Profile | ‘Call the dad instead’: Art Basel Hong Kong director on society’s expectations of women, ‘soft’ power and Hong Kong’s first art fair since the pandemic

Angelle Siyang-Le’s art career began in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates because she was ‘chasing love’. Now she is the director of Art Basel Hong Kong

On International Women’s Day, she explains why leadership has not changed her ‘bubbly and expressive’ nature, and the societal pressure she feels as a mother

Reading Time:4 minutes

Angelle Siyang-Le, Art Basel’s newly appointed director for Hong Kong. The mother of two talks about the importance of “soft” power and why it is OK to be bubbly. Photo: K. Y. Cheng

Published: 1:15pm, 8 Mar 2023Updated: 12:02am, 21 Apr 2023

In November 2022, Art Basel Hong Kong announced that Angelle Siyang-Le had been promoted to director, and that her initial task was to prepare for the first staging of the contemporary art fair taking place following the city government’s dropping of restrictions on international arrivals.

The fair, now in its 10th year, has faced unprecedented challenges since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, when it was scaled down because of social-distancing rules and quarantine requirements for arrivals.

The future of Hong Kong as an art hub is also up for debate given growing competition in the region, the slowdown of the Chinese economy and the introduction of Hong Kong’s national security law.

The law was passed in 2020 and aims to prevent and punish secession, subversion of state power, terrorism and foreign interference.

Siyang-Le (right) in 2010, when she was the collection representative of The Farook Collection in Dubai. Photo: Angelle Siyang-Le

Siyang-Le, a mother of two in her mid-30s, is a well-known figure in the art world, having been head of development for Greater China and the Asia head of gallery relations at Art Basel since 2017.