Staged on Hong Kong’s Central Harbourfront from March 25–29, 2026 (Preview on March 24)

Entering its second decade, Art Central 2026 brings together a record 117 galleries and over 500 artists from Hong Kong, across Asia, and beyond. Firmly established as one of the region’s leading platforms for critical engagement and discovery, the fair foregrounds experimentation and cross‑disciplinary dialogue through large‑scale installations, performances, and moving‑image works alongside curated gallery projects and special features. Together, these elements transform the fair architecture into an arena for sensory immersion and reflection, situating Hong Kong as a vital node in the global contemporary art ecosystem.

Creative Programs

Curated by Zoie Yung, the 2026 Creative Program explores how technology and lived experience intertwine, asking how digital systems reshape our social instincts and sense of presence. Through performance, installation, and a dedicated moving‑image section, Yung situates digital culture as both a catalyst and a mirror for today’s artistic practices, reflecting on how the digital age continues to transform embodiment, attention, and affect across physical and virtual spaces.

Hong Kong Artist Commission

For the third iteration of this annually commissioned project, Kaitlyn Hau presents Recursive Feedback Ritual 0.01 (2026), a large‑scale installation and motion‑capture performance that translates bipolar and obsessive‑compulsive states into data‑driven choreography. Oscillating between order and instability, Hau’s work probes recursion and feedback as metaphors for contemporary emotional processes—and the inextricable mediation of technology in their expression.

Video Art

Responding to the cognitive dissonance of an algorithmic age, the moving‑image program Reading the Room examines how AI and emergent linguistic forms redefine concepts of home, belonging, and truth amid displacement, revealing the porous boundaries between the virtual and the real. Drawing on Jiang Yifan’s One Sunday Morning (2021), it investigates the tensions between human intuition and algorithmic logic. Among the 13 works are Liang‑Jung Chen’s UK Indefinite Leave to Remain Application Fee (2025), a color‑coded Google Sheet turned social performance on migration and bureaucracy; Jon Rafman’s Cloudy Heart – Strawberry Moon (2025), featuring his AI‑native pop musician; and Adrian Wong’s With Love from Hong Kong (Episode 1) and With Hate from Hong Kong (both 2025).

Performance Art

Evoking the polar extremes of light and darkness, Endless Night and Midnight Sun examines how altered temporalities, intensified by the velocity and compression of the AI era, reconfigure emotional endurance and collective rhythms. For this edition, the fair has commissioned four new performances that extend these concerns into embodied and time‑based practice: Chaklam Ng’s Shadow Work, a sound performance merging gesture, object, and digital modulation in collaboration with percussionist Karen Yu; Jiaming Liao’s IYKYK (ON AIR), an influencer‑style livestream exposing the co‑production of beauty and masculinity; Isabella Isabella’s visceral I see blood in the sky.; and Susie Au’s immersive Memory In Motion — Walk‑In‑Cinema, which reimagines the fair’s theater as a corridor of cinematic memory.

Gallery Programs

Under the guidance of Enoch Cheng, Art Central’s curated gallery programs champion both established and emerging voices, positioning the fair as a laboratory for artists and galleries seeking to establish their presence within Asia’s art ecology.

Central Stage

Central Stage at Art Central 2026 features six artists whose practices have recently garnered significant institutional recognition through exhibitions, biennials, commissions, and awards—underscoring the Ffair’s commitment to advancing critical dialogue in contemporary art. This year’s presentation brings together: Arahmaiani (Indonesia), whose multidisciplinary works confront the entanglements of religion, gender, and power; Marta Frėjutė (Lithuania), exploring how fiction and memory shape mutable historical narratives; Elnaz Javani (Iran/US), examining the body as a site for articulating trauma, displacement, and identity; Esther Mahlangu (South Africa), the celebrated matriarch of Ndebele geometric painting; Arno Rafael Minkkinen (Finland/US), acclaimed photographer and 2025 laureate of the Académie des beaux-arts; and SIDE CORE (Japan), a collective that reimagines street culture through site-specific and moving-image interventions.

Yi Tai Projects and Installations

Returning with five ambitious site‑responsive works, Yi Tai deepens Art Central’s commitment to scale, experimentation, and spatial intervention. Highlights include Alexis Wong’s Sunken Echoes (2026), presented by Yiwei Gallery, which stages a charged “shi‑field” of black rawhide mountains, translucent shells, and suspended quasi‑organic forms that attune visitors to shifting forces and flows. OrangeTerry’s monumental Found Faith (2026), presented by Square Street Gallery, and Silvester Mok’s performative laboratory The Digital Fossiliser (2026), presented by Touch Gallery, probe belief, preservation, and “accelerated fossilization” in the digital age. Textile‑based projects by Jeong‑A Bang (Gallery MAC) and Elnaz Javani (RARARES Gallery) extend Yi Tai’s global scope through layered meditations on displacement, memory, and cultural continuity.

Neo and C3NTR4L+

The Neo sector remains a vital entry point for young galleries and those introducing new artists, presenting 10 curated booths, including newcomers BOUNDED SPACE (Beijing), Kimreeaa Gallery (Seoul), NoSugar Gallery (Wuhan), and Wolf & Nomad (Miami). Meanwhile, the debut of C3NTR4L+ underscores Art Central’s evolving dialogue with digital practice, spotlighting galleries integrating new media and data‑driven approaches into their programming. Among them, Art SoHyang features Korean artist Minjeong Guem, whose video installations intertwine sculptural materiality, landscape, and affective memory.