Grand Hyatt Friday 26-Sunday 28

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a hotel room? Crisp white sheets? Stuffing your bag full of miniature toiletries? Raiding the minibar at 3am? Whatever your personal flophouse affiliations, they are unlikely to include innovative and interesting art. Hotel rooms are generally filled to the brim with infinitely reproduced prints of great masters. Tightly screwed counterfeit copies of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or Botticelli’s Primavera are hung on endless identical walls acting as apathetic decoration rather than any form of creative augmentation.

Looking to break this tradition, if just for the weekend, are the organisers of the Asia Top Gallery Hotel Art Fair. After successful exhibitions at the New Otani Hotel, Tokyo (2008), and the Grand Hyatt, Seoul (2009), they are bringing their unorthodox bazaar to the Grand Hyatt, Hong Kong. The last weekend of the month will see the hotels rooms packed full of over 1,800 paintings, sculptures and installations from more than 70 galleries, spanning Korea, China, Japan and, of course, Hong Kong. Each gallery has been given free reign to transform one of the establishment’s quarters into an artistic atelier, utilising the Hong Kong harbour as a poignant backdrop. Paintings are to be strewn across plump feather pillows, while sculptures hide in wardrobes or laze in the bathtub.

The concept is not an entirely new one; galleries have been invading hotel and motel rooms across New York, Miami, Berlin and especially Japan for years. The DoJima Art Fair in Osaka just had its sixth annual art fair in 2009. The consecutive, contained capsules of hotel corridors offer an easy and relatively cheap way to facilitate a large number of participants while giving each the space to convey their individual ethos and motivations.

The gimmicky playfulness of the concept does not detract from the fact that the AHAF fair is a showroom by another name. The organisers have included the leading auction houses as a clear reminder of the commercial goals of all involved. But apart from being a novel way for industry dealers and consumers to compare notes and stockpile business cards it offers a rare insight into the thematic and stylistic connections that are prevalent throughout the collective Asian artistic aesthetic while promoting a dialogue between the too often estranged art markets.

Mary Agnew