Art Central reveals programme highlights for 2025 edition

David Ho has a peep at what Art Central has in store for its milestone tenth edition

Art Central has unveiled details of its creative programme for of its milestone tenth edition, running from March 26 to 30, 2025 with a VIP preview on March 25. Held at Central Harbourfront, the event will feature a record 108 galleries and over 500 artists from Asia and across the globe. The event has a mix of familiar and new features to its gallery programmes.

Legend

Curated by Enoch Cheng, Legend is a new initiative to highlight the work of artists born before 1970 in a dedicated area within their respective gallery’s booth. Special exhibits on the work of six distinguished and influential artists from the Asia-Pacific region have been selected to participate in Legend. The six artists are:

• Ay-O (b. 1931, Ibaraki Prefecture), a significant figure of the Fluxus movement and one of the most celebrated artists to emerge in the post-war period in Japan (Whitestone Gallery, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and others);
• Eikoh Hosoe (b. 1933, Yonezawa; d. 2024, Tokyo), the pioneering Japanese photographer and filmmaker known for his avant-garde, surrealistic imagery (see+ Gallery, Beijing, Shenzhen); 
• Emily Kam Kngwarray (b. c.1910, Northern Territory; d. 1996, Alice Springs), a renowned Australian artist from the Utopia community who began her prolific painting career in her late 70s. Her work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Tate Modern opening in July 2025 (Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, London);
• Lee In Seob (b. 1952, Busan), a prominent contemporary artist who draws inspiration from the lush natural surroundings of his studio in Eoseongjeon, Gangwon-do (Suppoment Gallery, Seoul); 
• Dean-E Mei (b. 1954, Taipei), a leading avant-garde artist known for mixed media installations and innovative use of objects to explore themes of identity and political ideology (Astar Gallery, Taipei);
• May Fung (b. 1952, Hong Kong), a pioneering Hong Kong artist known for her influential video and media art, co-founding the new media artist-run collective Videotage, and significantly impacting art education and community engagement through her innovative works and advocacy for emerging artists (Karin Weber Gallery, Hong Kong). 

Duo Projects and Solo Presentations

Duo Projects aims to encourage curatorial connectivity between artists in a shared booth space. Some of the artistic collaborations to be featured are the Duo Projects of Andris Eglītis and Dimitri Kosiré presented by CUT ART (Riga), uniting both artists’ material-driven abstract practices, and the juxtapositional works of Eunjeong Choi and Sooyeon Bang presented by Gallery Luan & Co. (Seoul).

Solo Presentations also returns to Art Central. This year, highlights include Joseph ChoÏ exhibiting surrealist oil paintings, presented by Art Project Co. (Seoul); Miaki Gallery (Tokyo) presenting conceptual master Keisuke Matsuura’s "resonance" and "jiba" series, and marking the artist’s inaugural exhibition in Hong Kong; Po Oi (Fairuz) Paisan with Core Contemporary Art (Petaling Jaya) presenting a series of recent wood-based fibreglass sculptures, and Myung Nam An with Cube Gallery (London) showcasing a collection of one hundred ceramic sculptures. 

Neo

Neo is Art Central's entry point for galleries to feature cutting-edge or undiscovered artists in their first and second years of participation. Fifteen galleries from Asia, Europe and the Americas have been selected to showcase new artists at the tenth edition.  

Photography

Art Central 2025 will present a special focus on photography.  It seeks to place a spotlight on contemporary attitudes toward photography and extend the narrative around this expansive medium. Highlights of the Photography programme include works by Chinese artist Fu Yu at None Project C14 Gallery (Shanghai); Netherlands-based artist Lo Shen Wen and the renowned director, screenwriter and cinematographer Chung Mong Hong at Avocado Art Lab (Taipei); and the late American photographer Jerry Uelsmann and award-winning Huang Xiaoliang, represented by see+ Gallery (Beijing, Shenzhen). 

Yi Tai Sculpture and Installation Projects

The Yi Tai Sculpture and Installation Projects has long been a mainstay in the Art Central programme. Curated by Enoch Cheng, it returns with large-scale works created by Dai Ying, presented by Yiwei Gallery (Los Angeles), Dean-E Mei presented by Astar Gallery (Taipei), Roxane Revon presented by The Locker Room (New York), Shinduk Kang presented by Galerie Pici (Seoul, New York) and Mark Lawson Bell presented by Swanfall Gallery (London). 

That's not all in terms of sculptures though. Art Central has also commissioned local artist Nadim Abbas (b. 1980, Hong Kong) to create a large-scale artwork to be unveiled at the Fair’s 2025 edition. Titled A Brazen Rift (After Branzi) (2025), the installation is inspired and modelled after architectural drawings created by the Italian architect and designer Andrea Branzi, whose unrealised drawings became proposals for alternatives to urban life as we know it. At the heart of Abbas’s two-decade-long practice is an interrogation of the image in an age of omnipresence. Using modular forms, Abbas frees, interrogates and reworks Branzi’s two-dimensional visions into complex set pieces, breathing new life into their ambitious and cellular-like structures. 

Video art

There is a dedicated video theatre showcasing  a diverse range of moving images. Under the curation of Aaditya Sathish, the fair’s Video Art programme is entitled “On the Shores of...", which will be an exploration of the ways in which today's diverse networks facilitate access to people and information while simultaneously creating an alternative sphere where new worlds can be found. Highlights include:

• Shu Lea Cheang (b.1954,Tainan) presents Virus Becoming (2022). A renowned artist and filmmaker regarded as a pioneering figure in Internet-based art, whose multimedia approach is at the interface between film, video, installation, software interaction and durational performance. Cheang’s works explore issues that are in a state of constant flux, including racial relations, the ecological impact of humans, the ethics of biotechnology, and sexual politics.
• Kary Kwok (b. 1964, Hong Kong) presents You Don’t Know Me, But... (1998). Working between photography, installation and fashion, Kwok’s artworks have engaged with the perceptions and demands put on marginalised bodies and subjectivities by normative society. 
• Raqs Media Collective (est. 1992, New Delhi) presents The Bicyclist Who Fell Into a Time-Cone (2023). The collective practices a ‘kinetic contemplation’, a restless and energetic entanglement with the world and time. The work oscillates between fact and fiction, investigating the increasing prevalence of video imagery and its resultant parallax sensory disjunction, which evokes the sensation of time both standing still and spiralling out of control.
• Riar Rizaldi (b. 1990, Bandung) presents Mirage – Eigenstate (2024). An artist and filmmaker whose artistic practice focuses on the relationship between technology, labour, nature, worldviews, genre cinema and the possibilities of theoretical fiction. Recently premiered at Gasworks (London), the work weaves together analogous investigations into the nature of reality, positioning Western science as just one methodology among many in a constellation of pluralistic worldviews. 

Performance programme

There is a new model for the fair's Performance programme with the introduction of Lecture-performance – an art form which focuses on research-based performances carried out through a combination of text, imagery and movement – to be presented throughout each day in the Fair’s Central Theatre. The programme, titled In Search of the Miraculous after Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader’s final unfinished work, assembles artists who approach history, materials, and the body with resonant gestures grounded in seeking. These artists engage in playful experimentation with their inherited contexts and invite audiences into open, generative spaces of play. 

Highlights include:

• Charmaine Poh (b. 1990, Singapore) presents in the shadow of the cosmic (2023). Featuring an avatar in dialogue with vocal clones, anime characters and 3D influencers within a vast digital constellation, Poh’s lecture-performance traces a technological lineage from the East Asian economic miracle of the 1980s and '90s, coupled with the advent of techno-orientalism, positing that digital representations of the East Asian femme body emerged from the confluence of these historical flows.
• Xiaoshi Qin (b. 1989, Guangzhou) presents The Landscape Between Us II (2022). Qin’s lecture-performance intricately weaves personal memories and historical reflections through a series of encounters with nature, spanning from the mountains of Nansha to ancient legends and contemporary experiences. Qin engages deeply with themes of memory, loss, and the nuanced relationship between humanity and the landscape, reflecting on mankind's enduring pursuit of understanding and belonging. 
• IV Chan (b. 1978, Hong Kong) presents Our Birthdays (uncut) (2025). In her newly commissioned piece for Art Central 2025, Chan draws from the campy formalism of B- Movies, delving into the horror genre to examine the dual figures of the vampire and the mother in Chinese cinema. Chan’s performance articulates the profound entanglement of queerness with the legacies of horror. 
• Hou Lam Tsui & Wong Pak Hang (b. 1997, Hong Kong / b. 1995, Hong Kong) presents Reaching This Point is the Limit (2025). Inspired by their visit to a Sham Shui Po mall teeming with old CCD cameras and DV camcorders, the artists revisit personal memories through the lens of outdated, malfunctioning, low-pixel electronic devices. Their work endeavours to assemble the fragmented threads of past, present, and future while contemplating the notion of death within a digital context. 
• Shavonne Wong (b. 1991, Singapore) presents Talking to Machines: When AI Becomes More Than a Tool (2025). Wong’s performance, conceived as a social experiment, centres on Eva, an AI companion designed to catalyse discussions about our relationships and emotions in an increasingly AI-integrated world. Through Instagram interactions and real- time conversations, Eva prompts a deeper contemplation of the emotional complexities and ethical implications associated with artificial intelligence.

Tickets to Art Central are now available. Visitors are encouraged to book online in advance here. 

Also see: Art Basel reveals highlights for 2025 event in Hong Kong