Preview days on March 25 and 26 drew a high-density turnout of collectors, curators, institutional buyers, and the curious. By the time the public doors opened on March 27, Asia’s largest art fair had already closed many deals. Robb Report India visited the fair grounds on the preview day for a closer look.
The fair offered a particularly immersive, almost educational vantage point. Robb Report India exclusively covered Art Basel through the lens of two artists whose relationship with art is anything but passive or touristic: Siddharth Kerkar, the Goa-based artist, restaurateur, and founder of India's largest affordable art festival; and Jayesh Sachdev, the Pune-based sculptor and founder of Quirk Box, who recently collaborated with Zara—the first Indian artist to do so, across an art-fashion-sculpture partnership.
New Sectors, New Conversations
The 2026 edition introduced Echoes, a sector dedicated entirely to works made within the past five years. At Double Q Gallery's Hong Kong debut, Polish Minimalist Natalia Załuska transformed the booth into an immersive work of geometric abstraction. Picture edges dissolving between two- and three-dimensions. At Max Estrella, Madrid, Tiffany Chung's embroidered maps of ancient spice routes hung alongside Miler Lagos' astonishing sculptures of books carved into dense, geological forms. Hyun Nahm's work at Whistle fused classical East Asian aesthetics with digital materiality, drawing on the Korean concept of chukgyeong—encompassing nature’s vastness into miniature forms—to compress ideas about telecommunication infrastructure and global digital consumption into compact sculptural form.
Encounters, the sector dedicated to monumental installations, underwent a transformation. For the first time, this section was curated collectively by four Asia-based curators led by Mami Kataoka, alongside Isabella Tam, Alia Swastika, and Hirokazu Tokuyama. Their organising framework was the Five Elements, the cosmological system found across Asian traditions, with each element—space/ether, water, fire, wind, earth—assigned to specific areas throughout the convention halls.
Perhaps no addition to the 2026 fair generated as much conversation as Zero 10, Art Basel’s global initiative dedicated to art of the digital era, making its Asia debut after launching at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2025. Named for Kazimir Malevich’s seminal 1915 exhibition, it featured 14 exhibitors and asked a simple, urgent question: How can digital art be exhibited, contextualised, and collected within today’s art economy?
Curated by Eli Scheinman and featuring 14 exhibitors including Art Blocks, bitforms gallery, and Silk Art House, the sector asked hard questions about provenance, and community in an age where digital culture evolves faster than institutional frameworks.
One moment stood out: DeeKay's digital animations that traced psychological states through vivid, almost hallucinatory movement. The work was unabashedly algorithmic and yet unmistakably emotional, a combination that felt like a precursor of where image-making is headed.
Hong Kong Art Basel 2026: Through Indian Eyes
Sachdev, whose practice moves between painting, sculpture, mythology-driven installations, and works rooted in ancient Indian iconography and rendered in chrome, glass, and reflective contemporary surfaces, arrived in Hong Kong attuned to a frequency the city answered immediately.“What I like about cities like this—which are really modern—is that you can still find the contrast of them being so deeply rooted culturally. These are ancient cultures which have now built into contemporary architectural and urban spaces. That dichotomy is very interesting,” he says.
Inside the fair’s halls, he found his own reflections in unexpected places, including the work of Fung Studios, a Singapore-based design agency whose graphic work, carrying both Japanese and Southeast Asian influences, had long been a reference in his own practice. “It was very interesting to see some of that here,” he said while speaking to Robb Report India. The fair’s embrace of multimedia, mixed media, and architectural installation formats also sat well with an artist who refuses to be categorised by medium alone. “My work is not bound to one medium,” he noted. “I don’t just work with paint or sculpture alone, so this place having a mix of all those different mediums was something I quite enjoyed.”
Kerkar, a Central Saint Martins alumnus who has navigated art fairs since childhood—accompanying his father, the celebrated Goan artist Subodh Kerkar, to exhibitions across Europe and as far as the Venice Biennale—arrived with practised eye. By the time Art Basel’s halls had been traversed, his tally included at least 10 museums and well over 100 gallery booths.
What he came away with was not a list though. “You don’t know what stays with you or where inspiration comes from,” he says in conversation with Robb Report India. For Kerkar, the act of absorbing is slow and cumulative, a process that often only reveals itself later alone, scrolling back through photographs taken in the heat of the fair.
What Kerkar absorbed at the fair was less any single work than a cumulative shift in material sensibility—the reappearance of textile, of slow craft, of the handmade in contexts where one might have expected the digital to dominate. The Encounters sector, in particular, gave him pause: the yarn and fibre works by Tandel and Kang representing a return to matter, to touch, that he found both unexpected and necessary.
Between Kerkar’s patient, cumulative absorption and Sachdev’s immediate, parallel-drawing responsiveness, what emerged was a portrait of two very different artistic temperaments arriving at the same conclusion: that Hong Kong, in this particular week, was worth every hour of attention it demanded.
For Indians, Art Basel Hong Kong is no longer simply a fair to watch from a distance. With Indian artists appearing in Encounters, Indian institutions making acquisitions, and collectors from the subcontinent increasingly visible on the floor, the conversation has shifted from observation to participation. If this edition proved anything, it is that the week belongs as much to India as it does to any other nation at the table. The only question worth asking now is whether you'll be in the room when it happens again.
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