The New York Fairs Are Done. What Remains?

The city's spring fair circuit is drawing to a close, but not before one last concentrated burst of art. TEFAF New York ended its run at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday, while Focus, the fair devoted to emerging Asian art, remains on view through Sunday on the northern edge of Chelsea. Together, they mark the final stretch of a season that has turned Manhattan into a dense, temporary museum of sorts.

That abundance was especially visible at the Independent Art Fair, which has moved to Pier 36 on the Lower East Side and brought together 76 exhibitors. The fair's mix of established galleries, newer voices, and unexpected participants gave it a restless energy. Among the most surprising appearances was Comme des Garçons, which showed more than 20 dresses by Rei Kawakubo, underscoring how porous the boundary between fashion and art can become in this setting.

Independent has long distinguished itself by keeping an art-first sensibility, even as it shifted from an open-plan format to traditional booths. The fair's current version feels less doctrinaire than its earliest years and, in some ways, more generous. That openness was evident in the range of presentations on view, from devotional imagery to cult figures to work rooted in social history.

One of the strongest booths belonged to Taiwanese artist Tseng Chien-Ying (b. 1980), shown by Kiang Malingue. Tseng, who is based in Taipei and was in New York for a residency at 99 Canal in Chinatown, presented ink and gouache paintings on paper centered on hands. Rendered in pinks, oranges, and yellows, the forms carried a luminous, almost ceremonial quality. Tseng connected the work to Guanyin, the Buddhist goddess associated with compassion and many forms of aid, and described the paintings as a kind of poetic use of verbs and imperatives.

There was also a sharper edge to the booth, in the form of an enlarged locket with two circular panels, each showing an oversized penis, one cut and one uncut. The juxtaposition introduced a note of mischief into a body of work otherwise marked by grace and symbolic clarity.

Elsewhere at the fair, Post Times used Independent's New York Debuts program to present Frank Gaard, while Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick brought Antonio Darden, whose work focused on the Black church in the United States. The range of those presentations suggested a fair season still capable of producing discovery, even as it gives way to summer.

For a city that has spent the week moving from one fair to the next, that may be the most telling fact of all: the appetite for art has not thinned, only shifted from one venue to another.

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