Incredible Women event, Art Basel Hong Kong

“New York on steroids” is how many locals choose to refer to Hong Kong’s social energy, and as the island gears up to welcome the international art crowd for Hong Kong Art Basel, the atmosphere is fizzing. Spirited debate, speed-connecting, champagne and female empowerment were the order of the day as PORTER celebrated Incredible Women in art with a panel of speakers including Hong Kong gallerists Daphne King-Yao and Henrietta Tsui-Leung, art advisor Lisa Schiff (the woman who Leonardo DiCaprio calls when he wants to buy a painting) and Yureeka Yasuda, founder and CEO of Tokyo Art Office, a disarming disruptor who’s changing the conversation about women collecting art in Japan.

By night, PORTER’s Incredible Women in Art gala saw guests, including model and actress Gaile Lok, French actress Ana Girardot and stylist Grace Lam (dressed in a standout macramé tunic by Xu Zhi and culottes by Johanna Ho: “I like to support Chinese designers”), mingle on the lawns of the Verandah Hotel, as the sun sank over the palm-fringed beaches of Repulse Bay. The Verandah has long been a haunt for the world’s chicest party animals – it was beloved by Ernest Hemingway, Wallis Simpson and Noel Coward, and where Hollywood film stars William Holden and Jennifer Jones stayed during the filming of Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. As designer Vivienne Tam regaled old friends about reality TV, Yasuda (dressed in sculptural Antonio Berardi) made a date to see the unveiling of Marina Abramović’s virtual reality piece Rising, and Girardot – star of TV’s Les Revenants – revealed that she was about to play an android. The conversation was distinctly modern, but there was an old-world flamboyance to the evening that Simpson, Coward et al would surely have found swell.