Packing is a marathon. You’ve spent your weekend driving to London’s closest emergency passport office—Newport, Wales—after that stupidly tiny book was not in your cutlery drawer like you thought. Then you need clothes. Smart ones, according to your mother. A laptop charger, according to your boss. It’s at this point you think to check the weather, and you learn the forecast for your five-day trip to Hong Kong for Art Basel—during its dry season—shows five looming rain clouds. We start over.
Hong Kong-born, London-based artist Cary Kwok once spent so long packing for a trip to Hong Kong that he was up all night, finishing just five minutes before he was due to leave for the airport. Bleary-eyed, he boarded his flight at Heathrow, passed out before the seatbelt sign blinked on, and woke up 13 hours later to find himself on the tarmac in Hong Kong. So in-flight entertainment recommendations aside, Annabel Downes sits down with Kwok to uncover the best restaurants, bars, and markets over the fair, while Elephant editors sort you out for hot picks of exhibitions.
ART
Of the five must-see exhibitions across the city, and to make it easy, three of them are conveniently housed within H Queen’s, the 24-storey art hub in Central—so we’ll start there. `
First up is the first solo exhibition in Asia of Los Angeles-based Emma McIntrye at David Zwirner. Though she’s only been with the mega-gallery for a year, ‘Among my swan’ marks the second time Zwirner has showcased her colour-saturated, abstract canvases. Four floors up, Tang Contemporary Art hosts a solo exhibition of the Thai artist Gongkan. His surrealist paintings—populated with human figures, and rendered in a graphic flatness—are joined by a playful new installation: a banquet table decked out with noodles made from magazine strips, clothes twisted into a bun, and stacks of CDs mimicking Peking duck wraps. Your final stop at H Queen’s is Pace Gallery, which hosts ‘The Shape of the World’, an exhibition celebrating Robert Indiana, one of the most enduring figures in American art. Featuring key sculptures, paintings, and prints, it marks the first exhibition of the artist’s work since Pace began representing The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative in 2024. For those who won’t make it to Hong Kong (or the 12th floor), Pace will mount a major Indiana exhibition at its New York gallery, opening 9 May.
As you’re in Central, you’re in the right spot to tackle Gagosian and White Cube who are hosts to two respective artists, who have yet to be exhibited in Asia. At Gagosian, American artist Sarah Sze takes over the historic Pedder building with an exhibition of new large-scale mixed-media paintings, and a series of hanging sculptures—delicate skeletal structures that appear to cradle entire miniature universes.
Over at White Cube, the spotlight is on Abstract painter Lynne Drexler. Following an acclaimed solo exhibition in London last year, this show highlights ‘The Seventies’, a pivotal decade in her career, featuring a trove of never-before-seen works that had been rolled up and hidden away in her home of Monhegan, a remote island off the coast of Maine.
Now if you’ve still got beans—and try to save them, because it’s good—head to M+ for ‘Picasso for Asia’, the first major Picasso exhibition in Hong Kong in over a decade. The Musée Picasso Paris has loaned over 60 masterpieces, showcased alongside 130 works from the M+ Collections by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists including Isamu Noguchi, Luis Chan, and Haegue Yang.
Getting there is a breeze: just three stops on the MTR (grab a single ticket or an Octopus card) to Kowloon Station, or a 20-minute taxi ride across Victoria Harbour. If your legs won’t carry you, there are other ways to take in M+’s offerings, without even stepping foot in the museum or the Kowloon Peninsula.
An evening stroll along the waterfront promenade on Hong Kong Island—running from Wan Chai to Sai Ying Pun—gives you the best uninterrupted view of the M+ Facade. Starting Saturday, 22 March, and running for three months, it will light up nightly with ‘Night Charades’, an AI-generated animation by Singaporean artists Ho Tzy Hyen, paying tribute to the golden age of 1980s and ‘90s Hong Kong cinema.
FOOD
Kwok’s favourite restaurant in Hong Kong, Dumpling Yuan 餃子園, stands two streets away from H Queen’s in Central. This unassuming, worn-in Northern Chinese jiaozi shop, run by an elderly Northern Chinese gentlemen, their homemade dumplings—served up fried, steamed, or swimming in soup—take Kwok straight back to his great-grandmother’s kitchen. It’s loud, it’s cramped, and everything from the menus to the benches are laminated within an inch of its life. For the full experience, grab a seat at the back, where you can watch dumplings being filled and pinched—while dodging the staff’s rapid-fire exchanges as they rush steaming bowls to fellow wedged-in diners. Just a few doors down is Tsui Wah, a beloved 24-hour cha chaan teng, a greasy spoon cafe chain which is Hong Kong’s answer to the drunken voyeurism synonymous with a McDonald’s or kebaby on any given Friday or Saturday night in London. Four-inch-heeled clubbers claw their way from the streets of Lan Kwai Fong district, to soak up the night on Tsui Wah’s French toast, Hong Kong milk tea, and macaroni soup—pasta in a light savoury broth, topped with crispy Spam, fried egg, leafy greens, shredded squid ham, whatever you fancy, really. Kwok joined them once, an evening immortalised with a photograph of himself asleep in their famed ‘Fish Curry with Rice 咖喱魚飯’ to prove it.
According to Kwok, the mark of a great restaurant lies in the consistency of their noodles. Fuck it up once, and you’d be hard pressed to get a recurring customer. Kong Chai Kee (江仔記粉麵專家), bordering Wan Chai and Causeway Bay, you’re guaranteed Cantonese noodles cooked to al dente perfection. What you won’t find here, however, is patience. This isn’t the spot for a leisurely, post-Basel, feet-up lunch. But if you’re solo dining, happy sharing a table with strangers, and know to leave the minute you finish your fish skin dumplings (魚皮餃’), and Morning Glory with fermented beancurd (腐乳通菜), you’ll avoid being tutted out the door. For the American diner on TripAdvisor who didn’t quite get this memo, Kwok offers an accommodating alternative. The Taiwanese dumpling juggernaut, Din Tai Fung, has embraced headsets and iPads to choreograph its assembly line of signature dishes like xiao long bao (steamed dumplings), steamed chicken soup, and Taiwanese milk tea. For a country with only 12 fully-fledged embassies around the world, the proliferation of these gargantuan restaurants—there’s over 170 branches across a dozen countries, including its two latest in New York City and Disneyland—is something to behold. So why opt for DTF in Hong Kong, when you could get the same experience at Canary Wharf’s ‘cosy’ 112-seat alternative? Well, Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui branch was the first to receive one Michelin star, and with a more extensive menu than its London counterpart, the five locations across Hong Kong remain the only places you can get Kwok’s favourite: glutinous rice stuffed with pork.
SHOP
If you’re coming from Tsim Sha Tsui’s waterfront, your first stop on Kwok’s Nathan Road crawl is Yue Hwa Chinese Products Emporium, just north of Jordan MTR station. A true time capsule, this legendary department store has been around since the 1950s. Once the go-to destination for Hong Kongers in search of traditional quilted jackets to brave the winter, it now sells everything from jade rollers and massage chairs, traditional herbal medicine, and Chinese handicrafts. Next up is Chung Nam Book & Stationery Co. Ltd, a five-storey stationary wonderland—and one of Kwok’s favourite days out in Hong Kong—that puts WHSmith to shame. ‘You really could spend all day in there,’ he says. If you thought that was niche, brace yourself for Sino Centre in Mong Kok, an emporium dedicated to Japanese manga and anime, selling everything from Tweety Bird key covers, to Spider-Man figurines, and CDs of Japanese heavy metal band X-Japan. For a more universal offering, there’s Fa Yuen Street Market, once famous for its concentration of sports shoe shops, now a bazaar of bargain-priced fashion, with most price tags £10 or less. Nearby, Goldfish Street lives up to its name—lines of market stalls framed by balloon arches of plastic bags filled with fish—as do neighbouring streets host to exotic bird markets, flower markets, jade markets, and a ‘ladies’ market. Our final stop is one Kwok never skips when in Hong Kong: Sham Shui Po. As an avid collector of buttons, Kwok comes here to sift through vintage fabric, deadstock fabric, buttons, threads, leathers, beads until his heart’s content.
BARS
Any night-out in Hong Kong, Kwok assures us, begins and ends with a drink under the harsh fluorescent glow of a 7-Eleven, or known to many as, Club 7s. Hong Kong has more of these convenience stores than anywhere else in the world (bar neighbouring Macau), and their offerings of cheap booze, instant noodles pots, and microwaves to cook them, have made these curbside hangouts the city’s most popular unofficial bar.
While the U.S. have taken to blasting Mozart and Verdi outside its stores—albeit, more as a deterrent for loiterers—in Hong Kong, the closest you’ll get to a dance on these curbside hangouts is with a makeshift speaker, operated out of a phone wedged into a beer-soaked 7-Eleven paper cup. Offering an alternative is Ping Pong 129, Kwok’s late-night recommendation, run by his friend Hugh Zimmern. Tucked behind a bright red door on quiet Second Street in Sai Ying Pun—one of Hong Kong’s oldest districts—this former ping-pong hall turned bar offers live music, Spanish tapas, and a rolling programme of art exhibitions spotlighting Hong Kong artists. On the Friday of Art Basel, Vietnam’s most buzzed-about house DJ, Di Linh, takes over. Listen up here.
Written by Annabel Downes
