With Supper Club, Hong Kong Gallerists Try to Create the Anti–Art Basel

This week, for those in Hong Kong looking for a change of scenery from the hustle and bustle of the show floor of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, there’s Supper Club.

The brainchild of Willem Molesworth and Ysabelle Cheung (the founders of PHD Group gallery) and Alex Chan (a cofounder of the Shophouse gallery), Supper Club is a kind of not-fair pioneered by other such alternative events like Basel Social Club during Art Basel and, more recently, Our Week during Frieze Seoul.

Located in the stately 19th-century building that is home to arts nonprofit Fringe Club, Supper Club presents works for sale from 20 galleries from New York to Mumbai to Hong Kong in this exhibition-cum-fair. The hope, Molesworth told ARTnews in an interview Wednesday, is to create a space for networking, chatting, connection, and real engagement with the art, which the team felt was lacking at the big fairs.

“That’s what contemporary art is all about,” Molesworth said. “It’s about connecting, networking, chatting, and, ultimately, making sales, of course. But, when you’re showing really boundary-pushing stuff, it’s difficult to pull the trigger. You want to learn, you want to chat, you want to talk about it.”

The venue opens as Art Basel Hong Kong closes each day, running from 4pm to 1am through March 30. Tickets are $150HKD, or around $19, and come with a drink.

ARTnews sat down with Molesworth to discuss the genesis of Supper Club and the challenges and joys of the contemporary alternative art fair

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

ARTnews: Can you walk me through how you came up with the idea for Supper Club?

Willem Molesworth: We just recently participated in the first art fair that PHD Group has ever done. It was Liste in Switzerland, which is seen as the best fair in the world for young galleries to emerge onto the fair circuit. While we were there, we visited Basel Social Club, which has become a bit of a phenomenon. It’s this really trendy, fun, cool event that happens during Art Basel. That year, they took over an abandoned mayonnaise and ketchup factory, a huge space, and they had over 90 galleries and they just kind of placed artists’ work throughout the space. It was this wonderful process of hanging out, networking, discovery, and chatting. It felt like a much more authentic engagement with the contemporary art scene than most fairs. You could buy things there—scan a QR code and make an inquiry—and work did sell. We found that hugely inspiring.

Then we participated in an event inspired by Basel Social Club in Korea, during Frieze Seoul, called Our Week, founded by our friend Soo Choi, who runs Seoul’s P21 Gallery. She pulled that together in like three weeks. It was very quick and very punk. And because of the speed at which it was put together, it was a lot of fun. But it was also not. It didn’t really create an environment that actually encouraged sales, or proper networking. It was in like a bar district, so drunk people would wander in.

There were all these little things that we felt like if it was considered a little bit more, it could be really effective. So that’s what we then strove to do. We didn’t initially want to do this because we know the workload is tremendous. But people kept approaching us. In particular, this very prominent, important curator in Hong Kong came up to us and said, You should do this. We said, No way—it’s too much work. And then an important gallery from Beijing came to us and said, Please do this. We didn’t want to do it.

Finally, another Hong Kong gallerist, Alex Chan, said, “Hey, let’s do it.” Chan runs this gallery called the Shophouse with a partner. He’s an ambitious young gallerist with really nice taste. His gallery is in a heritage building. It’s not a white cube. So we decided to divide and conquer the labor.

Initially, the idea was to use abandoned mini-malls. Everybody would get a tiny little mini-mall space to show their work. It’s a really fun idea, but then you think deeper and it starts to crumble. Those places are not very air-conditioned. Even one of the nicer spaces we found had a really horrendous smell to it. The flow of traffic would be really terrible, and then people would be in and out. There would be no lingering, chatting, network building. That’s what contemporary art is all about. It’s about connecting, networking, chatting, and, ultimately, making sales, of course. But, when you’re showing really boundary-pushing stuff it’s difficult to pull the trigger. You want to learn, you want to chat, you want to talk about it.

We were having a lot of trouble finding a space when, very fortuitously, a curator brought in the head of Fringe Club to PHD. In our little study space [at the gallery], we very naturally end up having these salon-style meetings that often last all day, basically. So he participated in one with a bunch of friends of ours who were in tech and art and a curator from M+. It was a wonderful conversation. Afterward, he was like, ‘Wow, that was pretty remarkable.’ I told him we were looking for space to do something and maybe Fringe would work. It’s like a community art space, but recently it has encountered some troubles. The attendance has not been doing very well. Their reputation within the city has kind of fallen off. It used to be a real center for avant-garde performance. But they made some changes recently and they are really trying to up their game.

The Fringe Club is a beautiful, old building, a Grade-I heritage site, so you can’t drill into the walls at all. You can’t modify the building in any way. When you want to do something ambitious, you have to think about how to make free-standing or self-standing structures. So the walls in Supper Club are hanging from rods that are preexisting within the structure. We had to work with architects to think about how to do this best. We worked with Beau Architects to adapt the space. The walls we put in are these floating wooded panels brushed with oil. Our inspiration for that came from this interesting talk at Hong Kong University with a person from Milan’s Space Caviar, which advocates for non-extractive architecture. It’s all about not wasting materials, using locally sourced materials, and trying to use what’s preexisting in a space. That might even mean, for example, going to a hardware store, buying bricks, and then returning the bricks when you are done. You want to waste absolutely as little as possible, while still being beautiful, creative, and innovative. That ethos was so inspiring to us and we tried to bring that to this project.

You mentioned that some of the fairs that were an inspiration for Supper Club didn’t quite get the balance between creating an exhibition and a fair where works sell. What is the Supper Club team trying to do differently to locate that right balance?

It’s such a subjective thing. Where is the line? And it’s probably not a line, but a gray zone. I’m sure for certain people, we’re in that zone and for certain people we’re out of it. We brought together a really incredible team. Alex, Ysabelle, and I were able to bring on board a project manager who had done small art fairs, like Sophia Lam; Charlotte Raybaud, an auction house specialist who is very well-connected within the client community; and curator Anqi Li. With them, we collectively decided how to make this gray zone. So a little example is that, initially, I didn’t think we were going to sell tickets. I wanted as many people in as possible. But then we realized that charging tickets contributes to creating this space that allows sales to happen. It creates a more serious conversation, because like I said, when we did Our Week, a bunch of drunk people came in and really ruined the energy. You can’t have a nice conversation when a bunch of 20-somethings are shouting. A simple ticket fee at the door prevents that. With that little barrier to entry, we had a million little conversations like that. I think we did pretty well.

Did you all learn a lot about fairs in the process of making one?

I’ve actually done it before, twice.  When the pandemic first started and Art Basel canceled its show in Hong Kong, I was the vice president of the Hong Kong Gallery Association. As a gallery association, we felt it was a call to action to do something. We very quickly pulled together Unscheduled, which was an alternative art fair only for our member galleries in Hong Kong.  That experience introduced me to Beau Architects. I came to really think that they are brilliant. It’s a husband and wife duo, Charlotte Lafont-Hugo and Gilles Vanderstocken. The first time we did it was very good. Everyone loved it. The second time, we pushed the envelope too much in terms of how challenging the architecture was. We wanted to create a fair where, the divisions between galleries was literally a permeable barrier, which meant that we were using see-through hanging curtains that you had to push through to get through the fair. Galleries really didn’t like it. I lost friends over it. I lost relationships with artists over it. It was a quite an experience. So I disavowed the whole thing. I was really put off by it, so that was also a hurdle to doing Supper Club. I didn’t want to experience that again. After I saw Basel Social Club and Our Week, I was like, Oh my god, we don’t need booths. There’s other ways to do this.

Does hanging all the work together introduce a challenge? Everyone hates on booths, but it does create a single space for a gallery to occupy and explain the work on view to interested collectors and viewers.

Yes and no. Part of why Supper Club has been so fun is because we’re working with really incredible like-minded galleries from across the world that get what we’re doing frankly. I’ve done things like this for many years in the past. Basel Social Club is a phenomenon not because it’s new, but because it’s very successful. This kind of thing has been happening for years and galleries love doing it. It’s a very certain kind of gallery, so we’ve attracted that community with Supper Club and people are really enjoying it and having fun. I think the gray zone is difficult for some collectors. I had a collector yell at me two days ago. Maybe it’s because I started laughing. When she walked into the room, she started shouting for one of the galleries. I tried to explain, “No, they’re not here, but you can inquire through the QR code next to the artwork. Just send them an email.” She was like, “But I want to buy it now!” And then I started to explain that, you know, as gallerists, it’s not great to work these things all the time and that she should make an inquiry and someone would get back to her. She said, Arrogant! to my face and then walked away. So, you know, some people are uncomfortable. It’s a new model.

Did you previously know the galleries that are participating in Supper Club or was this process a way of meeting new like-minded galleries?

It was a bit of a mix. We did know a lot of these galleries. For example, I had relationships with Nova Contemporary, 47 Canal, the Shophouse, Mou Projects, MadeIn Gallery, Vanguard Gallery, out of the 22 showing. Sometimes, friends would connect us, like with Tarq [from Mumbai]. Other times, it was a gallery recommending another gallery: 47 Canal recommended Misako & Rosen [from Tokyo], which is an incredible gallery, and I am very, very happy to be connected to them. That’s kind of how it worked.

When you were coming up with this concept, were you responding to something that collectors were looking for too? Obviously, there are liked-minded galleries, like you are saying, that find art fairs an exhausting and expensive proposition. But were there collectors in the city who said they were looking for this?

For sure. Hong Kong is a very commercial city—there’s no getting around that—but it’s also a very artistic city. And there’s an incredible amount of culture that’s happening here, despite how commercial it is. It’s odd to explain, because when you talk about commercial, you think that it comes at the cost of creativity. And it certainly does sometimes, but it’s not a hard line. There’s still a lot to be done, and that can be done and people crave that. We, here, at PHD group, as well as at other spaces like Current Plans and Empty Gallery—there’s a lot of great galleries doing very experimental things—have started to create this space. There are collectors who engage with us very seriously from across the region. There was absolutely room and desire for something like this. Collectors want to have a space to engage with art in a different and more fun way.

To really get an overview of what’s happening: I heard a collector at Frieze Seoul talking about the art fair as a survey of the art scene and, I was like, that is so terrible. It is not a survey of the art scene. It is a survey of the market. There are all these factors deciding what’s presented and that is why everything on the walls is paintings. It has nothing to do with the survey of the art scene and what’s happening. And so there needs to be other models.

Part of the appeal of Supper Club is that we’re very inexpensive. We really charged galleries just what it would cost to get it done and not more. The participation fee is $30,000 HKD, which is around $3,800. It’s not nothing but compared to a traditional art fair, it is nothing. So you feel more willing to show the really interesting aspects of your program.

As far as the presentation that galleries brought to Supper Club, were there particular themes that Anqi or the rest of the team wanted to build into the show? 

There’s no theme. Part of what’s different about Supper Club is that we didn’t tell galleries what to show. We didn’t participate in that at all. The loose rule was that each gallery can bring three artworks that are 100×100 centimeters [about 3.25 feet per side]. That was it. If a gallery wanted to bring one large work instead, that was OK, or four or five smaller works. We really trusted the galleries to bring something made sense.

What does curation look like in that case?

Curation is … difficult. Anqi had a big challenge on her hands there because she was basically trying to group things together, spatially, in a way that makes sense. She had to work very closely with our architects in order to figure out what goes where and how it could look good and engage and make sense.

Assuming you do it again next year, are there things you did in this iteration that you would do differently next time?

Always, always, always. I was having ideas last night about what we could do differently. There’s so many different ways of doing something. We’ve rented five rooms in Fringe and I was thinking, what if we just did five galleries and each one got a room to make a really immersive solo presentation. That’s a totally different version of it right there. Obviously, that would change everything, but maybe it would be more manageable. There’s a million different ideas and ways that you could do something.

Source: artnews.com