Visitors to Hong Kong Art Week this year will have several new fairs to add to their brimming calendars. Each offers an original take on the traditional model of viewing and buying art. First off is ArtHouse Tai Hang (until 25 March), spearheaded by Jacky Ho, the former senior vice president and deputy head of department for 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie’s.
ArtHouse features the works of 50 artists across ten locations in Tai Hang, a quiet neighbourhood of century-old residential buildings. His inspiration was of Venice, where cultural venues are often scattered across the ancient Italian city. Another inspiration for Ho was ArtDrunk’s 2025 Block Party in Seoul, where an inclusive, community-driven initiative was integrated into the neighbourhood. The financial model is equally unique: galleries pay a fee only if a work sells.
Over on Sun Street in Wan Chai, Alex Chan, the founder of The Shophouse gallery, is running Check-in (until 29 March) with a condition familiar to many frequent travellers: every work must fit inside a suitcase. Nine galleries from Asia and Europe have signed up. Each day of the event also features at least one live performance or special presentation, including a collaboration between the photographer Wing Shya and the street artist Lousy on 25 March.
Lenyx Choi is part of Check-in’s performance programme
Alongside the local gallerists Ysabelle Cheung and Willem Molesworth, Chan previously organised Supper Club, an alternative art fair that closed in 2025 after two editions. Despite charging lower fees than some of the bigger art fairs in the city, Supper Club’s costs still proved to be prohibitive for the participating small and mid-sized galleries testing the waters in Hong Kong. Chan took those lessons forward: “By focusing on ultra-portable works and a flexible, mobile format, the event seeks to reduce overhead costs and rethink the scale of presentation,” he says.
Cheung and Molesworth, meanwhile, have come up with their own alternative: Pavilion, which launched its inaugural edition in Taipei in January and now comes to H Queen’s in Central (until 28 March), with around 25 galleries from Asia, Europe and North America taking part. The premise of the fair is to counter the “high-octane, super-accelerated environments” of traditional art fairs, Cheung says. The Paris-based Sultana gallery—a regular at Art Basel Paris, Frieze Seoul and other major art fairs—signed on because of the boutique format the fair promises, which Kate Park, Sultana’s director of sales and business development in Asia, describes as “retaining a commercial dimension while feeling closer to a curated exhibition than a conventional fair booth”.
Down at the Central Harbourfront, a short walk from H Queen’s, Art Central returns for its 11th edition (until 29 March) with 100 participating galleries
While already a cornerstone of Hong Kong Art Week, the fair has a new curated section titled “Central Stage”, which will features mid-career artists who have recently had major institutional exhibitions or commissions. They include the Iranian American artist Elnaz Javani and the Lithuanian artist Marta Frėjutė.