Environmental Intersection by George Lindemann

HONG KONG -- Despite severe thunderstorms and flooding that closed schools and suspended subway service, art collectors from across Asia and the world streamed into the Hong Kong Convention Center Wednesday for Art Basel’s first branded fair in this eastern megalopolis port.

A $2 million wall-sized Yoyoi Kusama painting, a postcard-sized Gerhard Richter painting priced at $50,000, and dust — make that kiln-fired dust — tagged at $100 were among first-day sales at the initial Hong Kong Art Basel fair, sister to namesake fairs in Miami Beach and Basel, Switzerland.

Art Basel Hong Kong was far from a carbon copy of its predecessors, all owned by Switzerland’s MCH group.

For one thing, half of Art Basel Hong Kong’s 245 participating galleries have presences in Asian cities. These include world capitals such as Beijing and Singapore along with emerging art destinations such as Makati City, Philippines, and Bangalore, India. The East-West balance is key to attracting collectors and museum groups — which Wednesday included Paris's Pompidou Center and the Dallas Museum of Art — to the fair.

“Otherwise why would you come all this way?” said Bonnie Clearwater, director of North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art, who brought a group of 10 Florida collectors to Hong Kong.

Another difference: A serene, almost Zen-like atmosphere. Even as the halls became heavily trafficked during the fair’s nighttime vernissage, fairgoers found none of the frenetic crush typical of Miami’s openings or the old-world stateliness of Basel.

Partly that was due to the fair’s size. Despite featuring fewer galleries than Basel and Miami Beach, the show stretched across 366,000 square feet, compared to 215,000 in Florida and 334,000 in Switzerland.

Gallerists who had worked previous art shows here — including Art HK, an existing fair that MCH purchased and reshaped — said that the typical first-day boom when collectors rush to make splashy purchases seems to be less pronounced in Hong Kong.

“It just takes a little longer,” said Sean Kelly, a New York art dealer. In Hong Kong, unlike in Miami and Basel, reserving works on opening day is more popular than buying them outright.

Credit, too, the relatively recent introduction of contemporary art to the Asian sensibility, said Rachel Lehmann of New York's Lehmann Maupin gallery, which recently opened an outpost in Hong Kong,

“I think there is an authentic need to communicate about art. The whole process of explaining, asking questions—which we a little bit forgot in the West. It’s kind of refreshing,” she said.

And then there’s local cultural influence. “I think that is the Chinese way,” said Pierre Ravelle-Chapuis, director of Van de Weghe Fine Art in New York. “They try to negotiate for low prices on the last day.”

Despite the relatively calm ambiance, Art Basel Hong Kong brought out the rich and the famous, both in terms of artworks and attendees. Works included such familiar Western artists as Andy Warhol, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. And in the crowd, familiar names as well, including Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, Indonesian-Chinese tycoon Budi Tek and model Kate Moss. Organizers expect about 60,000 visitors during the course of the show, which ends Sunday.

As in Miami and Basel, Hong Kong stands to gain more from Art Basel than the usual trade-convention bump in hotel bookings — namely, cultural cachet. Just as Art Basel has showcased the city beyond fun-in-the-sun frivolity, Hong Kong is hoping to prove to globetrotters that it's not just a buttoned-up business capital with killer harbor views.

A severe property crunch, however, means that Hong Kong cannot support the profusion of side fairs crucial to achieving the full-whirl "Miami effect." Instead, the city's best hope to capitalize on an Art Basel reputation boost will likely come in 2017, when the city plans to open a major contemporary art museum called M+. That museum will also help educate Chinese contemporary art collectors who are now negotiating a steep learning curve without much institutional support.

In the meantime, Art Basel Hong Kong will play primary host to this regional maturation. Indeed, much of the intrigue in the halls opening day came from seeing how galleries bet on what to sell in the rapidly developing, unpredictable Asian collectors market.

Tokyo’s Wako Works of Art, a specialist in European works, decided to play the field for its first Art Basel. It brought works ranging from $1,500 to $1.6 million, and had sold a postcard-sized Gerhard Richter painting for $50,000 during the show’s first hour.

Casa Triângulo of Sao Paolo, an Art Basel Miami Beach regular, followed success with Asian collectors for works by Brazilian artist Mariana PauloAsian at the Florida fair, bring three of her works to Hong Kong. Admittedly a little out of their element—“In Miami we know many more people,” said the gallery’s director—the gallery nevertheless sold a Paulo diptych of bold-colored coral life Wednesday for $60,000.

London’s Victoria Miro gallery and Tokyo’s Ota Fine Arts had the fair’s most notable opening-day success with their booth featuring dozens of works by international art star (and polka dot aficionado) Yayoi Kusama. Thirteen of her works had sold by sunset, including the $2 million painting, a red riot of swirling tadpole-like shapes. Galerie Gmurzynska of Zurich had similar brand-name success, selling a painting by Colombian artist Fernando Botero for $1.3 million.