Visitors at Photofairs New York 2023. The fair was cancelled this year
Photo: V.Photos
The inaugural Photofairs Hong Kong will debut next March, aligning with Art Basel in Hong Kong (28-30 March) and the slew of cultural events that the local government brands as “Art March”. It will become the latest Shanghai fair to launch an offshoot in the city, with the contemporary art-focused Art021 opening its first-ever Hong Kong edition next month.
Photofairs Hong Kong will be held in Central, in an independent 5,600 sq m tent erected on the waterfront’s west side, in what is a similar setup to the concurrent fair Art Central (26-30 March), says, Scott Gray, founder and chief executive of Creo. It expects to welcome between 50 and 75 exhibitors.
Photofairs Shanghai, meanwhile, will next year move to May from the April slot it has held since 2023. It had previously been held in September, and it was paused in 2022 during the city’s harsh lockdowns.
Gray did not comment on what impact the new Hong Kong project might have on the Shanghai edition as well as the fair in New York, which was launched in 2023 but cancelled this year. A San Francisco edition was also held in 2017 and 2018. “There has been great interest in participating in the US fair, but feedback from a number of galleries has cited the difficult environment at this time,” Gray says. “Our priority is mounting a dynamic and high-quality event, so we will continue conversations with our community of dealers and collectors in determining future plans.”
Photofairs Hong Kong will be led by the Shanghai fair director Fan Ni, a longtime figure in the mainland art world. Before joining Photofairs Shanghai in 2019, she was associate publisher of Art Review Asia and previously worked at the Beijing museum UCCA. Gray did not address what having a director based on the mainland might mean for a Hong Kong fair, and whether any steps such as involving curators from Hong Kong or the surrounding Pearl River Delta for special sections might be taken to give it more of a Hongkonger, Cantonese character. He notes, however, her experience in leading projects across the wider Asia Pacific region, including during her time at ArtReview Asia and UCCA.
Organisers added in a statement that “all fairs are embedded in the cultural ecosystem of the specific location they are set in”, and that exact programming elements will be announced nearer the opening of the fair.
Many of Hong Kong’s top dealers, such as Blindspot and Kiang Malingue, are expansively multi-media, with strong rosters of local contemporary artists working in photography and video such as South Ho Siu Nam and Ellen Pau. Gray references a “great appetite for photography in Asia, and Hong Kong remains one of the leading hubs of the art market globally, making it the perfect location for Photofairs.” Launching during art week will make it “the destination for photography during the city’s unmissable annual moment, drawing the leading tastemakers of the international art world,” he says.
Like Photofairs Shanghai, the Hong Kong fair is primarily organised by the London-based company Creo Arts, which also operates both the Sony World Photography Awards and Sony Future Filmmaker Awards, as well as Photo London and Agnus Montgomery Arts, which is affiliated to fairs including Taipei Dangdai and Hong Kong’s Art Central. It also partners with mainland China publishing group Meta Media, formerly Modern Media. The new fair gains as a partner the Hong Kong entertainment events company Great Entertainment Group (GEG). Founded more than 30 years ago, GEG’s projects include The World Circus Hong Kong and managing the 60m-tall ferris wheel in Central Hong Kong.
Of the new fair’s ownership structure, Gray says: “We do not publicly comment on the specific details of our financial interests.” Last year, Gray confirmed to The Art Newspaper that the New York fair was 71% owned by Creo Arts Group Ltd and AMA, 10% by Photo London producer Candlestar Ltd, and 19% by Novel Investments, which is owned by Meta Media’s Thomas Shao. Meta Media holds the same share of Photofairs Shanghai while Creo and AMA own 81%.
