In attending an art fair in the 20s, I’m imagining what it might feel like to put my face in front of the particle beam of a nuclear accelerator. If you’re prone to feeling simultaneously over and underwhelmed on the internet, try wandering the 18-point asterisk of Frieze, a real-life production of Instagram Reels via the final 20 minutes of Society. Frieze fair is a TikTok cave minus the shelter, warmth and darkness of a real one – squint and you can almost see social handles hovering across everyone’s foreheads. It’s why Art Basel 2024’s base in the vaulting neoclassical hallways of Paris’s Grand Palais felt like a step forward for both fair season, and humanity.

It’s amazing what a considered hall layout and natural lighting can do to the psyche, especially when you’re being pummelled with art. The Palais is the perfect setting for Basal because, if you’re feeling physically attacked by concepts and ideas you can retreat to floor one, a necklace-balcony overlooking the main gallery network. The scenes below recall the notorious Champs Elysees car roundabout 100 yards to the west. They play into the Palace’s connections with the city’s arts community too: Launched to host the 1900 Paris World Fair – a celebration of human achievements of the past, and the tools and creations that would construct the future – it was turned into a military hospital in World War One, a workshop for local artists to build moulds for prosthetic body parts and paint hospital wards. 

As a tropical storm hit Paris mid-fair and the Palais’ glass roof began leaking rainwater, a strange tension hit the festivities as buyers and influencers scrabbled to find the piece of art they never knew they needed. The balcony is where I spent most of the fair – gazing down at the carnivalesque scenes below like James Spader’s purview on a roadside crossing in Crash, and exploring its rich and imaginative emerging artists display. In the summer, we launched an issue in time for the Paris Olympics, and surveyed various obsessive analogue and digital sporting cultures around the world. The Palais was the main arena complex for the games and we returned to the scene this month with a similar agenda (thanks to the Hong Kong Tourism Board, who hosted a tonne of fun gallery collaborations and a cafe there). Here are five artists that should be being talked about more.

KEI IMAZU

As a child in Yamaguchi, Japan, Kei Imazu became fixated with the shape of drawn animal body parts, tracing the contours of Bambi’s legs with her pencil hundreds of times a day. The river running through the town of Bandung, where she reallocated, is considered the most polluted in the world, carrying wastewater from various local textile mills and overstuffed chemical bins. Her interests in animation and later the post-apocalyptic Japanese manga of Hayao Miyazaki combines across a number of mediums in her work, from 3D-printed models to obsessively dimensional watercolour. Imazu’s display at Basel, a serpentine plastic reef spread flat across the mezzanine quarter, coiled its way off canvas and deep into my subconscious.  

MURAT ÖNEN

Istanbul-born, Dusseldorf-based artist Murat Onen’s work places familiar scenes, friendly eye contact and group encounters behind a chemical fog. Just like the portraiture of Francis Bacon or Wolfgang Tillmans, his earliest inspirations, there’s a strangeness and a sex that knocks the paintings off-centre. Tension, body parts, melancholia, digits disappearing behind paint and the mania of a club entwine, and it’s compelling. It makes sense that Murat’s art exists in the darkness - when he’s not painting, he’s DJing at his hometown club, Objekt Klein, where he takes a lot of his inspiration. 

HIROKA YAMASHITA

Just like the elevator-muzak ambient scene that emerged in Hiroka Yamashita’s native Japan in the 1980s, her impressions of the natural kingdom are flanked by a dream logic. These familiar-unfamiliar characters seemed to have been captured by Yamashita’s brush mid-flow, as if they are drifting past the canvas into another dimension entirely. Yamashita, whose Hygo-based studio was set up in an old pharmacy, draws from the perspective of animals staring back at human life, in scenes smudged by the vapour of wetlands and forest canopies. Trained in calligraphy, the artist’s silhouettes are faithful to the dimensions of animal bone structures and plantlife, adding a clinical quality to otherwise pastoral and ghostly depictions.

AHN TRAN

The title of Ahn Tran’s 2019 painting, “one day, my love, you come out of eternity” was taken from Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a 1959 film that hinges on a conversation between a Parisian woman and a Japanese man on the verge of marital separation, about the titular atom bomb and the French empire. Born in Vietnam before moving to New Zealand and then Amsterdam, like the film, Tran’s work is a violent, conflicted and bristling exploration of life in the shadow of colonialism, local and global customs and the complexities of dual nationality. And like the bomb itself, her brush seems to tear its way through the canvas, laying waste to formal silhouettes, gravity and the familiar.

NURI KOERFER

Like the rabbits that often huddled in the park opposite Swiss artist Nuri Koerfer’s studio, her four legged sculptures are based on real life encounters. Koerfer is keen to break the barrier between artist and consumer, encouraging people to use the structures as they would any household item, and to interact with the creatures walking around in them as pets. As innocent as this all sounds, I can’t help but see the horror in these porcelain deformations, which recall the MacGuffin fox in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, or the blow job rabbit-man in The Shining. Maybe it’s just me.