In May, Art Basel announced it would start a Qatar edition in February 2026 — the first for an international art-fair group in the Middle East. The world’s biggest organizer of modern and contemporary art shows boasts a global lineup, currently holding yearly events in Hong Kong, Miami Beach, Paris and Basel.

The new venture will be hosted in partnership with Qatar Sports Investments, which, as widely reported, was instrumental in helping stage the 2022 FIFA World Cup in the Gulf nation. Its involvement in bringing the region’s first Art Basel show to Qatar four years after the country basked in the global spotlight is deeply significant.

Indeed, as Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, chairperson of Qatar Museums, said in a press statement, “When we welcomed the world to Hamad International Airport for the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, the power of merging culture with sports could not have been more evident.”

The Qatar edition of Art Basel is the latest in a series of focused cultural explorations that the Gulf nation has been pursuing for years. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha was designed by IM Pei. Qatar is known for its world-class art collections and a widening list of museums and exhibitions. To quote the sheikha, “We have opened the National Museum of Qatar and the 3-2-1 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum, and this year we will launch the Lusail Museum and DADU: Children’s Museum of Qatar.” A permanent Qatar Pavilion will be unveiled in the Venice Biennale — the first new national pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale in 30 years.

Clearly, Qatar has prepared the cultural ground well.

So far, Art Basel’s annual show in Hong Kong, officially branded a mega event in the city, has been the only one of its kind outside North America and Europe. While Art Basel Qatar is primarily focused on the Middle East and North Africa, it is also looking at South Asia and further afield.

According to Art Basel and the UBS Global Art Market Report 2025, the global art market recorded an estimated $57.5 billion in sales in 2024, while total sales value declined 12 percent year-on-year. This was a much sharper decline than in 2023, when sales dipped by 4 percent year-on-year.

A nurturing arts ecosystem that goes beyond the return-on-investment mindset to pursue excellence with the humility and scope to elevate the human experience can bring immeasurable dividends

With another edition of Art Basel in Asia, albeit West Asia, amid shrinking sales, should Hong Kong worry yet? Apparently not.

Census and Statistics Department data shared at the Legislative Council in May suggests the total trade value of works of art, collectors' pieces and antiques stood at around HK$105.5 billion ($13.44 billion) in 2023, making Hong Kong one of the world's top three art trading centers.

According to the 2024 Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting report, in 2023, global imports of art and antiques were valued at $33 billion. Hong Kong was the second-biggest importer of art at 19 percent, trailing the US, which has a 32 percent share. Significantly, high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) from the Chinese mainland spent most on art and antiques in 2023 and the first half of 2024 with a median spend of $97,000 — more than double that of any other region.

Industry estimates cited by Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau tell us there were more than 150,000 ultra-HNWIs with investable assets of at least $30 million in Asia in 2022, representing one-fourth of the global ultrahigh-net-worth population. As of the end of 2022, Hong Kong’s asset and wealth management business was worth approximately $3.9 trillion, with $1.15 trillion in assets under management in private banking and private wealth management.

It is no surprise that the world’s top three art and antiques auction houses — Phillips, Sotheby’s and Christie’s — have their respective regional headquarters in Hong Kong, which is a gateway to the world’s biggest market of sellers and buyers in the Chinese mainland, and which has zero tariffs, a low tax rate, a convenient transportation network and strong financial integration capabilities.

It does help that Hong Kong’s Mega Arts and Cultural Events Fund has, since its establishment in 2023, supported 21 mega arts and cultural events, with a total approved funding of about HK$230 million.

From an art tourism point of view, a Junior Chamber International Hong Kong survey’s findings revealed in May that around 15 percent of international visitors to Hong Kong favored arts and cultural venues. So how big is art tourism? Grand View Research put the value of the global art tourism market at $44.0 billion in 2023 with a projection to grow at a compounded annual rate of 3.1 percent from 2024 to 2030. For Hong Kong, which logged 44.5 million arrivals in 2024, art tourism cold indeed be a significant market. In fact, the city's contemporary art museum, M+, received 2.8 million visitors in 2023, making it one of the top 20 most-visited in the world.

But art is not all about the economics or the bottom line of cultural explorations and expansion. A nurturing arts ecosystem that goes beyond the return-on-investment mindset to pursue excellence with the humility and scope to elevate the human experience can bring immeasurable dividends. Hong Kong pianist Aristo Sham’s prestigious win at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is a case in point. The muted media greeting of his feat is a bigger case in point.

It is heartening that when congratulating Sham, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu pledged last week that authorities will be “looking closely at the need to strengthen opportunities for different areas of art so as to develop talent”.

Coming back to Qatar in 2017, The Salesman, a Qatar-financed film, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars — a first for Qatar and the first time in 48 years that a film co-financed by an Arab country had won the prize. In fact, 10 Qatar-financed films have been nominated for Academy Awards so far.

Big money matters. Transcendental human experience matters much, much more.

The author is an award-winning English-language fiction writer and current-affairs commentator.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.