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By Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop

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Zao Wou-Ki: Master Printmaker — Asia’s First Major Retrospective

Zao Wou-Ki Untitled 1960 etching and aquatint Zao Wou-Ki occupies a rare position in twentieth-century abstraction: a Chinese-born artist fully at home in Paris, yet one who never abandoned the visual memory of his early training in ink and calligraphy. His work synthesised Eastern technique with European modernism, creating a vocabulary entirely his own. From December 13, 2025 to May 3, 2026, M+ in Hong Kong presents Zao Wou-Ki: Master Printmaker , Asia's first major exhibition dedicated entirely to the artist's graphic works. While Zao is often celebrated for his monumental canvases, this retrospective repositions his work on paper as a laboratory of invention—revealing a practice as exploratory and rigorous as his painting. Zao Wou-Ki Piazza Siena 1951 oil on canvas The exhibition will comprise nearly 180 works, spanning five decades and covering Zao’s development from early post-war experiments in Paris to his late-1990s explorations. Early pieces show his...

When Artists Turned to the Fan: The Met Revisits a 19th-Century Obsession

Henri-Gabriel Ibels (French, Paris 1867–1936 Paris). Circus Fan , ca. 1893–95. Lithograph on silk fan leaf. In the late 19th century, European artists found unexpected freedom in a surprisingly modest format. Edgar Degas sketched dancers across crescent-shaped compositions meant to echo the sweep of a folding fan; Camille Pissarro experimented with pastoral scenes that curved gently outward, as if opening toward the viewer; others played with metallic pigments, feathers, or lacquer, borrowing directly from the vocabulary of fan makers. In their hands, the fan became a hybrid object — part canvas, part design surface The allure of the fan had deep roots. By the 18th century, it was far more than a flirtatious prop; it served as a tool of education, political messaging, and even discreet surveillance. Women carried fans that could be read like small social scripts, their materials and motifs signalling taste, status, and worldliness. ...

The Art of Evolution; Theo Jansen's Strandbeests

Every spring a new Strandbeest (beach animal in Dutch) is ‘ born ’ on the northern beaches of Holland. The strange-looking creature with spindly legs and wings on its back will then take its first steps, gently coaxed by its ‘father’, Theo Jansen, and slowly learns to adapt to its seaside environment before becoming dying in the fall. The Strandbeest is actually a wind-powered kinetic sculpture that blurs the lines between art, engineering, and science. Surprisingly in the hi-tech age of computerized Artificial Intelligence, they are built out of rather mundane materials (PVC tubes, zip ties, recycled plastic bottles) yet the beach animals can not only walk on their own but can also react to their environment having developed over time a sense of self preservation. Jansen refuses to label his sophisticated kinetic sculptures as artworks and instead refers to them as a fast evolving new species on earth, dividing each generation into time periods and giving them scientific...

Wright of Derby: The Artist Who Brought Candlelight into the Age of Enlightenment

A Philosopher Giving That Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp Is Put in Place Joseph Wright of Derby, 1764-1766 Wright of Derby: From the Shadows, a new exhibition at the National Gallery in London, casts a warm glow on one of Britain's most distinctive 18th-century painters—an artist who took the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and turned it toward the modern world. Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) may not enjoy the name recognition of the Old Masters he admired, yet his vision was no less daring. While Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Gerrit van Honthorst used tenebrism for biblical scenes and historical narratives, Wright pointed those same dramatic contrasts of light and darkness at the contemporary world—science lectures, blacksmiths' forges, and moments of intellectual discovery. The small but carefully curated show focuses on Wright's "candlelight" paintings from 1765 to 1773—the period when he was a young artist trying to make his name in London's com...

Chiharu Shiota’s Autumn of Resonance: Three Major Exhibitions Unfold Across New York and Turin

Metamorphosis of Consciousness, 2025, installation. Few contemporary artists explore memory, identity, and mortality with the poetic precision of Chiharu Shiota . The Japanese artist transforms space into labyrinths of thread, enveloping familiar objects—keys, suitcases, pianos—turning them into delicate vessels of shared memory. This autumn, Shiota’s work is on full display across continents, from a sweeping retrospective in Turin to two concurrent solo exhibitions in New York. Uncertain Journey , 2016/2025, Installation view: Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles , Opened since October 22, 2025, Chiharu Shiota: The Soul Trembles at MAO Museo d'Arte Orientale marks the artist's Italian debut. Organised in collaboration with Tokyo's Mori Art Museum and curated by Mami Kataoka and Davide Quadrio, the travelling retrospective traces decades of her evolution through drawings, sculptures, photographs, and iconic installations including Uncertain Journey , In Silence , and Acc...