Art Basel Hong Kong 2025

Last month, I visited Art Basel in Hong Kong 2025. Again, there was little digital art to be found in the gallery sector. Therefore, I will focus here on two outstanding artists: Ding Shiwei from China and Lu Yang from Japan



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Ding Shiwei, China [Represented by Hundsand Space, Shanghai, China]

Ding Shiwei born in Heilongjiang Province in 1989, holds an MFA degree from the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art and now lives and works in Hangzhou, China.

His works unfold in various mediums such as video installations, sculptures, images, videos, and interactive installations based on the experience of the screen. He invokes and appropriates a wide range of ideological discourses,popular images, and philosophical symbols, opening up the viewer's perceptual channels through the media interface, filtering and intervening with the individual's degraded user experience, thus revealing the screen landscape as an anti-utopian self-fulfilling prophecy of contemporary politics and beliefs. As a mediator between the material world and the digital simulacrum, the screen is constantly involved in reshaping and disciplining the viewer's body. On the one hand, his works re-pierce the viewer's silently alienated interface body and the observation senses, and on the other hand, ultimately adopting "kawaiification" as the categorical imperative to obscure the fanged structure, they constantly stitch together the real and virtual branching in a paradoxical perception of wit and pain.

More about this artist here
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Ding Shiwei, Borderman No.8, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Hunsand Space

Lu Yang, Japan [Represented by Coma Gallery, Sydney, Australia]

Shanghai-born multimedia artist Lu Yang creates fantastical, often painful, and shocking images which represent an interdisciplinary blend of religion, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and modern technology, as well as the allusions to real life forms and structures of natural and religious origin. The output of Lu Yang’s artistic practice spans game engines, D-animated films, video game installations, holograms, motion capture performances, virtual reality and software manipulation. The artist also collaborates with acclaimed scientists, psychologists, performers, designers, experimental composers, music producers, robotics companies and pop stars.

His work has been featured in major museums and institutions internationally including recent important solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Kunstpalais, Erlangen; ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark; Spiral, Tokyo, Japan; M WOODS, Beijing; MOCA Cleveland, Cleveland, USA; UCCA, Beijing; and Fukuoka Asia Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan. Recent works in large-scale thematic exhibitions include Asia Society Triennial 2021, New York; Shanghai Biennale 2018 and 2012; Athens Biennale 2018; Liverpool Biennial 2016; Montreal International Digital Art Biennial 2016; 56th Venice Biennale 2015 China Pavilion; and Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 2014. Lu Yang’s work has also been recently curated into exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2020. Lu Yang was awarded the BMW Art Journey in 2019, and Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2022. Lu Yang lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.

More about this artist here

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Lu Yang, DOKU the Creator, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Coma Gallery

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Open image Credit: Ding Shiwei, Borderman No.8, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Hunsand Space

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