, texture, transformation, and application. Drawing on these principles, he incorporates into his artwork ambiguous emotions and sensations provoked by 'negativity', such as negative things, situations, and emotions. The series "Dummy” that began in 2015 initially depicted forms of monsters and gods without a specific subject. However, starting from 2019, it began to adopt realistic forms by borrowing from various insects like moths and cicadas, as well as from grotesque creatures. In the 2023 work, a set of ten pieces titled Dummy No. 91~100 (2023) was introduced, showcasing the unique formative aspects seen from different parts of a cow's internal organs, magnifying and describing them in detail. Additionally, inspired by the Zen painting 'Sibu do' (十牛圖, Ten Ox-Herding Pictures) that characterizes human nature in 10 stages, the artist presented a work named The Ten Oxherding Pictures (2023), concentrating the process of eating, digesting, and excreting a cow in 10 frames. Another piece, Scar No.17 (2023), interpreted the ten types of a cow's internal organs using Chinese characters, was also displayed alongside the aforementioned works. Following his turn toward borrowing the forms of concrete creatures after 2019, Dummy No. 85 and 86 reinterpret the iconography of Eleven-Headed Avalokitesvara by rendering it insect-like in two distinct ways. By restructuring the original painting’s intricate and minute forms into bodily configurations reminiscent of insects, Park presents the two works as a paired, male-and-female presence, juxtaposing sensations of the sublime and the abject on the pictorial surface.

PARK Wunggyu was born in Seoul, Korea, in 1987. He received his BFA in Korean painting at Chugye University for the Arts in 2010, and MFA in Korean painting at Chugye University for the Arts in 2015. PARK began his active career as a resident artist at the Cheongju Art Studio from 2016. He has held solo exhibitions at various institutions such as Hall 1 (Seoul, Korea, 2025), ARARIO MUSEUM TAPDONG CINEMA (Jeju, Korea, 2025), ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (Seoul, Korea, 2023), Art Space Boan1(Seoul, Korea, 2022), Onground2 (Seoul, Korea, 2018), and Space Kneet (Seoul, Korea, 2017), Cheongju Art Studio (Cheongju, Korea, 2016), as well as group exhibitions held at ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI (Shanghai, China, 2025) Sejong Meseum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2024), SONGEUN (Seoul, Korea, 2023), Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (Busan, Korea, 2023), Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2023), Seoul Museum of  Art (Seoul, Korea, 2022), Danwon Art Museum (Ansan, Korea, 2021), Art Sonje Center (Seoul, Korea, 2021), Aram Art Museum (Goyang, Korea, 2019), and more. His works are collected by institutions such as the Seoul Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, ARARIO Collection and more.

Lee Ufan (b. 1936) is a leading figure in contemporary art and one of the principal theorists and proponents of the Japanese avant-garde movement Mono-ha (物派) of the late 1960s. Exploring the relationships between objects, space, and the viewer, he has established a distinctive artistic practice that reveals the inherent presence of materials through minimal intervention. Combining Eastern philosophy with Western ontology, Lee’s work transcends mere visual experience, guiding viewers into a contemplative and meditative space. Through restrained elements such as the “point” and the “line” on canvas, he visualizes an infinite cosmic order.

Since the 1990s, his ongoing Correspondence series has demonstrated the tension between the blank expanse of the canvas and the decisive brushstrokes placed upon it. One or several points positioned within a vast empty space are the condensed result of the artist’s disciplined breath and physical energy. Rather than repeated gestures, Lee applies a single, concentrated touch after a prolonged moment of silence, infusing the canvas with vitality. In this context, the empty space is not merely a residual void but a dynamic field of “yohaku” (resonant emptiness) that interacts and reverberates with the painted point. The gradual fading of pigment within each mark suggests the passage of time and eventual dissolution, prompting viewers to confront the boundaries between presence and absence, fullness and emptiness. In the artist’s own words, his practice is “the encounter between making and not making,” and the Correspondence series represents the purest site where such an encounter occurs.

Lee Ufan was born in 1936 in Haman, Gyeongsangnam-do, Korea. After attending the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University, he moved to Japan in 1956 and graduated from Nihon University with a degree in philosophy. He currently lives and works between Japan and France, remaining active on the international stage. He has held major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, USA, 2011), the Palace of Versailles (Versailles, France, 2014), and Centre Pompidou-Metz (Metz, France, 2019), further consolidating his global stature. His works are included in the collections of major institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate Modern, London; and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. In 2010, the Lee Ufan Museum opened in Naoshima, Japan, and in 2015, a dedicated Lee Ufan Space was established at the Busan Museum of Art, Korea.

MA Lingli (b. 1989) was born in Chengdu, Sichuan, and graduated from the Chinese Painting Department at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute with a BFA with a bachelor’s degree in 2012. Ma Lingli’s practice takes silk as its primary medium, foregrounding the material’s physical properties and the ways in which the body directly intervenes in it. Through repeated pinching gestures, combined with spray-painting, she creates folds in the silk while recording the process of their formation. This sustained bodily engagement carries a ritualistic quality and establishes an ongoing dialogue with the material. The folds do not exist as static forms, but emerge through movement—expanding from singular actions into multiplicity, like ripples spreading outward—becoming accumulations of bodily motion embedded in the material.

In a subsequent stage of the process, the artist stretches the folded silk back into a flat plane and mounts it, transforming traces that once possessed volume and tension into two-dimensional images. The folds thus function both as physical evidence of contact between body and material and as residues of continuous actions sedimented over time. The resulting images do not represent the body itself, but rather the traces and echoes of bodily gestures as they are deposited within time and material.

Working with silk—a medium that is soft and responsive—Ma Lingli seeks to capture a subtle state between the tangible and the intangible. The fluidity of the folds keeps form, light, and perception in a condition of instability, resisting fixation. The works may therefore be understood as “passages”: they do not merely address acts of looking, but open onto the generation of sensation and experience. These passages remain open and mutable; as viewers encounter the works from different positions and at different moments, new perceptions and interpretations continue to emerge.

In the silk series, many works are titled with numbers. Rather than functioning as abstract or symbolic designations, these numbers correspond to the specific quantity of folds produced during the making process, serving as records of the degree of bodily involvement. Naming thus becomes an extension of the act of making rather than a pre-inscription of meaning. Between the disappearance of the folds and the persistence of their traces, the works raise a central question: how can the body, even when flattened and subjected to viewing, continue to exist as a boundary and passage of perception, generating memory within the material itself?

Her works have been exhibited at prestigious institutions such as the National Art Museum of China, Beijing; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Song Art Museum, Beijing; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka; the Royal Academy of Arts, Kensington and the Taylor Foundation, Paris.

Aokizy (b. 1988) explores concepts that arise between originality and authenticity, as well as between digital imagery and physical materiality. Drawing from endlessly reproduced and altered digital images sourced from visual media such as comics, films, and video games, he treats these as a kind of "original" from which new works are generated. His practice traverses traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture, as well as the boundaries between reality and virtuality, through acts of output and reproduction. Aokizy is particularly interested in the irony that emerges from the intersection of the “lightness” of digital images—infinitely reproducible—and the “weight” of artworks that assert their uniqueness. For Aokizy, painting is not a tradition to be restored, but a point of departure—an “original image” that can be adapted in scale and purpose depending on curatorial context and exhibition space, and extended into three-dimensional objects. His process begins with vector coordinates inside a computer program, and through traditional mediums such as canvas and paint, he translates these controllable, digital coordinates into tangible reality. His works go beyond mere shifts in perspective; they aim to reconfigure the essence of an image in subtle ways—akin to the logic of a video game’s character creation tool, where slight changes in hair color or skin tone generate visually similar yet distinct figures. Digital images, degraded to the point where any sense of an original has been lost, are reassembled and reinterpreted within the figurative framework of a character’s face. In Aokizy’s work, such concepts are visualized in the digital realm and subsequently materialized through his hand across various surfaces and substances.

The work titled Ranpo depict the same cartoon-like face: hollow, drifting eyes and a slightly hesitant expression convey a sustained state of uncertainty and hesitation. Much like the process of cultural translation evoked by the name Ranpo, the emotions in these images oscillate between lived experience and reproducible, circulating visual templates. The work Deadlock pushes this affective grammar toward a more extreme state. At the center of the composition, a cartoon figure opens its mouth wide as if bursting into anger and a shout, appearing as though emotion is on the verge of losing control. Yet this intensity does not lead to narrative progression; instead, it is fixed within a state from which no release seems possible. Here, “deadlock” is no longer a plot-based suspension, but the result of emotion being continuously amplified through processes of circulation and translation, while gradually losing any outlet.

Aokizy was born in Seoul in 1988 and earned his BFA in Western Painting from Chung-Ang University in 2013. He has held solo exhibitions at venues including ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI (Shanghai, China, 2025), Lotte Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea, 2025), Parco Museum Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan, 2024), Tuesday to Friday (Valencia, Spain, 2024) and Art Sonje Center (Seoul, Korea, 2022). His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as Busan Museum of Contemporary Art (Busan, Korea, 2024), Schema Art Museum (Cheongju, Korea, 2023), DMZ Paju (Paju, Korea, 2023), K11 (Shanghai, China, 2023), Daejeon Museum of Art (Daejeon, Korea, 2021), Daegu Art Museum (Daegu, Korea, 2019), and Platform L Contemporary Art Center (Seoul, Korea, 2019). His works are included in collections of institutions such as the ARARIO Collection.

Buen CALUBAYAN (b. 1980) explores the contradictions inherent in the concept of Filipino identity through his artistic pursuit of self-verification. He perceives personal conflicts as microcosms of the nation’s ongoing struggles for autonomy and believes that the process of finding the appropriate artistic form to materialize these ideas also reflects a country’s inherent aesthetic sensibility. Fundamentally, for CALUBAYAN, thoughts translate into actions, actions shape objects, and objects must be reorganized into a new historical narrative—ultimately offering an opportunity to redefine his homeland’s identity. As an artist who must sustain his livelihood while continuing his creative practice, he constantly questions the contradictions embedded in his own identity. CALUBAYAN’s work unfolds at the intersection of art, labor, and education. He explores institutional frameworks such as painting, landscapes, and linear perspective, deriving from them various strategies and practices that examine the body’s rhythm, movement, and sensory capacities. Through this process, he challenges traditional models of power and oppression, seeking to reconstruct the relationship between the body and the world. Ultimately, his work focuses on the systems that operate within daily life and the institutions that shape and regulate our existence. Through diverse media and formats—including painting, drawing, video, and installation—CALUBAYAN critically examines the imposed Western visual system, offering alternative perspectives in response.

Buen CALUBAYAN lives and works in Manila, The Philippines. He studied Cultural Heritage at the University of Santo Tomas and worked as a conservation assistant at the UST Museum from 2002 to 2006 and as a researcher at the National Museum of the Philippines from 2010 to 2013. CALUBAYAN has held solo exhibitions at various venues, including ARARIO GALLERY SEOUL (Seoul, Korea, 2025), UP Vargas Museum (Manila, Philippines, 2023–2024) and ARARIO GALLERY Ryse Hotel (Seoul, Korea, 2019), and has participated in group exhibitions at venues such as Mindset Art Center (Taipei, Taiwan, 2020), House of World Cultures (Berlin, Germany, 2017), ARARIO GALLERY SHANGHAI (Shanghai, China, 2016), Gwangju Museum of Art (Gwangju, Korea, 2014), and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila (Manila, Philippines, 2013). Moreover, from 2008 to 2018, he took part in numerous residencies in Japan, Australia, Singapore, and other locations. In 2013, CALUBAYAN received a Fernando Zóbel Prize for Visual Art at the Ateneo Art Awards in 2013 and a Thirteen Artists Award from the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2009.