LuxArtAsia

Jaejun Lee Europe's only international art fair dedicated to contemporary Asian art is back at the Saatchi Gallery from 16–19 October 2025. Now in its 4th UK edition, FOCUS Art Fair will showcase work by more than 50 artists from across Asia and its diaspora, spanning countries including China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Taiwan, and India. This year's edition features over 30 galleries, from One East Asia in Singapore to Hanmi Gallery in London and Seoul. Highlighted artists for 2025 include two distinguished Korean artists: Meekyoung Shin and Jaejun Lee . Shin creates sculptures of Chinese porcelain and Buddha figures —but makes them entirely from soap, exploring ideas of impermanence and cultural change. Lee works with actual porcelain, mixing traditional techniques with contemporary forms and glazes to examine themes of repetition and time. Both artists bridge historical craft traditions with modern art...

Painted Threads, Hidden Truths: Abi Dionisio at FOCUS London

At this year's FOCUS Art Fair London at the Saatchi Gallery, Abi Dionisio's mini-exhibition When Threads Take Turns stands out immediately. Her paintings are trompe l'œil works that look like embroidered fabric at first glance—you have to do a double take to realize you're looking at paint on canvas. It's a clever trick, but it's also the key to understanding what she's actually doing. Dionisio pairs small, detailed embroideries with large-scale paintings that reproduce the reverse side of the stitched work. From the back of an embroidery, you see thread knots, loose ends, and the structural work that holds the image together. That's what she paints. The gesture is simple but profound: she's showing us that meaning exists on both sides. The finished, polished surface tells only half the story. The hidden side—the labor, the time, the technique—is equally real and equally important. This approach runs through her entire practice. Every stitch is a ma...

Picasso Takes Center Stage: Tate Modern's Theatrical Reimagining of a Master's Legacy

Theatre Picasso, a major exhibition at Tate Modern, brings together familiar works by the Spanish master, from his iconic The Three Dancers (1925) to Weeping Woman (1937) and Nude Woman in a Red Armchair (1932). But what sets this exhibition apart is its "staging" by contemporary artist Wu Tsang and writer and curator Enrique Fuenteblanca. The gallery space has been transformed into a theatrical environment where visitors move through various "theatre" spaces—from storage and backstage to main stage, finally passing through a stage curtain into the audience seating area. Most of the exhibition is presented in dramatically low lighting that allows each artwork to shine. Rather than organizing by chronology or stylistic periods, the show explores themes including The Painter and the Model, The Artist's Studio, and Animal, War and Violence. In The Painter and the Model section, the paintings showcase Picasso's stylistic evolution while highlighting his poss...

Shin Sung Hy': Weaving Paint into Space

Throughout his career, Korean artist Shin Sung Hy (1948–2009) questioned painting's fundamental nature—canvas, support, and paint—through material experimentation that transformed flat surfaces into sculptural objects. A Solution to Continuity (Solution de Continuite), 1994, Acrylic and oil on canvas Running September 4 to October 18, 2025, at Gallery Hyundai New York Project Space, the solo exhibition "Body of Work" will showcase how i the late Korean artist's revolutionary approach to painting blurred boundaries between two and three dimensions. Shin's practice evolved through four distinct periods: the “monochrome hyper-realistic painting” series, jute paintings (1974–1982), “collaged paperwork” series, collage (1983–1992), “sewn-canvas” series, couturage (1993–1997), and “knotted-canvas” series, nouage(1997–2009). The exhibition focuses on his last two series . In his couturage works, he painted canvases, cut them into strips, then stitched them back togeth...

Anonymous Street Artist Banksy's Biggest Exhibition Ever Opens in London with 250 Works

All Photos/video courtesy ‘Banksy Limitless London’. A comprehensive exhibition showcasing the work of Britain's most enigmatic street artist has just opened in London marking the first UK appearance of the internationally acclaimed Banksy Limitless show. The exhibition, which has already drawn over two million visitors around the world, presents 250 works spanning the career of the anonymous artist believed to have been born in Bristol around 1974. Banksy emerged from Bristol's underground scene in the early 1990s, initially working as a freehand graffiti artist with the DryBreadZ Crew before transitioning to his signature stencil technique around 1994, inspired by fellow Bristol artist 3D, who later became a founding member of Massive Attack. The anonymous artist gained prominence for his anti-authoritarian art, merging graffiti with installation and performance art through what observers describe as "wry wit and stealth". Despite decades of speculation about...