Eleventh edition

Art Central returns for its eleventh edition with a record 117 galleries and more than 500 artists from Hong Kong, Asia, and beyond, advancing its role as a discursive platform for emergent practices and new collecting trajectories.

Under the curatorial direction of Enoch Cheng, the Fair’s gallery programme introduces Central Stage, a new platform for artists with recent institutional recognition, presented alongside the latest iterations of Neo and Yi Tai Sculpture and Installation Projects. Curated by Zoie Yung, the parallel creative programme considers the impact of digital culture on contemporary art, featuring moving‑image works, performances, and a major commissioned installation by Hong Kong media artist Kaitlyn Hau. The Fair takes place on Hong Kong’s iconic Central Harbourfront from March 25–29, with a Preview on Tuesday, March 24.

Central Stage
Central Stage debuts at this edition, spotlighting six artists distinguished by recent institutional recognition—from major international exhibitions and recurring large‑scale shows to significant public commissions, acquisitions, and awards. The selected artists and galleries are Arahmaiani, ISA Art Gallery (Jakarta); Marta Frėjutė, Meno Parkas Gallery (Kaunas); Elnaz Javani, RARARES Gallery (Dubai); Esther Mahlangu, LIS10 Gallery (Arezzo, Hong Kong, Paris); Arno Rafael Minkkinen, see+ Gallery (Beijing); and SIDE CORE presented by wamono art (Tokyo, Hong Kong).

Hong Kong Commission Artist
Art Central has commissioned Hong Kong‑based new media artist Kaitlyn Hau to create a large‑scale installation for the Fair. Recursive Feedback Ritual 0.01 (2026) translates Hau’s compulsive self‑regulation into a real‑time computational sculpture, using motion‑capture‑driven visuals that loop through recursive feedback systems. Rendering psychiatric symptoms as measurable cycles of repetition and dissociation, the work reclaims bodily agency by transforming involuntary internal processes into a generative vocabulary of movement and image.

Video Art
The 2026 Video Art programme, Reading the Room, explores how artificial intelligence and emergent linguistic forms are redefining contested notions of home, social bonds, and the fluid nature of truth within conditions of displacement. Works by Liang-Jung Chen, Yifan Jiang, Jon Rafman, and Adrian Wong feature among thirteen screenings presented within a dedicated on-site theatre.

Performance
Presented daily, the performance programme Endless Night and Midnight Sun takes the extreme circadian cycles of polar inhabitants as a lens onto the fractured temporality of the AI era, where the old idiom “a day feels like a year” has acquired an unsettling new irony. Against the cult of efficiency that the Midnight Sun represents, the programme turns toward the Endless Night: not perpetual darkness, but the “blue moment”—a threshold state in which clamour recedes and perception sharpens. Comprising new commissioned works by Jiaming Liao, Chaklam Ng, Isabella Isabella, and Susie Au, the programme asks what endures when time itself has been compressed beyond recognition.

Neo
An entry point for galleries in their first and second years of participation, Neo supports curated booth projects of emerging and undiscovered artists. This year’s ten‑gallery lineup spans Asia, Europe, and the Americas, with four new galleries joining the sector: BOUNDED SPACE (Beijing), Kimreeaa Gallery (Seoul), NoSugar Gallery (Wuhan), and Wolf & Nomad (Miami). Returning for their second year are Areté Space (Beijing), Astra Art (Shanghai), Meno Parkas Gallery (Kaunas), MJK Gallery (Tokyo), The Gallery by SOIL (Hong Kong), and V&E Art (Taipei/Paris).

Yi Tai Sculpture and Installation Projects
Art Central’s platform for installations and spatial interventions invites galleries to realise bold, exploratory works that transform the Fair into a site of encounter and dialogue. The 2026 edition presents five new commissions: Jeong-A Bang presented by Gallery MAC (Busan), Elnaz Javani by RARARES Gallery (Dubai), Silvester Mok by Touch Gallery (Hong Kong), OrangeTerry by Square Street Gallery (Hong Kong), and Alexis Wong by Yiwei Gallery (Los Angeles).

Discursive Events
The Talks Programme assembles artists, curators, and cultural practitioners for a series of encounters staged across Fair week. The programme moves between registers: Susie Au and Halftalk interrogate the music video as a contested site of aesthetic experimentation and technological mediation; Kaitlyn Hau, curator Inti Guerrero, and MetaObjects’ Ashley Lee Wong trace the conceptual stakes of the 2026 Hong Kong Artist Commission, situating Hau’s generative practice within broader questions of positionality and form; media artists Samuel Yip, Keith Lam, and Ng Tsz-Kwan turn to the infrastructural and ecological conditions underwriting Hong Kong’s art tech landscape; and M+ Sigg Curator Dr. Wu Mo and GAFA Professor Fan Lin excavate the grassroots artistic ecosystems of Southern China, recovering the informal exchanges, pedagogical experiments, and unofficial histories that resist assimilation into the dominant canon of contemporary art history.