Exhibitions

Pansori, an indigenous narrative vocal performance, holds a key place in Korean culture. Originating during the Joseon period (1392–1910), it involves a singer and a drummer and is known for its emotional, powerful sounds. As a storytelling tradition, it has shaped Korean music and served as a cultural bridge between generations. Recognized by UNESCO as a form of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2008, pansori has influenced K-pop, K-drama, and visual art.
This year, pansori takes center stage at the Gwangju Biennale in that South Korean city, thanks to French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, the artistic director of the event’s main exhibition, which is titled “Pansori: A Soundscape of the 21st Century.” Featuring works by 72 artists from 30 countries, the exhibition aims to reinterpret the traditional discipline within a modern context. Bourriaud sees pansori as a public space for voices to blend and communicate, creating a “visual symphony” that invites viewers to rethink human interactions with machines, animals, spirits, and organic life.
Interpreting Asian traditions through a Western lens can be risky. Done thoughtfully, it can break cultural boundaries and foster new insights, but it also carries challenges. Bourriaud, who previously curated the Taipei Biennial in 2014, faced high expectations in trying to capture the essence of pansori while expanding its narrative.
This year’s Gwangju Biennale focuses on a planet in crisis. Its main exhibition hall is divided into three sections: “Feedback Effect,” “Polyphony,” and “Primordial Sound,” with installations and paintings that address various interpretations of the theme. Some works create visual and sonic experiences, though their perspectives may not always align or converge.
Exploring Yangnim-dong, a historically significant area in Gwangju, provides a more immersive experience. Here, 12 artists across eight venues have worked to integrate their creations with the environment and local community, enhancing audience engagement.
Some critics have argued that the show lacks a specific connection to the event’s historical roots. Founded to commemorate the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a pivotal moment in South Korea’s democratization, the biennale this year may feel to some more like a generic global exhibition than a commemoration of this key anniversary. While the voices presented are varied, they do not coalesce into a consensus. This diversity could be strength, helping Gwangju to emerge as a platform for major global issues like migration, politics, and environmental challenges.
The biennale’s Pavilion section—dedicated to displays from individual nations, as in Venice—has expanded significantly, with 31 pavilions this year compared to nine in the previous edition. Several standout exhibitions include those by Southeast Asian countries at the Asia Culture Center, Japan’s lyrical “We (Still) Have Things to Remember,” and the U.S. Pavilion’s “Rhythmic Vibrations,” presented by the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, which explores the complexities of Asian identity in a Western context.
Running through December 1, the Gwangju Biennale showcases many impressive works and promising artists. Below, we highlight six rising stars worth watching.
—Vivienne Chow

Mira Mann (b. 1993)
Mira Mann, objects of the wind (2024). Installation view at the Gwangju Biennale, 2024. Image courtesy of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Gallery affiliation: Galerie Drei in Cologne
What to know: Calling the Frankfurt-born, Düsseldorf-based artist a star of this year’s Gwangju Biennale is not an exaggeration. The artist has an impressive 33-foot long installation, objects of the wind (2024), in the main exhibition’s “Feedback Effect” section and has staged a poignant takeover of an abandoned house in the Yangnim-dong area. The works delve into histories connecting Germany and Korea and reinterpret Korean folklore. They address a big picture through the personal lens of the artist, who was born to a Korean migrant mother in West Germany.
Most wanted: There is a strong demand for Mann’s “mirror” works, according to the gallery, and objects of the wind (2024) is the largest in the series to date.
Price points: The price range for typical mid-sized sculptures and moving-image works is currently €5,000 to €10,000 (about $5,400 to $10,800).
Up next: The artist is currently featured in the group exhibition “…and we live by the river” at KIT in Düsseldorf through November 10. A second solo exhibition with Galerie Drei is scheduled for January.

Harrison Pearce (b. 1986)
Harrison Pearce, Valence. Installation view at the Gwangju Biennale, 2024. Image courtesy of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Gallery affiliation: Mou Projects, Hong Kong, is representing the artist in Asia. He also works closely with other galleries such as Carl Kostyál in Stockholm, Ribot Gallery in Milan, and GNYP in Antwerp.
What to know: The London-born and -based Pearce was a popular target for photographers at the preview. His ambitious installation, Valence (2024), commissioned by the biennale, was equally popular. It consisting of 10 modular kinetic sculptures, each with a white inflatable silicone rubber element resembling an image of the artist’s brain. Its shape is distorted when it is touched gently by a metal stick’s rivet, which moves in a rhythm according to an automated pneumatic system controlled by a sonic composition that aims to relate pansori with the exploration of free will and collective engagement. The intriguing presentation, which questions the relationship between human and technology, was well-received.
Most wanted: The artist’s sculptural and installation works are the most in-demand, according to Mou Projects, but his paintings are also popular.
Price points: Paintings are priced $10,000 to $30,000. Prices for sculpture and installation vary.
Up next: The artist is currently having a solo show with GNYP in Antwerp. He will be in the Artissima art fair in Turin with Ribot in November, a group show with Perrotin in February in 2025, and a solo show with New Galerie next spring. Mou Projects aims to bring the artist back to Hong Kong for a solo in 2025 or 2026, a follow-up to the artist’s first solo with the gallery in 2023.

Haseeb Ahmed (b. 1985)
Haseeb Ahmed. Stock Weather III. Installation view at the Gwangju Biennale, 2024. Image courtesy of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Gallery affiliation: Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels
What to know: Born in Ohio and based in Brussels, Ahmed has a research-based practice that blends art with science and technology, with a focus on the fluid dynamics of wind and water. At the Gwangju Biennale, he presents Stock Weather III (2024), an installation that connects the manmade global economy with weather, which comes from nature, exploring how the two shape our lives. Stock market data controls fans that create winds over a miniature desert. A camera captures this evolving scene, displayed on curved monitors, hinting at the game-like nature of economics. The rotating arm acts like a clock, but the landscape stays in twilight, symbolizing a bleak future shaped by global capitalism.
Most wanted: Mixed-media scrolls and sculptures
Price points: $8,000 to $45,000
Up next: Ahmed is currently included in the exhibition “A Botanical Conversation” at Harlan Levey Projects, which runs through December 14. The artist will soon premiere a new film, Sand Reckoner, which traces the origin of the Mediterranean’s sirocco wind. He is also organizing “Pantha Rhei on the Rhine,” which consists of sound works commissioned by various institutions in Europe, and preparing for a presentation of his recent works at his new studio.

Yein Lee (b. 1988)
Yein Lee, System of In-between State (2024). Installation view at the Gwangju Biennale, 2024. Image courtesy of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Gallery affiliation: Lee does not currently have any galleries representing her, but she will be working with Podium in Hong Kong. She has also worked with Jack Barrett in New York, Super Dakota in  Brussels, and Galerie Derouillon in Paris.
What to know: Lee is a Korean artist based in Vienna who works across sculpture, installation, painting, and performance to explore fragmented and transient representations of the body. By reusing found materials and blending elements of technology with organic forms, her art examines social and ecological breakdowns, amplifying voices of otherness through bodies in states of crisis. Featured in Gwangju Biennale is System of In-between State (2024), an eerie installation that consists of complex sculptures that look like enigmatic cyborgs made up of body parts and technological hardware. Could this be a vision of our future?
Most wanted: Lee’s sculptures, as well as acrylic ink and lacquer paintings on galvanized steel plate.
Price points: Prices for sculptures range from $5,000 to $25,000. Her paintings start at $3,000.
Up next: She will be in a group exhibition, “Aftershock,” at Podium in Hong Kong in March 2025, coinciding with Art Basel Hong Kong.

Phạm Minh Hiếu (b. 1996)
Phạm Minh Hiếu, “The Laboratory for Experimental (Meta)physics (Room 5),” the Vietnam Pavilion, Gwangju Biennale Pavilion. Installation view at the Gwangju Biennale, 2024. Image courtesy of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Gallery affiliation: Galerie Quynh in Ho Chi Minh City
What to know: Born and based in Hanoi, Phạm draws on philosophy, physics, technology, and anthropology to create “total installations”—immersive environments that question reality through ideas and objects. His work reflects the experiences of a generation coming of age in a modern Vietnam shaped by its colonial past and the Vietnam War. In the Gwangju Biennale Pavilion’s Vietnam Pavilion, Phạm’s “The Laboratory for Experimental (Meta)physics (Room 5)” features a double-sided illuminated folding screen. One side depicts a calm water surface, while the other shows a chaotic urban scene. The contrasting imagery and soundscape highlight the complexity of navigating dual realities.
Most wanted: A mosaic work titled Somewhere and the video work Here & Now 2023 have received the most attention.
Price points: $12,000 to $60,000
Up next: The artist serves as one of the curators of the Creative Design Festival in Hanoi, running from November 9 to 17 as part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network. (The other curators are Uyen Le and Van Do.) The artist is planning to further develop the Gwangju work in the U.S. in 2025.

Amol K Patil (b. 1987)
Amol K Patil, Who is invited in the City? (2024). Installation view at the Gwangju Biennale, 2024. Image courtesy of the Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Gallery affiliation: Project 88 in Mumbai and TKG+ Projects in Taipei
What to know: Born in Mumbai and based between Mumbai and Amsterdam, Patil is a conceptual and performance artist who also works with sculpture and painting. His practice often involves the excavation of historical tales and the archives of his family. His late father, Kisan, who died when the artist was a child, was an avant-garde playwright, and his grandfather was a poet. Both adopted art as a form of resistance, which greatly influenced Patil. Commissioned by the biennale, Patil’s installation Who is invited in the City? (2024), which consists of bronze sculptures, video, light, and sound, is a poignant reflection on the shift of the contemporary urban landscape of Mumbai.
Most wanted: Wall-hanging bronze sculptures and works on paper.
Price points: $3,000 to $10,000
Up next: The artist will have a solo show at Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California in January, another at the Röda Sten Konsthall in Sweden in February, and one more at the Bałtycka Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej in Poland in April. He will participate in Mercosul Biennial in Brazil in March. More

The more you learn about the late Bay Area artist Ruth Asawa (1926–2013), the remarkable nature of her life and career becomes more and more apparent. Now, the Japanese American sculptor, painter, and printmaker is getting her first posthumous retrospective, with an international exhibition organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Five years in the making, the show will feature over 300 works of art, featuring the intricate looped wire hanging sculptures for which Asawa is best known. The exhibition will also showcase her works in a wide range of other media, including drawing, printmaking, paper-folding, and the many public sculptures still on view across the Bay Area.
“People will be really astonished to see what else she did,” SFMOMA chief curator and curator of painting and sculpture Janet Bishop told me. “She was somebody who was relentlessly creative. Everything she did, she did in her own way.”
“Ruth Asawa is an artist who is very exciting because of how seamlessly she integrated her art practice into her life. Material exploration was ceaseless, and
 she was a fierce art advocate, instrumental in bringing arts education into the Bay Area schools,” Cara Manes, MoMA’s associate curator of painting and sculpture, added.
Ruth Asawa, Untitled, (S.046a-d, Hanging Group of Four, Two-Lobed Forms), 1961. Collection of Diana Nelson and John Atwater, promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy David Zwirner. Photo by Laurence Cuneo.
The artist grew up on a farm in Norwalk, California, until high school, when the government forced her family to relocate to a Japanese internment camp, first in California and later in Arkansas.
Asawa began pursuing art in college, studying at the famed Black Mountain College outside Asheville, North Carolina, with Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller from 1946 to ’49. It was a fruitful time for the young artist, as she began adopting the line-based visual language and techniques that would characterize her work over the next six decades, including learning looped-wire basketry in Toluca, Mexico, in 1947.
After school, Asawa married one of her fellow students, the architect Albert Lanier. The two moved to San Francisco, where they would raise six children—two adopted, four biological—and live for the rest of their lives.
“When Ruth got to San Francisco, she was still in her early 20s. She knew she wanted to have a big family, and she knew she wanted to have a career, and it was important to her that those things were integrated,” Bishop said. “She did not feel the limitation of expectations for women, and didn’t feel like she needed to make a choice between art and family. Both were incredibly important to her.”
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (PF.293, Bouquet from Anni Albers), early 1990s. Private collection. ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy David Zwirner. Photo courtesy Christie’s.
Asawa worked tirelessly, reportedly sleeping as little as four hours a night. When the children were in bed, she made work. And her unique practice was shaped by the realities of childcare.
“Unlike working with oil painting, for instance, where it’s harder to put something down and and then go into the kitchen and tend to the pot of soup, she worked intentionally with materials that that could be put down and picked back up again,” Bishop said.
Asawa’s woven sculptures were sometimes dismissed as belong to the realm of craft, or women’s work—a 1956 ARTnews review called them “‘domestic’ sculptures in a feminine, handiwork mode.”
Nonetheless, she secured New York representation with Louis Pollack. He gave her three solo shows at the Peridot Gallery in the 1950s—until Asawa decided to step away. (The retrospective will include a display of works she showed in New York.)
“She was beginning to have a kind of market career.
She was getting commissions,” Manes said. “Her kids were toddlers or newborns at that point. She just made a decision to focus on other things and not need to meet the demands of this burgeoning market that was being made for her.”
Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.433, Hanging Nine Open Hyperbolic Shapes Joined Laterally), ca. 1958; William Roth Estate. ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy David Zwirner. Photo by Laurence Cuneo.
That market would stay largely paused for decades, until mere months before Asawa’s death, when one of her works sold for $1.4 million at Christie’s New York. Her profile has continued to rise in the decade-plus since, with mega-gallery David Zwirner taking on representation of the estate in 2017. (Her current auction record of $5.3 million was set at Christie’s New York in 2020, according to the Artnet Price Database.)
But while she did not pursue art world fame during her lifetime, Asawa remained dedicated to her practice. Her sculptures, with their interlocking lobes and nested forms, remain instantly identifiable, despite each one being unique. SFMOMA gave Asawa a mid-career retrospective in 1973, and she became well known across the city for her public monuments.
Some of these projects were collaborations with children, teaching them to sculpt with baker’s clay, made from flour, salt, and water. For San Francisco Fountain, outside the Grand Hyatt San Francisco, Asawa worked with children across the city to model the tiny scenes in relief sculpture for a drum-like basin she cast in bronze.
Ruth Asawa, Andrea (PC.002), 1966–68; Commissioned by developer William M. Roth for the renovation of Ghirardelli Square. 900 North Point Street, San Francisco. ©2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy David Zwirner. Photo by Aiko Cuneo.
Asawa began working with kids because of her passionate belief in arts education. She cofounded the grassroots Alvarado Arts Workshop, which ultimately blossomed into a citywide commitment to arts education in San Francisco public schools. She was a champion for the founding of a dedicated School of the Arts in 1982, which was renamed in her honor in 2010.
The exhibition will delve into Asawa’s incredible work with the community, but also remain rooted in her home and studio in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. One of the galleries at SFMOMA will be inspired by the space, placing the home’s nine-foot-tall carved Redwood doors at the entrance.
“She lived with the work that she was making—and that of others who were important to her, by friends and mentors like Josef Albers,” Manes said. “We’re planning a gallery that really communicates this seamlessness between living and art making, life and art, and between the home and studio.”
“Ruth Asawa: A Retrospective” will be on view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, California, April 4–September 2, 2025; the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, New York, October 19, 2025–February 7, 2026; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, Abando, 48009 Bilbo, Bizkaia, Spain, March 20–September 13, 2026; and Fondation Beyeler, Baselstrasse 101, 4125 Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, October 18, 2026–January 24, 2027. More

A trip to New York’s Storm King Art Center this autumn will include an installation quite unlike the monumental sculptures and sweeping land art that is most closely associated with the venue. American artist Taryn Simon has created a machine, Kleroterion (2024), now situated a short walk down a path from the central museum building.
The outer shell of the work is made of cast resin, as are the variously colored rectangular tiles, or “chips,” that protrude from its front—five stacked vertically and five horizontally just beneath. Upon closer inspection, a small window at the top of the square monolith reveals a row of four small balls.
And if the quality of the machine’s finish and colors seem familiar, it’s because they likely are. The colors of the slotted chips are based on those of billiard balls used in a game of pool, matched exactly, with the main body of the Kleroterion drawn from the cue ball. A short, polished pathway leading to the piece is black, like the eight-ball. With all of these elements taken together, and standing against the natural landscape of Storm King, the Kleroterion manages to appear both retro and futuristic at the same time.
Installation view of Taryn Simon, Kleroterion (detail) (2024) at Storm King Art Center. Photo: Eli Baden-Lasar. Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian, and Almine Rech.
One of the inspirational starting points for the piece was seen by Simon on a trip to Greece, where artifacts of Ancient Athenian kleroterion were on exhibit. These devices were randomizers, employed to select citizens to local or state councils, offices, or other public positions equitably by chance. No complete kleroterion is currently known, though there are advanced theories on how it might have worked from an operative standpoint. Studying fragments of the ancient tool as well as written accounts, Taryn created a version fit for the 21st century.
Despite the slick visual aesthetics of the work, at its heart, Kleroterion is participatory, a work meant to be played like a game. Similarly to its Ancient antecedent, visitors in groups of five each select one of the colored chips from the lower line and insert it into any open slot along the upper vertical line. At this point, it is up to the group to decide what to vote on: who is on the hook for doing the driving back down to the city? Where should we go to lunch? How much time should we spend here? Once decided, a hand crank on the side is turned, releasing the four small balls that trail down the machine’s interior and randomly knock out four of the five chips, with the remaining chip indicating the winner.
Speaking of the execution of the project and its reception, Storm King Art Center Artistic Director and Chief Curator Nora Lawrence said, “I have long admired Taryn’s practice and am thrilled to collaborate with her to realize Kleroterion at Storm King. The work is poignant and playful, a reflection on the role of transparency in democracy and the value of open space. It’s been exciting to see visitors come together to use the machine’s game-like elements, to shape the outcome through their own unique questions, and to experience its power-granting abilities.”
Installation view of Taryn Simon, Kleroterion (detail) (2024) at Storm King Art Center. Photo: Eli Baden-Lasar. Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian, and Almine Rech.
While its inspiration by an Athenian democratic tool invites broader considerations around voting, elections, and contemporary democratic processes, as Lawrence notes Kleroterion simultaneously doesn’t resist but rather embraces its associations with games, and more specifically games of chance—a stark and poignant juxtaposition. The chips, here literally, fall where they may, bringing questions around the allocation of power and the extent of power to the fore.
Though not visible, further evoking the effect of a classic coin-op game is what’s just beneath the surface. Inside the Kleroterion, there are no circuit boards or digital anything. Instead, there is an intricate core of machinery, entirely designed by Simon herself. Full of gears, levers, and an Archimedean screw (a helicoid that transports the four balls within).
“I’ve wanted to make a game for a long time,” said Simon via email. “And there’s no bigger game than politics. I grew up in my grandfather’s and father’s arcades. They both invented, manufactured, and distributed air hockey, pool tables, old school arcade games. Games were like oxygen—always there.”
With its artificial colorway and polished finish against views of Storm King’s South Fields and now-changing fall foliage, the kleroterion conveys a certain degree of uncanniness, one that tempts and repels at once. An apt physical metaphor for the allures and uncertainties of power, both micro and macro. More

Artificial Intelligence is disturbing and scary, but there is little one can do about it, said Tim Burton. He would know: The award-winning illustrator and director is known for his own slightly disturbing animated and live-action films such as Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, and Beetlejuice.
“It reminded me of other cultures where they did not like their picture taken because they thought they were taking your soul from it. And this, to me, was a more weird and extreme version of that,” said the director, referring to images created using A.I. to draw Disney characters in his style. Burton was speaking at a roundtable with Tim Marlow, director and CEO of London’s Design Museum ahead of the opening of “The World of Tim Burton,” a sprawling exhibition that chronicles the  famed director’s 50-year creative journey.
“[A.I.] gives me a weird sort of scary feeling inside. And what do you do? I don’t know,” he added. “No matter what they try to do to stop it, once you can do it, people can do it. I don’t know what you can do about it.”
Tim Burton and Design Museum exhibition curator Maria McLintock visit ‘The World of Tim Burton’, a new exhibition at the Design Museum in London. Picture date: Wednesday October 23, 2024. Photo credit: Matt Crossick/PA Media Assignments.
His concerns about A.I. echo that of other artists and creatives. This week, more than 15,000 creative industry professionals—including musician Thom Yorke, actors Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon, and artists Joel Shapiro and Amoako Boafo—signed a statement calling for the halt of the “unlicensed use of creative works for training generative A.I.,” which they said is “a major, unjust threat” to the artists who make a living out of these works.
Burton’s exhibition at the Design Museum is a powerful demonstration of human creativity. Featuring some 600 items, few of them are digital. Some came from Burton’s personal archive and collections, others on loan from film studio archives and private collections from his collaborators.
Exhibition goers admired Tim Burton’s art at “The World of Tim Burton” at the Design Museum, London, October 2024. Courtesy of the Design Museum.
Taking the center stage are his drawings on paper, napkins, and canvas, and various other media. These date back to his teenage years, when he won a trash can design competition, through to his early adult life that laid the blueprint for his future career in filmmaking and unique aesthetics. His meticulous, eerie, and sometimes adorable depictions of otherworldly creatures underscore Burton’s prowess as an artist as well as a director. There are also drawings from his unrealized projects over the years as well as from his latest project, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024), a sequel to his acclaimed 1988 feature featuring Winona Rider and Michael Keaton.
Also on view are models that were used in his iconic stop-motion features, such as Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Corpse Bride (2005). There is also an array of hand drawn storyboards and costumes from his films, such as the iconic Catwoman suit from Batman (1989) and the pair of scissor hands from Edward Scissorhands (1990). Costumes from his recent works such as Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Netflix series Wednesday (he is working on a second season) are also on show. Posters of Japanese Kaiju (monsters) films, books of Edgar Allan Poe and tales of monsters from the director’s collection reflect his cultural influences.
Tim Burton, Surrounded (1996). Courtesy the artist and the Design Museum, London.
“For me it’s about the process of things,” the 66-year-old said. “Drawing is very emotional and personal. It’s a therapeutic process. I see things in picture form, which is an emotional core to start with. The drawings can be turned into animation or live action films, or nothing.”
It’s not like Burton is completely anti-technology. “I’ve worked with CGI [computer-generated imagery],” he emphasized, likely referring to his films such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Alice in Wonderland (2010). “I have nothing against it. Beautiful things can be found in any medium.”
He added that he feels “like stop-motion is the most artistic” and the most fun. “When you walk on the set and you see the miniature set, you see people moving these objects frame by frame. It’s an exciting, long process.”
An exhibition-goer examining the Catwoman suit from Batman (1989), on view at “The World of Tim Burton” at the Design Museum, London, opening to public on Friday, October 25, 2024. Courtesy of the Design Museum.
The exhibition already sold 32,000 tickets in advance, the biggest advance ticket sales in the museum’s 35 years of history. To accommodate the excessive demand, the museum will open late on Fridays and Saturdays throughout the rest of 2024.
But the director resisted staging an exhibition in London initially, despite living in the U.K. capital for a quarter of a century. When asked if London was a creative place for him, Burton responded with a long silence.
“Maybe I have thinner skin that I just didn’t really like going through the feelings,” he said, without explaining what those feelings were. He then continued saying that the show traveled to many different places over the years—14 cities and 11 countries since 2014, and a show in London simply “never really came into reality.” But the enthusiasm from the crew of the Design Museum successfully convinced him to stage the touring exhibition’s grand finale in London. He was impressed by the results.
Tim Burton visits ‘The World of Tim Burton’, a new exhibition at the Design Museum in London featuring over 600 items relating to the filmmaker’s career, ahead of it opening to the public on Friday. Photo credit: Matt Crossick/PA Media Assignments.
“The feng shui [of the show] is beautiful. It makes me more calm looking at it. Beautiful job,” Burton said to Marlow and exhibition curator Maria McLintock.
Asked if he would put his talent into designing objects for people, Burton hinted that he has a few tricks up his sleeves. “I got a whole range of joke shop items that I would love to introduce to everybody. I’ve got big plans,” the director said.
“The World of Tim Burton” is on view at the Design Museum, 224–238 Kensington High St, London, through April 21, 2025. More

A self-trained artist who often takes art and art magazines as his subject will get a major museum spotlight this coming winter. In its Projects gallery, which is free to enter, New York’s Museum of Modern Art is staging a show of California painter Marlon Mullen. His first solo exhibition at a major museum, it will, appropriately enough, serve as the premiere for a brand-new work inspired by the cover of the museum’s own publication Van Gogh: The Starry Night, devoted to one of its best-known works.
Featuring 25 paintings from the last decade, the show will include two examples from the museum’s holdings. One untitled 2017 work is based on an Artforum cover showing a work by Kerry James Marshall—which, itself, shows a Black artist holding up a gargantuan palette.
Born in 1963 in Richmond, California, Mullen has since 1986 been based at his hometown’s NIAD Art Center (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development), which hosts and supports artists with developmental disabilities. It’s part of a network of studios in the Bay Area working with this population, including Creative Growth and Creativity Explored.
After a decade principally working in printmaking, Mullen turned to painting. The Center started receiving steady donations of art magazines in the late 2000s, and Mullen has been working with it extensively ever since.
“He’s committed to the work of painting, thinking about what it is and what it can be, and to an exploration of abstraction that’s deep and resonant,” said Amanda Eicher, NIAD’s executive director, in a phone conversation. “Like many artists, he’s translating pop culture into form and texture and layers in a way that’s extraordinarily sophisticated.” 
Marlon Mullen at work in the NIAD studio. Courtesy of the artist and NIAD.
Examples in the show focus on covers and advertisements from top publications like Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, and Sculpture that feature works by artists as varied as Andy Warhol, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He doesn’t precisely reproduce the source material, but instead uses it as inspiration for graphic riffs in bold shapes and vivid colors. Other works are based on a series of Time-Life books with monochrome covers; the museum’s 2016 The World of Picasso features just the titular words on a blank background.
The show is organized by no less than the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, Ann Temkin, with support from curatorial assistant Alexandra Morrison.
“He’s really identifying his work as an artist with the art world as it’s presented through these publications, so it’s an intense relationship that he’s creating,” said Temkin in a phone call.
“There’s so much artistry,” she added. “If someone were to just say that the technique was copying the covers or advertisements, that would be such a misrepresentation. They’re a starting point in a way, but he makes his own choices.”
Mullen’s work is a notable entry in a long tradition of art that references existing art. Just to name a few examples: Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) sexualized Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1504); Cindy Sherman’s 1990 Untitled (#224) restaged Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (1593–94); appropriation artists like Sturtevant and Sherrie Levine recreated works by artists from Andy Warhol to Walker Evans; and Louise Lawler creates works showing her and other artists’ work in situ in museums, storage spaces, and collectors’ homes.
Marlon Mullen, Starry Night (2024), displayed with the publication it is based on. Courtesy the artist and NIAD.
Mullen’s work has appeared on major art-world stages before. The 2019 Biennial exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art included an untitled 2018 work depicting an Art in America cover. He’s also had solo exhibitions at in-the-know galleries like New York’s JTT; Adams and Ollman of Portland, Oregon (which represents him); and Brussels’s Sorry, We’re Closed, as well as New York nonprofit White Columns, and many other venues.
Museums have also collected his work, including not only MoMA and the Whitney but also the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and Oregon’s Portland Art Museum.
MoMA itself has a long tradition of showing folk artists, outsiders, and self-trained practitioners. Curator Holger Cahill mounted the 1932 show (just eight years after the museum’s founding) “American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900.” Five years later, William Edmondson would become the first African American artist to have a solo show there; in 2021–22, the museum organized a show of Joseph E. Yoakum. The museum owns examples by some of the best-known artists in this arena, like James Castle, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial, Martín Ramírez, and Bill Traylor.
“One of the things that attracted me to thinking of proposing this as a venue for Mullen’s first solo museum show was the really deep connection to MoMA’s history, going back all the way to the beginning, of looking at the work of artists who—the wording has changed umpteen times—were not in a professional art world market and ecosystem, and instead forged different paths to recognition and visibility,” said Temkin. “MoMA, starting with [founding director] Alfred Barr and Holger Cahill and Dorothy Miller and so many others, from the early days right up to the present, has seen this this strand of creativity as a very vital part of Modern art history.”
“Projects: Marlon Mullen” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd St, New York, December 14, 2024 to April 20, 2025. More

“The Louvre’s enigmatic painting par excellence.” That’s how Bernard Dufour, a French abstract painter from the 20th century, once described Pierrot, a 1718-1719 painting by Jean-Antoine Watteau.
He’s not wrong. The painting is mysterious for a number of reasons. For one, it is merely attributed to Watteau, and not all art historians are convinced he is indeed its creator. We also don’t know who commissioned the painting, or what their intention might have been. Depicting stock characters from French-Italian plays known as commedia dell’arte, Pierrot—also known as Gilles—might have hung on a wall, or it might have been used to promote a particular performance.
Then there’s the relationship between the characters themselves. The central figure, a clown character alternatively referred to as Pierrot or Gilles—hence the two titles—is thought to have been based on sketches Watteau made of a young man known as “Vel.” The other figures in the painting also appear in the commedia dell’arte genre, including two lovers, and a captain.
Then there’s the figure on the left, hiding in the clown’s shadow. Referred to by some sources as a doctor, and by others as a grifter called Crispin— both familiar to 18th century European audiences, as he appeared as a Shakespearean character—he rides a donkey and looks directly at the viewer, smiling deviously.
Left, detail from Watteau’s Pierrot , known as Gilles; right: Louis Crepy after Antoine Watteau, Self Portrait of Antoine Watteau © National Library of France.
Though a secondary element of the composition, this shadowy character has temporarily taken center stage as restoration work on the painting— which involved removing its aged, dulling coat of yellow varnish—led to a surprising realization: that his face looks an awful lot like Watteau’s. If this is the case, how does it reinforce (or change) the image’s meaning?
Watteau was born in 1684 in Valenciennes, a French commune close to the modern-day border between France and Belgium. Growing up in the shadow of the Italian Renaissance, he was trained in the Baroque tradition, which is characterized by grandeur, drama, and emotional exuberance, but gradually moved towards the emerging Rococo style, which was like Baroque, but less dramatic, more decorative and colorful. And yet, the style is far from one-note.
Detail of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s The Embarkation for Cythera (1717). Photo: Collection of the Louvre, Paris.
As art critic Jonathan Jones points out in a 2003 review of the painting written for The Guardian, Pierrot —or Gilles—has all the trappings of a typical Rococo painting: the flowing costumes, idyllic setting, and bright lighting that give off the impression of a nice summer picnic. But there’s also tension at this picnic: while all the other stock characters fulfil their predisposed roles, the eponymous clown “looks back at us: knowing, disillusioned, without a mask.”
Doctor or grifter, Watteau’s self-portrait remains in character, reinforcing the dissonance between ensemble and protagonist. Directing his devious smile at the viewer, he essentially repeats Jones’ point: that what we see on the stage is anything but authentic.
Pierrot is the center of an ongoing exhibit at the Louvre titled “A New Look at Watteau.” Running from October 16, 2024 until February 3, 2025, it’s part of a larger exhibition program titled “Figures of the Fool,” which looks at artists’ representation of one particular stock character: the jester. Spoiler alert: as in Pierrot, he’s not as happy as he seems. More