2026 Basel Social Club: Liang Hao
BANK is pleased to announce that works by Liang Hao will be presented at Basel Social Club 2026, on view from June 14 to 20. This year's edition takes "Office" as its theme and is housed in a vacant office building near Basel's main railway station. As one of the most anticipated independent projects during Art Basel week, Basel Social Club is known for subverting the traditional art fair model.
This year, the office serves as subject and stage: A vacant multi-story building designed by Diener & Diener Architekten, located only a few minutes from Basel SBB train station, will be reimagined as a living environment for artistic and social exchange. Basel Social Club 2026 reconsiders the workplace not as a site of production, but of critical reflection. Once a symbol of efficiency and growth, Office now marks a shifting reality: hollowed out by digitalization, remote work, and artificial intelligence, it is, paradoxically, more pervasive than ever.
Unfolding vertically across open-plan offices, archives, server rooms, meeting rooms, a cafeteria, and an underground parking garage, Basel Social Club incorporates the building's architecture into its curatorial framework. Works that reflect on labour, automation, surveillance, bodies, and the aesthetics of the contemporary workplace come together. Digital and AI-driven practices sit alongside durational performances, sculptures, and historical works.
Liang Hao introduces his restrained and precise brushwork into the "Office" context. The presentation features a pair of paintings of the office building at Peter Merian-Strasse 34, continuing his ongoing interest in modernist architecture. Built in the early 1960s, the building is a prime example of post‑war modernism in Basel. Its design realizes Le Corbusier's concept of the "open floor plan," embodying an era's faith in efficiency and progress. Liang Hao's depiction, while seemingly faithful, draws a stark contrast between smooth façades and deep shadows. What emerges is a seductive fable - a warning that our faith in efficiency has ultimately led to the absence of the human figure itself.
As digitalization and AI reshape how we work, Liang Hao's recurring motif of the "hand" becomes a meditation on the condition of the body. Whether it is the large hands confronting each other across a mirrored table in By the Hand (2025), or the fingers gently rubbing ash in Incense Maker (2026), the white shirt's folds extend the canvas space, serving as a metaphor for the body's predicament. These gestures stand in quiet defiance of the strange realities reflected on the painting's surface.
Concurrently, a launch event for Liang Hao's new publication, Books on Books, will take place on June 13 at House of Books in Zurich. The book is published by tria publishing platform and brings together 32 paintings by Liang Hao. In these works, the book appears both as a subject and as a medium. The images are inserted as loose reproductions into various donated blank volumes from other projects and are accompanied by a sheet of text in both English and Chinese, containing an essay by Anna-Viktoria Eschbach. Each copy varies in size and thickness, with a hand-folded dust jacket, making every copy of Books on Books unique.
