Focus Art Fair 2025
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Sunlight finally peeked out on Manhattan this Thursday evening, just as a line started wrapping around Chelsea Industrial, on West 28th Street—artists, fans, collectors, and Andres Serrano, all queuing for a first look at Focus Art Fair, “the only NYC fair dedicated to the intersection of tech-enabled and traditional art.” Inside, 52 exhibitors from over 10 countries explore this year’s curatorial theme, “Human Creativity vs. Machine Potential,” with an eye for East Asian artists.
Focus Art Fair first launched in Paris in 2019. For three years now, the event has happened in New York, Paris, and London—in that order, at least, this year. One single curatorial question has typically anchored all three editions throughout that calendar, though that may change soon.
Art fairs—unlike, say, biennials—don’t generally tend to have such extensive curation. But Focus Art Fair wants to be different, to transcend the fair format’s drawbacks (namely, overwhelm) by organizing theirs like a story, courting that ancient human affinity. Sections A and B introduce exhibitors straightaway. Section P recreates 16 artists’ studios, their names listed on each outer-booth gallery label, with their addresses below. Section C has machine-oriented art.
Section P also features an open call booth. Focus Art Fair’s curators chose four artists from hundreds of applicants. That corridor then opens back out on Section B’s conclusion—a ring of booths surrounding the lounge, where opera singer and pianist Alice Wang performed opening night, with violinist Stephanie Yoshida and cellist Allen Liang. Stage right, “extreme performance artist” Angela Nikolau debuts the starkly new body of work she’s teased to her 1 million IG followers since December. Do you think Nikolau caught “Welcome to the Rabbit Hole” last Fall?
There’s an eclectic array of works along that path. French provocateur ORLAN signed copies of her memoir in her booth right at the front of Focus Art Fair on opening night. Just a few doors down, Japanese photographer Mitsuhiro Higuchi is presenting an intricate costume he created, on a mannequin standing before an artwork depicting its recipient—superstar J-Pop singer Miu Murayama, of Sakurazaka 46. He also designed the look for their Tokyo arena show last year.
Art fairs are often free for alls. I still have a map of Messeplatz, painstakingly annotated to ensure I’d hit every booth in those maddening circles at least twice. While Focus Art Fair’s flow is far more organized, partially due to the comparatively compact venue, several key choice points remain. Ideally, as curator manager Eriko Ozaki told me amongst the fair’s press preview, guests will continue from the middle of Section B into the studios of Section P. When I first read about this concept, I wondered why other fairs hadn’t tried honoring the studio. In person I realized, perhaps, why they haven’t. It’s a visual chaos even the fair floor isn’t built for. But, lingering a second, the scene became comfortable, like I was really on a studio visit. I almost went to light a cigarette. Instead, my friend and I took turns on a mixed reality headset, trying the artistic therapy adventure that South Korean artist Sun-Joo Chung created for Gen Artainment.
Indeed, the biggest and boldest booths ring this gathering space. New media sculptor Jinah Roh has installed four huge, functioning human heads. One had eyes that followed me as I pranced about. The works arrived by sea at 2pm that day, Ozaki said. I snuck a peek at their brains mid-install. Smaller than I thought. Nearby, enter the bright pink wonderland of Ashley Longshore, the self-professed “feminist Andy Warhol” who left her infamous New Orleans atelier for New York two years ago. Bouquets bloom in this other cult favorite creator’s maximalist acrylic paintings. Her glittery, wall-mounted letters deliver dirty jokes, and her sculptures bear famous faces. Elon Musk appears on a big Black card with neat lines of white powder atop it.
Dutch artist-architect Florian Markus’s installation of machine drawings—as well as the machine doing the drawings—ushers guests into Focus Art Fair’s final section, focused on tech-savvy works. It’s the fair’s most sophisticated area, if also its sparsest. The sound of “Mesmerine 111” by pioneering sound collective Illustrious Company fills that space. Blindfolds (ironic, in a fair context) are available for true immersion into this 50-minute soundscape, which utilizes the prehistoric, shamanistic 111 hz frequency. Those who forgo blindfolds can watch the uncanny pharmaceutical ad that British remix group Eclectic Visuals patchworked as an accompaniment.
Here, Focus Art Fair’s narrative-driven approach reaches its climax. Section P’s frenzy clearly contrasts Section C’s calm. This meditative space is sort of an anticlimactic end, until you realize the only way out is back through Sections B and A, equipped with a new appreciation for both the “Machine Potential” behind Florida-based sculptor Sebastian Piazza’s Arp-like forms and the “Human Creativity” animating John Black’s aerosol abstractions, on view with NYC Culture Club. If you’re interested in alternate models for exploring art, Focus Art Fair is definitely worth the trip.