Art & Exhibitions

Though not all the art critics were part of the in crowd on this occasion, the buzz around Tate Modern’s spectacular “Leigh Bowery!” exhibition has been undeniable. It is the first major museum show dedicated to the legendary cultural figure—an artist, performer, fashion designer, club promoter, and T.V. personality. In celebrating Bowery in its 25th year, Tate Modern is making a bold programming choice to recognize the considerable influence of underground countercultures on contemporary artists.
Born in Melbourne in 1961, Bowery moved to London in 1980 and fast became a regular fixture of the city’s queer nightlife. He commanded attention for his flamboyantly unconventional dress and soon built up a milieu of admirers for his razor sharp wit. Embodying the outré spirit of free expression encouraged by clubs like Taboo, the Cha Cha, and Fridge, Bowery was drawn to these spaces for their crowds, which included some of his generation’s greatest artistic talents, like Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Cerith Wyn Evans, Neneh Cherry, Jean Paul Gaultier, John Galliano, Grayson Perry, and Peter Doig.
Although a museum show celebrating Bowery’s role as an artist and muse during this richly generative era is a breakthrough in terms of representation for long maligned forms of creative expression, the occasion is bittersweet. Bowery reportedly told musician Boy George that he hoped one day to make it into the Tate, but he would not live to see his belated retrospective. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1994.
Installation view of “Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern in London. Photo: Larina Annora Fernandes. © Tate Photography.
Among Bowery’s many performances that are spotlighted by Tate Modern, some saw him embraced by pockets of the traditional art world during his lifetime. In 1988, Bowery staged a five-day performance at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, during which he adopted a variety of poses, including draping himself over a chaise longue, before a two-way mirror, so that both he and his audience was watching himself. Each day Bowery wore a different one of his trademark “Looks” and the experience was turned multi-sensory thanks to the introduction of scents and a soundtrack of field recordings of insects mixed by DJ Malcolm Duffy. The presentation was followed up by a feature in choreographer Mark Clark’s piece Hetrospective at the same gallery the following year, as well as a performance with his close friend and later wife Nicola Rainbird at the Serpentine.

“Every day was a performance for Leigh, even if there was only an audience of one,” his close friend, the artist Sue Tilley, recently recalled for the “Leigh Bowery!” exhibition catalogue. “Of course, Leigh’s real stage was nightclubs. He always made a grand entrance, usually debuting a new fantastic outfit he had been making all week. We’d probably go to three or four clubs a week when I first met him–anywhere if we heard that there was something on. We’d walk in, get a drink, wander around to see who we knew, and then dance like maniacs until the lights came on.”

Bowery’s many artistic achievements are finally being institutionally recognized, but he also served as a source of inspiration to friends and collaborators. By many accounts, Bowery’s willingness to break with convention and keep pushing himself into unchartered and often taboo creative territory was a liberating force that influenced the practices of those who surrounded him. Here are five artists for whom Bowery was a cherished muse.

Stephen Willats
Stephen Willats, Are you good enough for the cha cha cha? (1982). Photo: © Stephen Willats, Tate Collection.
The conceptual artist Stephen Willats, whose work is currently also included in Tate Modern’s survey “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” (through June 1), met Bowery at the Cha Cha Club, which was tucked at the back of gay nightclub Heaven. It had a notoriously strict door policy, with co-founder Scarlett Cannon asking wannabe entrants “are you good enough for the Cha Cha?”
“At the time, [Bowery] was developing his ‘Futurist’ image and had already begun to evolve his approach as an artist in articulating the language of interpersonal presentation of the self, centering on himself as the artwork,” Willats recalled in the “Leigh Bowery!” catalogue.
Cannon and fellow co-founder Michael Hardy collaborated with Willats on this triptych of panels celebrating the club that featured detritus picked up off the floor at the end of a night and photos of frequent revelers, including Bowery. Amid squashed cigarette packets, beer cans, and a discarded hairbrush are handwritten accounts of nights at the Cha Cha. They underscore the club as a safe haven for those who felt alienated from mainstream society.
“Have become so used to mixing with gay people all the time, or being with people that are completely open-minded,” wrote Hardy. “You forget about all the narrow-minded people that really exist and thats the whole thing that I got into, you just forget about the whole straight world.” The work debuted at Lisson Gallery in 1983.

Rachel Auburn
Rachel Auburn, Leigh (1982). Photo: © Rachel Auburn.
The fashion designer and D.J. Rachel Auburn met Bowery when he visited her stall Vena Cava in Kensington Market, where she sold her own experimental designs and vintage pieces. “I had already clocked Leigh mincing around on Portobello Road because he had the build of an Australian rugby player but was wearing tweed jackets with big shoulder pads and shirts with pointy collars, wide trousers, and clogs,” she recalled for the “Leigh Bowery!” catalogue.
The pair regularly met up at Taboo nightclub and shared ideas about fashion, eventually debuting their own collections side-by-side at the “New London in New York” fashion show in New York in 1983. “When they ended up being sold at Macy’s, it was considered outrageous because people thought they were similar to what bag ladies wore on the street,” said Auburn.
“Leigh and I both loved art, film, literature, and fashion; he was the first person I could talk to about those things,” she added. “Whenever we went abroad, we would spend all our time in museums. Leigh particularly liked the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin. Leigh was influenced by the work of Viennese Actionists, which we saw in Amsterdam, and we both loved Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Art would stimulate ideas for designs. For instance, Leigh got the idea of the target motif on his early kaftans from Jasper Johns’s ‘Target’ paintings.”

Sue Tilley
Sue Tilley, Untitled (Portrait of Leigh Bowery) (1985-6). Photo: © Sue Tilley.
One of Bowery’s closest friends was the writer, model, and artist Sue Tilley. Her portrait of him was a true collaboration: Bowery added a grid of thread spools over the painting, referencing his habit of hand-sewing elaborate costumes to debut during his next night out. The work captures one of the sitter’s classic “Looks,” a provocative style of dress and body art that Bowery would adopt for a period of time. In this example, spots that had covered his face spread over his clothes and wig, which some read as a reference to the AIDS-related illness Kaposi sarcoma.
“His energy fueled the night as he approached practically everyone there, either to admire their outfit or to make some witty comment about how they should have tried harder,” Tilley fondly recalled in the show’s catalogue. “But whether it was a compliment or a put-down, no one cared. They were just grateful to have been noticed by Leigh.”

Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud, Nude with Leg Up (Leigh Bowery), 1992. Photo: © The Lucian Freud Archive. All RightsReserved 2024.
Bowery’s best known artistic collaboration was a series of portraits by Lucian Freud from the early 1990s. The pair first met at Taboo and then again when the older painter visited Bowery’s 1988 performance before a two-way mirror at Anthony d’Offay gallery. Of all the work to come from Bowery’s expansive creative universe, it is the Freud paintings that received mainstream recognition within the traditional art world. The sitter had known since 1988 that he had HIV, only informing Rainbird and Tilley, and the tender works strip the performer of clothing and body paint to reveal a man in a state of starkly vulnerable repose.
“They got the best out of each other,” Freud’s daughter Bella told The World of Interiors. “They were both ambitious to break boundaries and the [large] scale was something else. Leigh gave Lucian the idea to do that.” She added: “They had such a good time together and my father was very impressed by Leigh’s performances and he liked having someone who was up for trying new things. […] When he died I remember talking to Dad and he was crying on the phone because Leigh was so important to him.”

Charles Atlas
Charles Atlas, Still from Mrs Peanut Visits New York (1999). Photo: © Charles Atlas. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.
Bowery collaborated with the American video artist Charles Atlas on multiple projects. One, the film Hail the New Puritan (1986), is a fake documentary about the Scottish choreographer Michael Clark that was set in the east London council flat that Bowery shared with the artist Trojan. Bowery wore a futuristic, Hindu deity-inspired look with a kaftan and a painted blue face. His deconstructed fashion designs were also featured in a dance sequence set to music by The Fall.
In Atlas’s Mrs Peanut Visits New York (1999), Bowery can be seen strutting along the streets of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District in 1992 in a homemade bodysuit interpretation of “Mr. Peanut,” the Planters’ Peanut mascot in a flora dress and a top hat. All the while, the eccentric look draws surprised stares from passersby.
Atlas introduced Bowery to Marina Abramović, and the three collaborated on the performance Delusional, for which she wore a sheer “queen rat costume” made by Bowery and 400 live rats filled the stage. Though she is known for boundary-pushing work produced over many decades, Abramović describes Delusional as “the most insane work I have made to this day.”
“His impact was strong on me immediately,” she recalled. “I learned so much from him about shame, about extremes. He was a true original, unique and fearless.”
“Leigh Bowery!” is on view through August 31 at Tate Modern, Bankside, London. More

A week out from his debut photography exhibition, Yorgos Lanthimos is feeling equal nerves and excitement. The prints have emerged from his darkroom and were framed in Los Angeles, but he’s yet to lay eyes on them, the director told me over a phone call. “I haven’t seen them framed and on the wall,” he said. “I’m looking forward to go and install—something I’ve never done before.”
The show is a first for Lanthimos, but photography itself has long been threaded throughout his filmmaking career, which has produced some of cinema’s most darkly offbeat entries. He has lensed fashion campaigns and magazine editorials, photographed the goings-on on the set of his movies, and released three books of his enigmatic images. Recently, he told me, he’s been taking photos entirely removed from his films—of his travels through his native Greece, for one.
In fact, photography has turned out to be a distinct creative pursuit for him. “I’m creating a body of work that’s unrelated to my films now; it is more conscious at this point,” he said. “I’m focusing on that now. It has become an important thing in my life other than filmmaking.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024. Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos / Mack.
The L.A. exhibition, “Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs,” brings together photographs from Lanthimos’s latest books, released in 2024: i shall sing these songs beautifully, which compiles photographs he shot during the making of Kinds of Kindness (2024) and Dear God, the Parthenon is Still Broken, featuring images from the production of his lauded film Poor Things (2023).
These are not your typical behind-the-scenes photographs. On Poor Things, Lanthimos captured the atmosphere of a film set—with its lighting rigs and constructed interiors—with an idiosyncratic eye, when he wasn’t trotting out large- and medium-format cameras to snap intimate portraits of his cast, including Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo.
“It was a whole process in between setups, which we kind of enjoyed and gave us a little break within the hectic schedule of filming,” he said.
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024. Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos / Mack.
His Kinds of Kindness images, meanwhile, evidence a spontaneity. Shot at real-life locations around New Orleans, the production allowed the director to wander beyond the set and photograph uncanny cityscapes. His images of people, this time round, grow even more abstract—limbs appear detached and faces are averted—rendered all more dramatic in black and white.
“It was experimenting with how different it could look to the film,” he explained of the black-and-white compositions.
Yorgos Lanthimos, from i shall sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.
These photographs are made even more mysterious when printed in i shall sing, accompanied as they are with poetic (and surprisingly comic) snippets of text that add layers of ambiguity. “he woke up from a wonderful dream. once his eyes were open he realised the opposite of what he dreamt was true. the two dogs were fucking,” goes one of them; “tears and hearts and smells and songs and hands,” reads another. “where are they going?”
The entire effect, I told Lanthimos, was that of an ancient text that defied singular interpretation. “We tried to avoid being too literal,” he said, crediting publisher Michael Mack for his help in sequencing the book. “You can’t know how other people are going to respond or interpret these connections. It was just a game of seeing these images and texts work together, what kind of a pause you left before you said something again with words, having some humor about it. It is very intuitive.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024. Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos / Mack.
The show arrives amid Lanthimos’s rich, award–winning filmmaking practice, recognized for its creation of dystopic worlds, so much like our own in their mundanity, in which characters grapple with realities equal parts absurd and brutal. Where Dogtooth (2008) and The Lobster (2015) unpack alienation and isolation, The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things explore how power can distort the individual. Throughout is woven his distinct visual language—wide angles, dramatic zooms, symmetry—that offers an unnatural slant on the most everyday of scenes, fueling the psychological discomfort.
While he was initially interested in filmmaking, Lanthimos said, he realized he first had to get to grips with photography as “the whole medium starts with still images.” Over the years, he picked up and grew proficient in the technical aspects of photography; he shot images on his film sets, some for promotional purposes, never believing they would become an “independent thing.” More interesting to him was the making of the image.
“I was just interested in the act of taking the picture—looking at it, the magic afterwards or the disappointment, making mistakes and trying to figure out how you can correct them,” he said.
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024. Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos / Mack.
It’s for this reason that Lanthimos has insisted on photographing on film—a process he termed “a joy in its own right” compared to shooting digital, which “doesn’t feel like I’m actually taking a picture.” There’s a gravity to taking an analog image, he added, as well as a depth in the film photograph.
“I have hundreds of film cameras, which has become a bit of a problem,” he said. “I always find an excuse to get another one, like in case one breaks or something.”
Photography has also inched toward the center of Lanthimos’s practice (he’s built his own darkroom next to his editing suite). The medium, he told me, offers him a new freedom in creative expression and experimentation. Where filmmaking involves greater financial investment and human resources—thus making it “more conservative in how the narrative is constructed”—photography invites independence, an openness, he noted.
“I like the fact that you can just take a picture of a tree, go home, process it, print it, and hold it in your hands and look at it the same day. You may either be disappointed or amazed or intrigued by what it is; it could lead you to start doing something that is interesting to you,” he explained. “The directness of that? I love that compared to filmmaking.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024. Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos / Mack.
Another thing photography presents to the filmmaker? A different way of seeing.
Throughout our conversation, Lanthimos repeatedly invoked “perspective,” whether in reference to his observer’s eye or the way narratives could be spun out of a single photograph. His first images on sets depicted “corners and perspectives of what was happening on set that were not related to the film”; his penchant for photographing his actors from behind emerged from his desire to “shoot things you never see, which is their back or their side, or while they’re doing something else.”
Yorgos Lanthimos, from i shall sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024). Courtesy of the artist and Mack.
Lately, Lanthimos, after living for a decade in London, has moved back to Athens, where he is seeing the place from “a very different perspective.” Armed with his camera, he’s been documenting its landscapes as they newly appear to him—a body of work that he is still processing. “I’d like to take some time off filmmaking and focus on that,” he said, describing the time it takes to understand the images he’s created. He’s speaking, as always, of perspective.
“Even if you just take one picture, there’s so much that you can experience again by the person that you are or the mood that you’re in,” he said. “I love that freedom of just showing one image and people can react to it. Even myself, I can see it differently at different times.”
“Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs” is on view at Webber at 939, 939 S. Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles, March 29–May 24. More

You’d be forgiven for not knowing the name Madalena Santos Reinbolt (1919–1977). Her current exhibition at New York’s American Folk Art Museum is the self-taught Afro-Brazilian artist’s first museum solo show in the U.S.
It showcases her riotously colorful embroideries on burlap sacks, which she dubbed quadros de lã, or “wool paintings,” as well as earlier oil paintings depicting busy landscapes. But in bringing the show to the city from Brazil’s Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), where it originated in 2022, Folk Art Museum curator Valérie Rousseau had her work cut out for her.
“When MASP produced this show, they had very little interpretation on the wall. Very little historical research about her had been produced,” Rousseau told me.
Santos Reinbolt was born and raised on a farm in the rural region of Bahia. As an adult, she became a domestic worker, moving to the south to pursue employment and eventually settling in Petrópolis, a city north of Rio de Janeiro that was often used as a summer getaway for wealthy families.
American Folk Art Museum curator Valérie Rousseau gives a tour of “Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets.” Photo by Olya Vysotskaya, courtesy of the American Folk Art Museum.
During her lifetime, Santos Reinbolt gave only one two-part interview, speaking just a few years before her death to art critic and anthropologist Lélia Coelho Frota in 1974 and ’75. (Coelho Frota would go on to include a work by Santos Reinbolt in the Brazilian pavilion at the 1978 Venice Biennale.)
The exhibition title—“A Head Full of Planets,” or uma cabeça cheia de planetas in Portuguese—comes from that interview, and Santos Reinbolt speaking of her inner world, and the creative impulses that fueled her art.
MASP had tracked down some 60 known works by the artist in putting together the show—a number that has since hit 90, and continues to grow as more collectors have come forward—but had very little information about them. (The Folk Art Museum is hoping to soon finalize the acquisition of one.)
Attributed to Pedro Oswaldo Cruz and Cristina Oswaldo Cruz, Madalena Santos Reinbolt (ca. 1974–1975). Photo ©Lélia Coelho Frota, Mitopoética de 9 artistas brasileiros (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1978).
To add context to the exhibition, Rousseau, with the curatorial assistance of Dylan Blau Edelstein, set out to speak with the collectors who had loaned Santos Reinbolt’s work, often providing valuable context about their creation and subject matter.
“We now know that some of these are depicting family scenes, of people she knew. Others are works of her imagination,” Rousseau said.
One piece is celebrating a young man’s life milestones, from birth to his college graduation, given as a gift to his parents. Other works seem to illustrate rituals or ceremonies. Repeated motifs include a mountain range and a lake that looks like an eye.
Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled (Salvador) (ca. 1962–67). Collection of Edmar Pinto Costa, São Paulo, Brazil.
But there is more research to be done. Though she never had children of her own, Santos Reinbolt came from a large family. Rousseau is interested in tracking down the artist’s siblings’ descendants to see if they can share any new details about her life and art, as well as the family history and whether their ancestors were enslaved.
There is also so much we don’t know about what inspired Santos Reinbolt. Some of the works seem to allude to race and class, depicting both Black and white figures. But how would the artist have thought about those issues, and experienced their effects, working as a household servant in a wealthy community?
“When you look at this moment here, you see a white woman almost absorbed by the textile,” Rousseau said of one work. “Maybe this implies some tension between between races.”
Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled (ca. 1969–76). Collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil, gift of Edmar Pinto Costa, 2021.
Santos Reinbolt spoke about having made art from a young age, drawing on repurposed sheets of newspaper. But her earliest surviving works date to the early 1950s, when she began working as a live-in cook for Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares (1910–1967) and her partner, American poet Elizabeth Bishop, (1911–1979).
In addition to beginning her art practice, Santos Reinbolt also met her husband, Luiz Augusto Reinbolt, while working there. Initially, she was painting on canvas, but then she developed an allergy to oil paints. As an alternative, her husband began bringing her discarded burlap sacks from a nearby warehouse.
“She seemed to have enjoyed the irregular mesh of the burlap,” Rousseau said, pointing the incredibly neat and tidy reverse on a work displayed to show both sides. “It gives a lot of expressive finish to the surface. It’s less confining, a lot of freedom, and she really took advantage of that.”
Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled (ca. 1965–76). Collection of Edmar Pinto Costa, São Paulo, Brazil.
Santos Reinbolt also made her own clothes, sometimes incorporating those fabrics into her art. (Most of the works are undated, but the switch to yarn came in the mid 1960s.)
Although self-taught, Santos Reinbolt was part of a rich cultural milieu working in the Bishop-de Macedo Soares household. The couple were cultural luminaries in their own right, with friends who included the famed Brazilian Modernist Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994). They also collected Modernist works by the likes of Alexander Calder (1898–1976), Tarsila do Amaral (1896–1973), and Candido Portinari (1903–1962).
“We imagine that Santos Reinbolt had been looking and paying attention to these artists, and had even met some of them,” Rousseau said.
Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled (ca. 1965–67). Collection of Edmar Pinto Costa, São Paulo, Brazil.
But the family cook might have been a little too interested in the art she was encountering, at least to her employers’ liking. They fired Santos Reinbolt because “it finally got to be a choice between art and peace, and tranquility seemed more important than a masterpiece every afternoon,” Bishop wrote in a letter.
“The family was very annoyed that she was spending too much time creating her own work, instead of taking care of the cooking,” Rouseau said.
Bishop also wrote of a feeling of competition with Santo Reinbolt: “Her [paintings] are getting better and better, and the rivalry between us is intense—if I paint a picture, she paints a bigger and better one.”
Madalena Santos Reinbolt, Untitled (Salvador) (ca. 1950–60). Collection Rafael Moraes, São Paulo, Brazil
Santos Reinbolt’s next post was a better fit. She was working at a family’s second home, giving her plenty of time to devote to her craft while they were in the city. The artist even sold her work: one piece on display in the exhibition with the back visible shows the price written on the painting’s reverse in Brazilian currency.
“She was aware of the value of the work,” Rousseau said. That value has gone up considerably recently, she added, from around $5,000 just a few years ago to upwards of $150,000—although it may prove hard to find one. “People don’t want to sell them. They want to keep them!”
“Madalena Santos Reinbolt: A Head Full of Planets” is on view at the American Folk Art Museum, 2 Lincoln Square, New York, New York, February 12–May 25, 2025. More

As Art Basel Hong Kong takes center stage this week, the city is humming with more than just buzzy sales and glamorous soirées—its institutions are offering a rich slate of exhibitions that deserve equal attention. From meditative installations rooted in Chinese medicine to a centennial retrospective of Hoo Mojong, these shows offer deeper engagement with the cultural landscape beyond the fair.
Here are the must-see museum shows to explore while you’re in town.
Wing Po So: “Take Turns”Para Site, through May 25
Installation view of Wing Po So: “Take Turns”. Para Site, Hong Kong, 2025. Photo: Felix SC Wong.
To most Hong Kongers, traditional Chinese herbal medicine is an essential part of their daily lives. But to artist Wing Po So, this centuries-old practice has an extra layer of meaning. Born into a family of Chinese medicine doctors and raised in a family-run Chinese medicine shop, her upbringing deeply shaped her artistic practice, which explores form, materiality, metaphysics, and relationality through the lens of the knowledge she absorbed from that environment. In “Take Turns” at Para Site, Hong Kong’s leading independent non-profit art space, So has created new installations using old drawers recovered from traditional Chinese pharmacies in the city that have ceased to operate. By reconfiguring these worn wooden structures and filling them with new objects, they form a new ecosystem that invite audience to meditate on these “sites of transformative healing.”
—Vivienne Chow

Alicja Kwade: “Pretopia”Tai Kwun Contemporary, through April 6

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“Pretopia” is the Berlin-based international art star Alicja Kwade’s institutional solo debut in Hong Kong, and Tai Kwun—a heritage site comprising the former Central Police Station, Victoria Prison, and Central Magistracy—is a fitting venue. Known for her conceptual sculptures and installations that explore perceptions of reality using contrasting materials like heavy stones and delicate clock hands, Kwade presents nine seminal works alongside a newly commissioned, site-specific installation created in response to the historic compound’s colonial past. Her new work, Waiting Pavilions, commissioned by Tai Kwun and housed in the site’s Prison Yard, reflects the passage of time in prison, a subject matter that has been studied by scholars. The exhibition’s title, inspired by the word “utopia” carved into historic stones found in the site’s storage, reflects Kwade’s interpretation of the present moment. “It’s not about a utopian place that already exists,” she explained in a video interview, but about humanity’s ongoing effort to reach that ideal.
—V.C.

“Picasso for Asia—A Conversation”M+, through July 13
Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia—A Conversation,” 2025 Photo: Lok Cheng Image courtesy of M+, Hong Kong
For anyone in Hong Kong during the art week, this exhibition is a rare opportunity to experience the works of Pablo Picasso. Featuring over 60 masterpieces on loan from the Musée national Picasso in Paris—home to the world’s largest and most significant collection of Picasso’s works—this show is a must-see. 
Titled “Picasso for Asia—A Conversation,” this exhibition is part of M+’s Hong Kong Jockey Club Series and marks the first major showcase of Picasso’s work Hong Kong in over a decade. The exhibition sparks cross-cultural and intergenerational dialogue by placing his works in conversation with over eighty pieces from M+’s collection. These include works by more than 20 Asian and Asian-diasporic artists, spanning from the early 20th century to the present day. Alongside Picasso’s iconic pieces, you will encounter works by artists such as Isamu Noguchi, Luis Chan, Gu Dexin, Nalini Malani, Tanaami Keiichi, and Haegue Yang.
A highlight of the exhibition is Taiwanese American artist Lee Mingwei’s Guernica in Sand, a large-scale installation and performance presented in The Studio at the museum. In this thought-provoking work, Lee recreates Picasso’s iconic Guernica using sand—a medium often associated with impermanence and transformation. By rendering the scenes of violence from Guernica in this ephemeral material, Lee invites viewers to reflect on the nature of chaos and the creative potential of change.
However, not everyone is a fan of this blockbuster show. Some exhibition goers and critics raised eyebrows at the curatorial direction, saying that the “dialogue” was arbitrary and unnecessary. One visitor was quoted saying: “Why am I seeing Zeng Fanzhi as soon as I step into the gallery but not Picasso? It is very strange.”
—Cathy Fan and Vivienne Chow

“Objects of Play: Hoo Mojong Centennial Retrospective”Asia Society Hong Kong Center, March 26 through July 6
Detail of Hoo Mojong’s French Bread (1985). Courtesy of Aye Gallery.
Recognized as one of the most prominent Chinese female artists, Hoo Mojong has emerged as a pivotal figure in 20th-century Asian Modernism. Her work stands as a testament to her role in bridging Eastern and Western artistic traditions and this retrospective offers a deep dive into her remarkable life and career.
Born in Shanghai, Hoo left the city in her early twenties and spent years living and working in places like Taipei, Brazil, and Spain—experiences that brought a rich blend of cultural influences to her art. She eventually settled in Paris, where she painted for 37 years before returning to China in 1996. Back home, her distinctive focus on the human body and whimsical everyday objects earned her wide recognition from institutions across the country.
The exhibition offers a comprehensive look at Hoo’s artistic evolution, featuring nearly 100 works spanning different phases of her career. It showcases how she skillfully blends Chinese and Western artistic traditions while exploring the deeper spiritual and emotional dimensions of everyday life.
—C.F.

“Lining Revealed: A Journey Through Folk Wisdom and Contemporary Vision”Center for Heritage, Arts, and Textile, through July 13
Günes Terkol, Hopes from Mothers, 2024. Image courtesy: Günes Terkol and Ferda Art Platform. Photo: Barıs Özçetin
Hong Kong’s Center for Heritage, Arts, and Textile (CHAT), housed in the former cotton-spinning mills of Nan Fung Textiles in Tsuen Wan, has long been a space where history and contemporary creativity intersect. Known for its unique programming, the institution bridges the innovative legacy of Hong Kong’s textile industry with fresh artistic dialogues. “Lining Revealed: A Journey Through Folk Wisdom and Contemporary Vision,” curated by in-house curator Wang Weiwei, delves into the enduring synergies between traditional folk crafts and contemporary art. Showcasing a rich variety of folk crafts—including handwoven and silkscreen-printed Chinese fabrics, traditional Indonesian weavings, and intricate Central Asian ornamental motifs—the exhibition brings together the works of 13 artists from across Asia who reinterpret, preserve, and transform textile traditions, weaving new narratives that connect past and present.
—C.F. More

When Ridley Scott recruited Syd Mead for his 1982 film Blade Runner, he had a simple assignment for the designer: devise the futuristic vehicle driven by the film’s protagonist Deckard. Mead took to the task with gusto, creating a car detailed with a dense assemblage of mechanical parts, a sleek glass exterior, and stickers indicating its legal authority. But he didn’t stop there. After designing the vehicle, he sketched the dystopic urban environment the car would be navigating—its architecture, its inhabitants, its neon glow, right down to the near-constant rain that fell on it. In short, he built a world.
“He could not just keep this object, this car, in isolation,” curator William Corman told me. “He had to build everything around it.”
The late designer’s world-spanning visions are now coming to life in “Future Pastime,” a major show in New York dedicated to his oeuvre. Curated by Elon Solo and Corman with access to the artist’s archives, the exhibition spotlights Mead’s decades-spanning painting practice, during which he gave shape to the science fiction imagination. Mead’s future, Corman noted, was “a place of possibility.”
Syd Mead, Party 2000 (1977). Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate.
As a child in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he was born in 1933, Mead displayed a knack for drawing, spurred by his reading of comic books and pulp magazines. After graduating from Los Angeles’s Art Center School in 1959, he embarked on a fruitful career in industrial design, working with clients including Ford, Philips, and Sony. He also created architectural designs for hotels and promotional material for manufacturers—most notably U.S. Steel Corporation, for which Mead developed a now-iconic catalog stacked with his vivid futuristic scenes.
“We’re talking technology, innovation, industrial design, automotive, architecture, advertising,” Solo told me. “He really just touched everything.”
Syd Mead, Mobilage (1985). Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate.
Mead’s entry into film, Solo added, was almost by happenstance, when the team behind Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) reached out to the designer to troubleshoot a visual effect. His eventual creation of the movie’s V’ger—”a mechanical chaperone of planetoid size,” in Mead’s words—would land him on Hollywood’s radar. Ridley Scott came calling for Blade Runner (and later, Denis Villeneuve for the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049), as did Steven Lisberger for Tron (1982), Peter Hyams for 2010 (1984), and James Cameron for Aliens (1986).
“There are no singular world builders on the scale of Syd prior to his entry into the film world,” Solo said.
(Even the films Mead did not work on weren’t untouched by his presence: for 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas lifted the film’s four-legged AT-AT walkers directly from Mead’s U.S. Steel catalog.)
Syd Mead, Cavalcade to the Crimson Castle (1996). Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate.
Where science fiction once tended toward the whimsical and cartoonish, Mead’s worlds were emotionally charged, dramatically lit, and, significantly, grounded in real world dynamics and mechanics (thanks to his expertise in industrial design and engineering). His designs would become synonymous with imaginary worlds in which man and machine coexist, and in which postmodernism arrives at its technological conclusion. They depicted, as Mead was wont to say, a “reality ahead of schedule.”
This reality, as “Future Pastime” will show, wasn’t always dystopian to Mead. At the heart of the exhibition is his body of gouache works from the 1970s through the 2000s depicting an idealized future, where familiar activities are rendered fantastical by technology. His metropolises are tactile with sensual glass and mirrors that reflect the pinks and blues of a galactic sky; a party’s attendees arrive in curious pods; and a horse racing event is hovered over by alien-like drones just as a dog race is run by large mechanical hounds.
Syd Mead, The Running of the Six Drgxx (1983). Photo courtesy of the artist’s estate.
In his depictions of leisure, Solo noted, Mead was walking in the wake of the Impressionist and Ashcan movements, which saw the painting of everyday scenes as a revolutionary act. When viewed together, his compositions appear to portray “this one unified future in which common people are enjoying the fruits of this bounty side by side, shoulder to shoulder,” Solo said. It’s a utopian beckoning.
“His future wasn’t this distant, outlandish fantasy. It was always this extension of reality, refined and inevitable,” said Corman. “I love to say that Syd’s futures are the present stretched gracefully forward. It was always with logic and beauty and purpose in mind.”
“Future Pastime” is on view at 534 West 26th Street, March 27–May 21. More

What is scripted or planned versus improvised isn’t discernible in Jacklean (in rehearsal)—the latest performance project by Mariana Valencia—and that is exactly why it is as captivating as it is.
Presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, Jacklean (in rehearsal) was produced in collaboration with sound artist and musician Jazmin “Jazzy” Romero, who shares the stage with Valencia for the course of the 60-minute performance. Featuring music, song, dialogue, and choreography, the show uses a fictional character by the name of Jacklean as a starting point.
Mariana Valencia, Jacklean (in rehearsal) (2025), with music by Jazzy Romero. Photo: Maria Baranova. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Valencia and Lydia Okrent, a fellow performance artist and long-time collaborator, first conceived of Jacklean in 2014. In Valencia’s words, “Jacklean is a being who will arrive to us in the future, and it will be a future without identity binary, and Jacklean will prefer the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us,’ and Jacklean is the perfect example of improvisation at its best. A kind of vision for hope and potential that came to Lydia and I.”
While Jacklean’s conceptual origins date back to 2014, the present project was largely born out of the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, when seemingly everything was brought into question: institutions, communities, life and death, and artmaking itself. From this perspective, Valencia developed a performance that focused on crafting a solid, creatively rigorous framework on which experimental and ever-evolving presentations could be hung.
“It’s not about proposing a final project but proposing a structure for work to be made again and again, an improvisatory structure, a structure of rehearsal, a structure of practice, and a structure where I’m not focused on product,” said Valencia.
Mariana Valencia, Jacklean (in rehearsal) (2025), with music by Jazzy Romero. Photo: Maria Baranova. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In its present iteration, the fluidity of exchange between Romero and Valencia speaks not only to the efficacy of their collaboration but also to their respective creative fortes. Valencia, who was awarded the Outstanding Breakout Choreographer at the 2018 Bessie Awards and participated in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, has been an important figure in the New York performance art scene for more than a decade. Weaving together elements of her personal life, relationships, anxieties, and more, a vibrant and dynamic world is brought to life in the performance, highlighting her individual experience while simultaneously casting a light on the greater context these thoughts and encounters occur.
Within the performance’s structure, space is carved out for Romero to in turn bring her own creative vision. “Jazzy is working through tools and modalities of electronic music or acoustic or vocal, or her histories in punk music and Spanish speaking music and traditional music from Mexico,” Valencia said.
Mariana Valencia, Jacklean (in rehearsal) (2025), with music by Jazzy Romero. Photo: Maria Baranova. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
While the performance could not necessarily be described as participatory, at various moments in the piece the audience participates, answering questions collectively or, in several of the more humorous moments (skillfully inserted as a counterweight to the weighty, vulnerable tenor of the piece overall), laughter feeds into the reciprocal nature built between viewer and performer.
“It’s a process of the audience watching Jazzy and I communicate, but also us communicating to them in a way that isn’t ‘we broke the fourth wall,’ but as people to people.”
With eight performances in the series total, and knowing the pivotal role improvisation plays in the work, it’s difficult at first (even if subconsciously) not to seek out the boundary between the planned and unplanned, attempting to suss out what might be the variable between iterations. Valencia’s personable and accessible execution of Jacklean (in rehearsal), however, quickly makes the delineation feel moot. Instead, viewers come away with a feeling analogous to having spent time with a close friend you haven’t seen in a long time, the type where you pick up right where you left off. And perhaps this is at the crux of what or who Jacklean is—a cogent reminder of just how small the chasm really is between you and I and we and us. More

Unfortunately, almost everyone has resonated at some time or other with Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). So much so, it seems, that a recent investigation found that the legendary masterpiece had been damaged by eager visitors breathing too heavily in front of the work. The iconic painting wasn’t the only time that the leading Norwegian modernist sought to personify some form of existential angst, with other examples being Despair (1894) and Melancholy (1891). Yet, it was in the many portraits also produced by Munch that he was able to attempt a slightly more subtle probing of the human condition.
A group of more than 40 of these character studies have just gone on display as part of “Edvard Munch Portraits” at the National Portrait Gallery in London, through June 15. The exhibition reveals new dimensions to Munch, using his art to build up a vivid sense of his biography, his wider cultural milieu, and his developing style before, during, and after several influential years spent in Paris and Berlin.
Though many of the paintings on display, especially those of family or close friends, contain the moments of brilliance we would expect from such an internationally beloved artist, some of his society portraits are surprisingly slapdash and inept. It may be that some level of intimacy was required for Munch to do what he does best: employ gestural brushwork to make paint quite magically metamorphose into a bewitching psychological presence.
“Throughout his life, Munch sought to delve behind the masks of those he portrayed, using expressive paintwork to reveal inner feelings and motivations,” explained the show’s curator Alison Smith.
Here is our pick of five must-see masterpieces from the show.

Tête-à-tête (1885)
Edvard Munch, Tête-à-tête (1885). Photo: Halvor Bjørngård, © Munchmuseet.
Painted when Munch, who was born in late 1863, was just 21, Tête-à-tête is a scene in which the artist’s friend, fellow artist Karl Jensen-Hjell, can be seen from behind appearing to chat up a mysterious woman at a bar. It has been suggested that the woman in the picture is Munch’s sister Inger, which, though he was immersed in bohemian circles, may have risked her reputation in the late 19th century. This may be why neither sitter was ever formally identified, but double portraits, building narrative around subjects, and integrating them into a seemingly natural, candid scene, would all be recurring features of Munch’s later work.

Evening (1888)
Edvard Munch, Evening (1888). Photo: © Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.
A few years later, Munch painted his other sister Laura in Evening, a painting that might on the surface appear to be a pleasant scene of a woman in a straw sunhat enjoying a sunny vista. That is, until the viewer squares in on the subject’s face, with her intense stare betraying an inner turmoil that would align with the mental health condition that Laura struggled with. The sense of alienation is heightened by a ghostly white presence faintly perceivable at the center of the canvas, the remnants of an original composition that included a standing woman, most likely Munch’s other sister Inger. With her absence, the composition becomes an obvious precursor to Melancholy, which contains a similarly posed figure modeled on Munch’s friend Jappe Nilssen.

Thor Lütken (1892)
Edvard Munch, Thor Lütken (1892). Photo: Sidsel de Jong.
In one apparently ordinary portrait of Munch’s friend, the lawyer Thor Lütken, eagle-eyed observers will spot an intriguing painting within a painting. What could, at a glance, be the white cuff poking out from a black jacket sleeve, appears, in fact, to be one of two figures—one dressed in white, the other in black—making their way through a mysterious, moonlit landscape. This highly unusual vignette is left ambiguous, and it is up to the viewer to decide whether it might be an allusion to romance or death, two themes that recurred frequently in Munch’s work.

The Brooch. Eva Mudocci (1902)
Edvard Munch, The Brooch. Eva Mudocci (1902). Photo: courtesy Peder Lund, © Private collection.
Munch’s prints are among the most affecting works on view at the National Portrait Gallery, including the lithograph The Brooch. Eva Mudocci, of the English violinist who was a friend and potentially lover of the artist. According to the exhibition catalogue, during Munch’s Symbolist phase, he tended to portray women as either positive or negative archetypes. If he admired the woman, as was the case with Mudocci, they might be idolized, but other women with whom he had more painful relationships were imagined as malevolent femme fatales.

Model with a Green Scarf (Sultan Abdul Karim) (1916)
Edvard Munch, Model with a Green Scarf (Sultan Abdul Karim) (1916). Photo: © Munchmuseet.
Munch made portraits of many of the men who worked for him, and one of these was his chauffeur Sultan Abdul Karem, who had arrived to Norway as a traveling member of the German Hagenbeck Circus. He and Munch met during a stop in Oslo. Eventually, the artist made seven paintings and one lithography of Karem, and the nature of these works differs greatly. In Cleopatra and the Slave, he is represented as an enslaved person, reinforcing racist stereotypes of Black people at that time. However, in Model with a Green Scarf, Karem is not exoticized or othered but shown simply as he was, wearing casual winter clothes.
“Edvard Munch Portraits” is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London through June 15. More

Satellite Ranch opened last weekend across a 10-acre sprawl in Austin, Texas, transformed into a playground for artists, craftspeople, and performers. The Texas event is an outpost of Satellite Art Fair, founded in 2015 by New York artist Brian Andrew Whiteley (he of the Trump tombstone). When I visited the art show on Sunday, the scene was bucolic—the ranch’s buildings housing myriad exhibitions and projects, the sun beaming on a host of outdoor sculptures. Not so, however, in photographer Phil Buehler’s cyclorama.
The indoor installation is a cylindrical plywood structure featuring a panoramic image on its inside. Visitors stepping into the curved space find themselves immersed in a 360-degree view of the remains of an apartment complex in Ukraine after it had been targeted by Russian bombs, courtesy of a high-definition photograph by Buehler. Over the entire scene, an air raid siren plays on loop. It’s a powerful experience, however lo-fi.
Installation view of Phil Buehler, The Perils of Indifference at Satellite Ranch in Austin, Texas, 2025. Photo courtesy of Phil Buehler.
“I always feel like these cycloramas are like a transporter,” he told me. “I try to bring things in from someplace else in a different way than other people would. It’s getting a message across in a different way than a writer or a filmmaker or the news would, because art goes into your head a different way.”
Buehler has had a long history of photographing sites equally haunting and haunted. Since 1973, he’s visited the remains of Ellis Island, the Greystone Park psychiatric facility, and New York’s 1964 World’s Fair—documenting what he terms “endangered history.”
His work has also intersected with his activism: he’s photographed the site in Ferguson where Michael Brown was killed, installed a massive mural chronicling U.S. president Donald Trump’s lies, and created a memorial on the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre. His cycloramas have captured events from the 2017 Women’s March to a Trump rally. More recently, his mural projects, Empty Beds and Irpin Ukraine: Please Don’t Forget Us, have unpacked the devastation wrought on Ukraine by Russian forces.
Installation view of Phil Buehler, The Perils of Indifference at Satellite Ranch in Austin, Texas, 2025. Photo courtesy of Phil Buehler.
His new installation features an image Buehler created in Borodyanka during his first trip to Ukraine, which he took with his wife, the artist Lisa Levy. In the background are variously charred and ruined buildings—some apartments appear abandoned; some have their windows boarded up with wood, signaling that their occupants had returned after the bombing; and others destroyed, their insides exposed to the elements. A children’s toy store is visible in the distance. In the foreground is a field of yellowed grass, amid which a swing set stands askew.
Buehler’s decision to center the panoramic view in the complex’s playground was a conscious one. “I wanted to have some humanity,” he said. “It’s hard to get humanity when there’s nothing inside.”
(Not in frame but close by, Buehler told me, is a wall with a Banksy on it. “It was coming apart. When I was there, there were some Italians who were squirting glue behind the plaster with syringes, so the plaster wouldn’t come off the brick.”)
Installation view of Phil Buehler, The Perils of Indifference at Satellite Ranch in Austin, Texas, 2025. Photo courtesy of Phil Buehler.
The artist has titled the cyclorama The Perils of Indifference, a nod to Elie Wiesel’s 1999 speech at the White House. It’s also even more resonant at this moment, as Russia’s war on Ukraine enters its third year, and as Trump, following a disastrous meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, waffles on sending further aid to the embattled nation. “We’re going backwards,” Buehler noted.
It’s why the photographer has opted to work with nonprofits such as Liberty Ukraine, which has backed The Perils of Indifference, in his continued bid to ensure exposure for the ongoing conflict.
“I almost use art as a media provocation,” he explained, telling me about the curiosity that greeted his Ferguson cyclorama when it was installed in Brooklyn. “Art seduces you in a different way. The nature of the cyclorama is that there’s no perspective. You stand in the middle and there’s no framing. You get to choose what you look at.”
Installation view of Phil Buehler, The Perils of Indifference at Satellite Ranch in Austin, Texas, 2025. Photo: Min Chen.
After Satellite, Buehler’s plywood cyclorama (the first one he’s hand-built; his other structures were aluminum constructions) will make its way to the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. There, he will install it with an entirely different image: that of the ward in Greystone Park where the folk legend spent his final years. The picture is plucked from Buehler’s 2013 book Wardy Forty, compiled in partnership with the Woody Guthrie Archives.
That showcase is worlds removed from his Ukraine project, just as his war images are somewhat distinct from his pictures of abandoned sites. But seen together, they’re testament to Buehler’s roving eye and curiosity. Visitors to his cycloramas aren’t the only ones getting immersed.
“These art projects allow me to join groups that otherwise might not necessarily be a natural fit,” he said. “These different worlds are interesting to me. What are they feeling? What are they sharing? There are commonalities: they love their kids and their family, they want their freedom, and they don’t want to be told what to do. The stuff that’s good about America? They want the good stuff.”
Satellite Ranch is on view at 719 Shady Lane, Austin, Texas, through March 15. More