On-site insights

David Zwirner was one of the first blue-chip galleries to open a virtual viewing room three years ago, realising how much business the gallery did via pre-fair digital previews. Collectors were comfortable buying based on PDF images and auction houses have increasingly boosted sales by posting on Instagram.

This is particularly true in Asia, where the collecting demographic trends younger than its Western counterparts and has generally been exposed to more digital art and public art via collectives such as teamLab. Chinese entrepreneur Michael Xufu Huang, the co-founder of the M Woods Museum who resigned his role and just opened the X Museum in Beijing, is typical of this trend. He's just turned 26. Increasingly it's not just about having a digital presence to sell, but offerings over and above the artwork, to entice.

Mindful of such demand, Hauser& Wirth, which, like Zwirner, took a space in Hong Kong's H Queen's in 2018, launched its Dispatches digital content initiative on March 21 in tandem with its first online exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: Drawings 1947-2007.

But here's the thing: hard as a virtual exhibition may try, it's not the real thing. What is real, though, in the virtual world, is curating a bunch of added-value content that wouldn't come so easily in the real world.

"Dispatches connects people with our artists－and all of us with each other," explains Iwan Wirth. "For many, this is an uncertain time; as a team, we needed to urgently adapt to this. With our exhibition spaces closed, we realized that necessity is the mother of invention and fast-tracked our existing digital strategies, working nimbly and creatively."