Below, are the answers to some frequently asked questions.

What is the Venice Biennale?

Dubbed “the Olympics of the art world,” the Venice Biennale is an international art festival that is now comprises three parts: 1) a central exhibition organized by an artistic director in the Central pavilion in the public gardens (aka the Giardini) and former dockyards (aka the Arsenale); 2) a series of national pavilions organized by dozens of countries offering a show of one or more artists; and 3) independently organized, but officially approved exhibitions known as Collateral Events.

Additionally, there are other exhibitions and events planned to coincide with the Biennale that are not, in fact, officially affiliated. This can include shows put on by artists themselves, the city’s museums and foundations, or commercial galleries. There are also performances, panels, screenings, dinners, and parties that bring the city’s art to life.

Who’s in charge?

The Biennale organization, which manages activities across art, architecture, film, dance, music, and theater, is overseen by current president and right-wing journalist Pietrangelo Buttafuoco. Each Biennale, a new artistic director is selected to curate the central show. This practice began in 1980 with legendary Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, who repeated the role in 1999 and 2001. Only three Biennales have been organized by women and only one African-born curator thus far.

The curator of this year’s edition is Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil, presents “Foreigners Everywhere.” The first Latin American curator in the Biennale’s 130–year history, the title is a provocation aimed at a wave of anti-immigrant agendas across Italy, Hungary, the United States, and other countries over the last few years.

What are the origins of the Biennale?

On April 21, 1868, King Umberto I of Italy married Margherita of Savoy. Nearly 25 years later, Venice’s city government honored the couple’s silver anniversary by establishing a national biennial exhibition of art and an orphanage on April 19, 1893. This era of grand international art expositions and commerce in Europe can be traced back earlier, however, to the large-scale art exhibitions of the 18th century. The inspiration for the Biennale’s organizers, though, was a national art exhibition held in Venice in 1887.

The inaugural Biennale took place with King Umberto and Queen Margherita in attendance on April 30, 1895. The first iteration boasted 516 works, with 188 by Italians and the rest by foreigners. In addition to artists from Italy, there were artists from 14 other nations, along with a selection of works submitted in advance and approved by a jury. With approximately 225,000 attendees, the Biennale quickly established itself as a vital source of tourism and commerce.

Why is this year’s Biennale identified as the 60th edition when it started in 1895?

While the Biennale typically occurs every two years, there have been changes made to the schedule over the years due to extraordinary circumstances. In 1916 and 1918, World War I nixed the show. World War II also prevented editions in 1944 and 1946. In 1974 there were related activities, but the show was dedicated in solidarity with Chile, in which a coup put General Augusto Pinochet in power the year prior. As such, it was not assigned an official number. (It should be noted that the Chile show was supported by the Italian Communist party, which had sway on the Biennale committee.)

Though the Biennale has not seen that kind of solidarity since, subsequent iterations of the festival adopted this concept of selecting a unifying theme. Numbering resumed with the 37th edition in 1976, which considered “environment, participation, cultural structures.”

Were there Biennales held during World War II?

Though some nations dropped out in the years leading up to the war—the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain boycotted in 1936, for instance, over the political situation in Italy—the Biennale continued through the 1942 edition.

If the Biennale began in the odd-numbered year 1895, why have there been some even-numbered editions in the past?

Beginning with the ninth edition in 1910, the Biennale shifted to even-numbered years, though a show was still staged in 1909. This move was intended to avoid a grand art exhibition planned in Rome in 1911 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Italy’s unification, with the goal of avoiding a major overlap between the two events. There was a three-year pause following the 1990 Biennale, after which the show went back to debuting in odd-numbered years so that the centennial edition could be celebrated in 1995. With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2021 edition was postponed to 2022.

How many nations will present work at this year’s Biennale?

This year’s edition saw a substantial increase, with works by 331 artists, including Kay WalkingStick, Lauren Halsey, and Samia Halaby, from the 2022 edition’s 213 artists.

The Central pavilion will focus on “the queer artist,” “the outsider artist,” “the folk artist,” and “the Indigenous artist.” On the hall’s facade, Brazil’s Indigenous Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin (MAHKU) collective will paint a mural, while New Zealand’s four-woman Māori Mataaho collective will stage an installation in the building’s first room. A large section of the pavilion is dedicated to LGBTQ+ artists, with a special display of queer abstraction.

What are national pavilions?

Biennale organizers encouraged countries to participate with their own pavilions to create shows. Each individual nation is responsible for the costs of construction, upkeep, and programming of their respective pavilion.

Belgium was the first to participate with an inaugural pavilion in 1907. Germany, Britain, and Hungary joined the ranks in 1909. The United States joined in 1930 for the ninth national pavilion. Since the Giardini is filled with only 30 pavilions, other countries began showing at the Arsenale and other venues across the city. In 1995 South Korea was the last country to build a pavilion in the Giardini.

How did the US pavilion come together?

The US Pavilion is distinct because it was not actually started by the government. Instead, the effort was undertaken by the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York. The three-room Palladian-style structure opened in 1930. In 1954 the Museum of Modern Art purchased the pavilion, and sold it to the Guggenheim Foundation in 1986.

How are artists selected?

The artistic director selects artists for the central show. For the pavilions, each country makes its own choices, ideally in line with the Biennale theme.

In the United States, for instance, the Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, a group of experts assembled by the National Endowment for the Arts in an agreement with the US Department of State, makes the choice from proposals submitted by various institutions. Jeffrey Gibson will represent the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale, marking the first time in more than 90 years that an Indigenous artist has had a solo presentation with the US Pavilion.

What prizes does the Biennale give out?

Three main awards—a Golden Lion for the best national participation, a Golden Lion for the best individual participant in the main show, and a Silver Lion for the most promising young participant in the main show—are presented by an international jury of curators following the opening festivities. Two special mentions can also be given to artists in the main show. One special mention can be awarded to a participating nation. Additionally, the artistic director proposes a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement that is confirmed with the Biennale’s board ahead of the show’s opening. The latter award went to Anna Maria Maiolino and Nil Yalter this year.

The history of the prizes is somewhat muddied. Between 1968 and 1986, there were no awards. At certain points, the awards were medium-specific, with prizes for the best examples of painting and sculpture, for example. During the height of Fascism, there was even a prize for best maternity subject. In the early days, the awards came with cash prizes to incentivize the participation of major artists. Today, however, the award comes with a lion statue and a sense of pride. The current prize structure began in 1986, based on a prior system from 1938.

Is the art in the Biennale for sale?

Until 1970, the art was available for purchase, and the sales office tracked the deals: there were 186 sales in the first edition and a high of 1,209 sales in 1909. Political shifts in the late 1960s and changes around art commerce influenced the decision to stop selling at the fair. The art, however, can still be purchased through dealers from the galleries representing the artists on view. Often, works on view by the most in-demand artists will sell ahead of the exhibition’s opening.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally reported and written by Andrew Russeth in 2019, on the occasion of the 58th Venice Biennale. It has been updated with information about the 60th Venice Biennale by Francesca Aton.

Her death was announced by her longtime New York representative, ACA Galleries, which did not specify a cause.

Just one aspect of Ringgold’s remarkable life would have been enough to secure her place in history, but it was her action-packed, richly detailed painted quilts for which she was best known. Her most famous was Tar Beach (1988), which tells the story of an 8-year-old girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who flies from the roof of her Manhattan apartment building into the night sky. In 1991, it was adapted into a children’s book that has become a staple of elementary school classrooms in the United States.

Ringgold made fabric part of her practice after seeing Tibetan thangkas at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, but quilting had deep roots in her family. Her great-great-great-grandmother, who was enslaved in the South, quilted, she said. Her mother, Willie Posey Jones, a fashion designer, helped her sew early on, and Ringgold would go on to use the process to chart her travels, her love of art history, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and a great deal more.

With mordant humor and a joyful flare for invention, Ringgold also made vivid dolls and unforgettable political posters, staged performances, and wrote. We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold was published in 1995.

She was an organizer too, picketing outside museums that that excluded Black and women artists and defending free speech. On at least one occasion, she was arrested. Recalling the 1960s and ’70s, in an interview with ARTnews in 2016, Ringgold said, “people were really very dedicated to each other, to their freedom and support of one another. And I felt that I had something to say, and I wanted to say it.”

Faith Ringgold was born October 8, 1930, in New York and grew up in Harlem. Her father, Andrew Louis Jones, was a truck driver. She enrolled at City College in Manhattan in the 1940s, and while she was barred from majoring in art as a woman, she was determined to become an artist, and so she took classes by studying art education. After graduating, Ringgold taught art in New York public schools, quitting in the 1970s to focus on her art. (She later taught for years at the University of California, San Diego.)

From the start, Ringgold’s work examined race relations and politics in America with an unflinching gaze. For Members Only (1963), from her “American People” series, has stone-faced white men staring from it. A 1967 painting from her “Black Light” series spells out “Die N—” within the stripes of the American flag. The 1970s brought her “Slave Rape” works, which follow women as they attempt to escape enslavement. (They are on unstretched canvas; one of many aspects that she liked about using such textiles was that she could transport them herself.)

Ringgold’s vast body of work amounts to an epic, sustained history of Black life in America across centuries, and offers a window into her own experience as an artist amid fast-changing times. In just one especially charismatic piece, she has an octet of fellow pioneering Black women (Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Fannie Lou Hamer among them) holding a sunflower-covered quilt in a sunflower-filled field in Arles, France, as the area’s most famous resident, Vincent van Gogh, stands off to the side.

Ringgold showed steadily throughout her career, and found supportive collectors, but major museums only came on board fully in the late 2010s and 2020s, as they attempted to reckon with their history of racism and sexism. “I am fully aware of the attention I am now getting in the art world, and grateful,” the artist said to the Times in 2019. “But I am also aware that it has taken a very long time, for I had to live to be 89 years old to see it happen.”

In 2019 the Serpentine Galleries in London organized an acclaimed survey of her work, which traveled to the Bildmuseet in Umea, Sweden. Another retrospective also appeared at the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, and the New Museum in New York.

A few years earlier, the Museum of Modern Art had acquired her 12-foot-wide Die (1967), which shows a bloody street fight between Black and white people. When MoMA reopened in 2019 after renovations, that work hung next to the storied Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) of Pablo Picasso, whom she often cited as an inspiration.

Ringgold’s art is also in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum (an institution she had picketed), and numerous other important institutions. She was the author of more than 16 children’s books, and received more than 20 honorary doctorates. Always ready to try something new, she even developed an app, Quiltuduko, a sudoku-style puzzle game that involves arranging patterns and images.

The artist’s first marriage, to Robert Earl Wallace, a jazz pianist, ended in divorce; in 1962 she married Burdette “Birdie” Ringgold, an auto worker, who died in 2020. The artist’s survivors include her two daughters, the cultural critic Michele Wallace and Barbara Wallace.

Even though Ringgold lived to see some segments of the art world embrace artists from more diverse backgrounds, she continued to speak forthrightly about the underrepresentation of Black women artists, telling the Times in 2019 that “there is a bias even in the selection of black women, favoring those who have little or no politics.”

That, of course, could not describe Ringgold. She was resolute in her convictions, ready to take a stand, and aware of the risks that entailed. In 1970, she took part in an exhibition called “The People’s Flag Show” at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, which aimed to challenge flag desecration laws, following the conviction of an art dealer a couple years earlier for showing anti-Vietnam War work that involved the flag. The police showed up, and cuffed Ringgold and two other artists, Jean Toche and Jon Hendricks. Speaking with ARTnews in 2016, she explained her thoughts on the matter. “How dare you tell artists what they can do?” she said. “That’s the beginning of some really bad funk—bad, bad, bad.”

The design is closely guarded until 2016. Then, renderings are released. The grand reveal: this designer is planning to make … a tower of stairs—154 flights, to be exact, all arrayed in a kind of upside-down cone, like shawarma on a spit, stretching 16 stories (some 150 feet) into the sky. In 2018 the designer offers a wan explanation: “What I like about stairs—as soon as you start using your body, it breaks down potential artistic bullshit, because there’s just an immediacy to straining your leg,” he tells the New Yorker’s Ian Parker.

Then, early 2019, Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel opens to the public in Hudson Yards, the crowning jewel of a complex of towering corporate offices, luxury apartments, luxury stores, and a luxury hotel developed by a luxury gym chain. Its pristine copper-colored cladding gleams in the sun. It looks alien and a little menacing, like a digital creation clicked and dragged from a computer screen into real life. It is vacuous in its celebration of vertigo-inducing capital and private ambition, and even though it closes to visitors not long thereafter, in May 2021, it has to rank as one of the defining architectural projects—one of the defining artworks—of the era.

Miraculously, this managed not to derail the 53-year-old Englishman’s career. Gargantuan, eye-catching Heatherwick schemes continue to crop up around the world. Boris Johnson has compared him to Michelangelo. Diane von Furstenberg has termed him a “genius.” For engineer Tony Fadell, the “father of the iPod,” he is “a creative genius.” Billionaire Stephen Ross, the man behind Hudson Yards, is said to view him as “the ultimate genius.”

It is no crime for artists and designers to be adored by the wealthy and powerful, of course. It’s essential. (Michelangelo certainly knew this.) But Heatherwick has become the go-to artist of the ultra-rich. Why?

ONE ANSWER IS THAT Heatherwick really can make punchy spectacles—edifices that become landmarks that patrons tout with easy pride. An early success was the Rolling Bridge, conceived for a London office and retail development where it was installed in 2004. More a kinetic sculpture than a bridge, it unfolds grandly from an octagon into a now-nonfunctional 36-foot-long footbridge over a canal in Paddington Basin. (Comprising thousands of complex moving parts that stopped working in 2021, it may never be repaired.) A few years later, his UK Pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai, covered with 60,000 thin acrylic rods, was a shimmering Op art tour de force. And his similar starburst of a sculpture for Manchester, England, the nearly 200-foot-tall B of the Bang (2005), emanated the thrill of a vision brought improbably to life. Sadly, it was removed because parts of its 180 spikes kept falling off. Even the lobbying of Antony Gormley, another lover of bombast, could not save it.

But these are essentially razzle-dazzle, one-note pleasures, perfect examples of Ed Ruscha’s old line about the reaction that bad art elicits: “Wow! Huh?” Whereas good art draws those same words in reverse. Heatherwick’s 2007 Spun Chair, rendered in polished copper and stainless steel, could be a mascot for his methods: a sleek chair (picture a thread spool pinched at the center) that sitters can tilt at an angle and spin in a complete circle. It’s fun for a few spins.

Heatherwick’s competitor (and collaborator on a 2022 Google building in California), Bjarke Ingels, nailed it when he told the New Yorker: “There’s a Harry Potter-esque, Victorian quirkiness in the work. An element of steampunk, almost.” He comes bearing showy designs that aim to be icons for a development, a neighborhood, a city. A prime example is his 2017 plot with Mayor Johnson to build a $260 million Garden Bridge—a tree-filled pedestrian walkway—across the River Thames in London, scrapped after having sucked up $48 million in public funds.

The Heatherwick phenomenon is not a tale of gentrification. That work has usually been done by the time he gets the call. Long ago, white-cube galleries in West Chelsea and the rent-spiking High Line paved the way for Hudson Yards, which was helped along by almost $6 billion in tax breaks enacted by dubious rezoning that made Harlem, Central Park, and Hudson Yards all one low-employment district (never mind that only one of these had people living in it: the latter is a former train yard). He is, instead, an exemplary architect for a time when cities have become unbearably expensive and the wealthiest do not believe they should have to pay taxes.

HEATHERWICK, HOWEVER, positions himself as a man of the people. In his new manifesto of a book, running nearly 500 pages, he goes on the attack against the past century of design. “Some architects see themselves as artists,” he writes in Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities. “The problem is, the rest of us are forced to live with this ‘art.’” He inveighs against buildings that are “boring”—too flat, plain, straight, shiny, monotonous, anonymous, serious. Some 50 pages are devoted to a diatribe against Le Corbusier, “the god of boring,” whose theories “gave permission for repetitive order to utterly overpower complexity,” which Heatherwick prizes.

“Modernist architects think boring buildings are beautiful,” Heatherwick grouses. Their minimal, theoretically loaded work has lent cover for the cheap, knockoff stuff that sits alongside it. Against these elites and their “emotional austerity,” their buildings that “make us stressed, sick, lonely, and scared,” he adopts the language of the populist politician. “I am going to make a promise to you,” he writes in a lightly condescending letter to the “passerby” that closes Humanize. “I will dedicate the rest of my life to this war. But I need you … to join us. Our aim is modest: we just want buildings that are not boring!” And if boringness sounds difficult to measure, do not worry: Heatherwick Studio has made a “Boringometer” to determine how interesting a structure’s shapes and textures are, on a scale of 1 to 10.

The obvious irony is that many Heatherwick structures read like desperate, failing attempts not to be boring, via some whiz-bang trick. They illustrate Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick—a device induced by late capitalism that falls flat for appearing to work both too little and too hard. Bulbous, grenade-shaped windows monotonously line his 2021 Lantern House apartment building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, while his newly opened 1,000 Trees mall in Shanghai features, yes, 1,000 trees, each sitting on its own mushroomlike column high in the air around the stepped building. It suggests a videogame environment, as do renderings for his overwrought multifarious proposal for an island in Seoul’s Han River.

While purporting to speak on behalf of everyday people, Heatherwick is careful to do nothing that could actually offend the ultra-rich. In a revealing passage in Humanize, he praises Antoni Gaudí’s curvaceous Casa Milà in Barcelona for “wanting to fill us up with awe and break us out in smiles.” Says Heatherwick: “Even though this building was made to provide high-end apartments for wealthy people, I believe it is a gift.” We should be grateful.

Heatherwick’s pitch sounds precisely attuned to the ears of politicians who are disinclined to pursue projects that might actually benefit the public at a time of government austerity (forget about the emotional strain). Self-styled technocrat Michael Bloomberg blurbed Humanize, praising it as “a powerful prescription for buildings that put the public first.”

“Our most vulnerable people live in the most boring buildings,” Heatherwick writes on a page that is illustrated, bizarrely, by the burned-out Grenfell Tower, where 74 people died in 2017. “Why should absence of boredom be a luxury good?” Heatherwick, it should be noted, has not pursued any large-scale, or affordable, housing projects that I am aware of.

Making buildings and cities that are more hospitable, livable, and generous is a noble pursuit, but the designer of a cold and imposing nine-figure stairway to nowhere does not feel like the right man for the job—not least because he and his developer-patron declined to install safety features after a series of suicides there. (Following the fourth, they finally closed it; nets are reportedly being tested.) Standing below it, I do not feel that I am receiving a gift.

STILL, IT IS EASY to share a common enemy with Heatherwick: boring buildings that exhibit little regard for those who use them. We all spend time in places made with little imagination and even less care. We deserve more. As he writes, “we’re richer than we’ve ever been at any point in history.” Heatherwick, making that pitch to deep-pocketed developers, has not often been able to deliver satisfying structures, but his brio should inspire everyone, whether commissioned architects or apartment renters or voters, to ask for more.

In any case, some ideas that Heatherwick floats in his tome for creating better buildings are sensible mainstream ones that practitioners and activists do advocate, like reducing regulations and simplifying planning processes. (Such moves could also assist wealthy developers, to be sure.) But my favorite Heatherwick prescription is an eccentric one, and absolutely peak Heatherwick: “Sign buildings.” Instead of “staying in the shadows,” he says, a building’s creators should “be proudly named at eye level on the outsides of their projects.”

“Why would anyone involved in the process of building buildings be against this?” he asks. “Why wouldn’t you be proud? Why wouldn’t you want to sign your canvas?”  

As a journalist based in Seoul, much of my year-end top ten, which follows below, comes from South Korea, but I am grateful to have finally been able to bounce around the region a fair amount this year with ease.

The best art I saw was on a visit to Kyoto this summer, when, coincidentally, the millennium-old Gion Matsuri festival was taking place with full pageantry, after scaled-back versions during the pandemic. Towering floats—fantasias of ornate architecture, some adorned with sumptuous tapestries—crawled through the streets, pulled by relentless teams of volunteers. It was captivating. However, as an annual event, that glorious affair is not eligible for this list, which is reserved solely for temporary exhibitions that were on view in 2023.

Before revealing my top ten, I have to note a few remarkable shows that did not make the list: feminist artist’s Yun Suk Nam’s captivating portraits of women who fought for Korean independence (plus more than 1,000 painted sculptures of dogs) at the Daegu Art Museum in South Korea; the essential “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul (and at the Guggenheim for a couple more weeks!); a revelatory survey of painter Guei-Hong Won (1923–1980), a chronicler of postwar daily life in Seoul, at the Sungkok Museum in Seoul; the excellent Yooyun Yang’s presentation of her latest cinematic, mysterious paintings at Primary Practice; Wang Tuo’s time-bending video treatises on Chinese history and censorship at Blindspot in Hong Kong; Rirkrit Tiravanija’s piquantly odd umbrella-repair shop and robots at David Zwirner in Hong Kong; the MMCA’s richly rewarding retrospective for the beloved painter Chang Ucchin (1917–1990) at its Deoksugung branch in Seoul; and Do Ho Suh’s invigorating, interactive installation at the Seoul Museum of Art’s Buk-Seoul location, which invited children to take brightly colored clay and keep adding, and adding, and adding to it.

Without further ado, my top ten:

Roldan, a trim and youthful 70, was sitting inside Green Papaya Art Projects, a multifarious art space he cofounded that embodies that ethos. It began in 2000 in Metro Manila, and it is now the longest-operating artist-run organization in the country. However, if all had gone according to plan, it would no longer exist. In 2020, Roldan, its artistic director, was taking steps to shut it down—the Asia Art Archive was helping to preserve its records—when a fire tore through the building it called home. Astonishingly, many of its materials survived, and the AAA website for the space now offers an exhilarating glimpse at the performances, shows, and events it hosted.

Instead of hastening Green Papaya’s closure, the disaster spurred Roldan and some of his collaborators to keep the venture going, and it has since relocated to Roxas City, an hour southeast of the capital by plane. Roxas has a population of about 180,000 people, and it is where Roldan was born, one of six children of an architect father and a mother who ran a printing press.

The day we spoke, activity hummed around Roldan at Green Papaya, and he was wearing a T-shirt, his trademark white beard, and a baseball cap with the word “adventure” emblazoned on it. I asked about the hat. “I just randomly picked this,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything, actually.” He paused for a second, and continued, “Or maybe, yes. I’m here for a new adventure.”

Or new adventures, perhaps—in a life that has already had many of them. Green Papaya is now running a residency for Thai, Vietnamese, and Filipino artists, a rural architecture forum with a local university, an initiative with local Indigenous people, and projects with surrounding fishing and farming communities. Announcing its reopening earlier this year, it quoted Charles Bukowski: “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

Meanwhile, Roldan has been continuing to make his own art, which collages disparate materials to address the fraught history of the Philippines and its contemporary struggles. These works are incisive, elegant, and often elegiac, and six of them will comprise a solo booth at Art Basel Miami Beach this week from Silverlens, the New York and Manila gallery. In May, at the gallery’s Manhattan location, Roldan will stage a one-person show, his first in the United States.

“There’s always a question for me: How can we speak about the past?” Roldan said, discussing his practice. “It was only yesterday. How can we look at the past within the context of now? Because for me, they are so intertwined.” For a series called “100 Altars for Roberto Chabet” that he began in 2014, he has been building ziggurat-like assemblages with architectural elements of demolished homes in the Kamuning neighborhood of Quezon City, where Green Papaya was located at the time, along with old photographs and sundry possessions. (Two of these “Altars” will be in the ABMB booth.)

You could see these wall-hung pieces as reliquaries for areas that have been cleared in the name of progress, for urban renewal and development, and for the people who lived there. “We’re losing a lot of cultural landmarks, architectural landmarks, things that we can preserve,” Roldan said. The works encapsulate the way that people protect their memories as they move elsewhere and age: in fragments, always inevitably incomplete. No. 23, for example, has jazzy faded wallpaper, black-and-white images of people gathering in groups and trying to look their best, the odd bit of latticework, and tiny old vases and cans. It suggests a life that has been well lived.

The ziggurat form nods to the shape of famous works by Chabet, a godhead of conceptual art in the Philippines who died in 2013 at 76. “I was too old to become a student of Roberto Chabet,” Roldan said, “but he became a very good friend through Green Papaya. He was a great mentor or friend and adviser. The few times that I wanted to close down Papaya, he was there to stop me.”

That may be true, but is hard to imagine Roldan quitting. Exuding a can-do optimism, he seems like the rare type of artist who was always going to make it, or at least the type that was never going to give up. So it’s intriguing to learn that he did not originally set out to become an artist.

Roldan entered a seminary at the age of 11. “I knew after finishing eight years that I was not going to be a good priest,” he said. Instead, he pursued visual communications at a school in Manila in the mid-1970s, a path into advertising—“a very lucrative job,” he said. “Very glamorous, as well. And that attracted me. It was also creative enough.”

In the early 1980s, Roldan’s then-wife inherited a sugar farm on the island of Negros, where conditions for workers are notoriously exploitative. “That got me politicized when I got there,” he said. “Realizing that there is really something wrong with Philippines society, if the condition of that island was allowed to happen for so many generations.” He became involved in activism—he learned to build communities and educate, skills that would help him later—and he began developing an art practice. By 1987, concerned about his safety, he decamped to Australia for an advertising job. When he got back to the Philippines in 1990, he kept organizing, creating the Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference, the nation’s oldest biennial.

“I knew from the very start that I was not going to live off my art,” Roldan said. “So from the very beginning, I always had a day job.” He was raising two children. But in 1998, as he neared 50, he decided to focus more on his art, and quit his job as a creative director at the media company ABS-CBN (which was targeted by President Rodrigo Duterte).

Roldan’s unorthodox past—his on-the-ground political activities, his near-priesthood—comes through in his work. One 2012 painting, owned by the Guggenheim Museum, pairs an American F-16 flying over Afghanistan with a quotation posthumously attributed to US President William McKinley about the need to “uplift and civilize and Christianize” Filipino people after the US had acquired the country following the Spanish-American War. Roldan “situates the religious or spiritual discourse within a political sensorium, mixing post-colonial conceptualist approaches with hybrid folk imagery and knowledge systems,” said Patrick D. Flores, professor of art studies at the University of the Philippines, deputy director of the National Gallery Singapore deputy director, and curator of a Roldan retrospective at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum in Quezon City in 2017.

Other works that will be at Art Basel include textile pieces that resemble ceremonial banners that might be used in a Catholic mass or procession. They are radiant, richly symbolic, and subversive. Relacion de las Islas Filipinas 2 (2023) features three layers of fabric, “representing the three layers of Philippines society,” Roldan said.

The bottom layer is a pink floral pattern that denotes the “the folk or masses,” its edges adorned with demonetized Filipino coins, Roldan explained. “They may look decorative, but it also connotes how poor their economies [are] at the fringes.” Next is an intricate black lace: the elites.

Finally, on top, is earth-colored fabric dyed by a young artist named Giah De los Reyes, which “represents the revolutionary movement against the persisting social inequalities,” Roldan said. At its center is a 19th-century “amulet” vest bearing Catholic iconography, a thin undergarment of the kind worn by revolutionary fighting against Spain. This symbolic, spiritual armor was believed to provide protection in battle against colonial forces. That struggle still resonates today, Roldan said, in “the context of the revolution against the continuing oppression and harassment in the countryside” and, he told me later, “against our colonized selves.”

While the solo booth will be a major event for Roldan’s career, he will not be making the trip to Florida. He has plenty going on. Besides his upcoming solo outing in New York, he is gearing up for a yearlong residency for Green Papaya in Berlin via DAAD, in which all six of its current members will be taking part. There is also the matter of the “100 Altars for Roberto Chabet.” There are around “30 altars right now,” Roldan said. “Far off the target of 100. But I am continuing the series to get to that.” There is conviction in his voice. You know that he will get there.

That story came to mind while soaking in the Chang Ucchin retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Deoksugung Palace branch in Seoul during the last days of summer. Its four galleries are jam-packed with some 300 pieces by the 20th-century painter, who “became almost a mythic figure in Korea,” as art historian Hong Sunpyo writes in the show’s robust catalogue. Depicting tranquil, harmonious, sometimes dreamy scenes of rural Korea with an economy of marks on a flat plane, almost all the pieces charm. Birds fly in a row through the sky. Trees stand proud. People peer from tiny houses. At first glance, they could be the work of a very good illustrator of books for young children.

Keep looking. These seemingly simple, modest size paintings (generally only a little larger than a sheet of paper) are potent—and yes, radical—born of tough, self-imposed restraints. As his native South Korea went through seismic political and economic changes, and as peers like Kim Whanki and Yoo Youngkuk ventured into thrilling abstract terrain, Chang honed his language to absolute essentials. He rendered eyes with just two dots or circles, and people frequently as just stick figures or a precise stain of paint. For decades, he stuck largely to the same few subjects: humans (many of them children) and animals outside in the world, together, at peace.

Chang was singular, uncompromising. “When people talk about my paintings, they often comment that they’re too small,” he once wrote. But as he saw it, “as the scale increases, the painting starts to get diluted.” In 1951, as he was entering his mid-30s, he painted an indelible self-portrait on paper (the Korean War had made canvas scarce) about the size of a postcard. It seems to announce both the style that he would pursue for the next 40 years and himself as a major but idiosyncratic talent. He is in the foreground, debonair in a suit and tie (his wedding attire), on a road that stretches far behind him into hills that vibrate with minute gold and green strokes. A black dog follows him, and four blue birds fly overhead. With a top hat and an umbrella in his hands, he suggests a man ready for a leisurely stroll or, perhaps, to open a variety show. Either way, you can hear him calling for you to join him.

Who was he? Chang was born on January 8, 1918, in what is now the South Korean municipality of Sejong, then Yeongi County in Japanese-occupied Korea. (The artist’s birth date is widely cited as November 26, 1917—correct in the lunar calendar, which he preferred.) Like many ambitious Korean artists of the time, he studied in Tokyo and picked up on the latest international art currents via publications.

In the newly independent Korea of 1945, Chang found work at the National Museum, where he was involved in restoration projects and observed the excavation of ancient tombs, according to Bae Wonjung, the MMCA curator who organized this richly researched exhibition. The country was rediscovering itself after foreign domination, and Chang’s works are filled with tributes to its deep heritage—ceramics, folk paintings, and enduring iconography. A 1949 oil painting depicts a sturdy clay jar that might be used to ferment kimchi, and many hold both the sun and the moon, as they appear in traditional Joseon Dynasty paintings. In an impressive bit of scholarship, art historian Kang Byoungjik notes that 440 of Chang’s roughly 730 oil paintings (around 61 percent!) contain magpies, a bird with auspicious connotations in Korea.

These plainspoken paintings were produced through tremendous labor, the artist repeatedly applying paint, then wiping it away. (For a stretch of the 1960s and ’70s, this occurred in a remote studio without electricity.) The results have a rare solidity, some with the rough-hewn firmness of Buncheong stoneware, a sensation heightened by Chang’s restraint with his brush. “According to his family, the technique of wiping off or scratching paint was also a way for Chang to empty his mind,” art historian Choi Yeob writes in a lucid catalogue essay on the Buddhist nature of his art. Chang did not identify as a Buddhist, but his wife, Lee Soonkyung, did, and one of his masterpieces is a spare 1970 portrait of her in a serene state of contemplation: Zinzinmyo: My Wife’s Buddhist Name (the name means “absolutely stunning beauty”).

This may all sound nostalgic or backward-looking. It is not. What saves Chang’s art from those traps of kitsch is his unrelenting invention. He was modernist in the line of Elie Nadelman and Bob Thompson, plumbing history and transfiguring it in an inimitable style. He built powerful symmetries and patterns in his compositions, and Bae connects him with Paul Klee, a similarly superb colorist. Reveling in everyday life, he was aligned with visions like those of Grandma Moses, Florine Stettheimer, and of course, Park Soo Keun, and like, say, Bill Traylor’s paintings, his evince an astute understanding of the inner beings of animals, with personalities and emotions like us. (His bulls seem prepared to crack jokes.)

Nothing is extraneous or wasted in these worlds, where day and night overlap. Signs of contemporaneity are absent. (A military jeep intrudes in a 1953 picture, though it seems oddly jaunty.) All is well here, and families and nature are in accord; Hong astutely terms them “self-sufficient spaces.” Real life can fall short of that. But Chang’s art is not after utopia. It distills the nobility of quotidian, fleeing moments, which is a project tinged with melancholy. The MMCA show is titled “The Most Honest Confession,” riffing on an intriguing claim from the artist: “My paintings are my true self. I confess myself in my paintings, I reveal and release myself entirely.”

In his last 15 years, Chang developed a method of cutting his oil paint with turpentine so that he could work more rapidly, almost as if he were painting with ink (another one of his talents, as examples here attest). That allowed him to be more prolific—80 percent of his oils come from this period—yet for me, these lack some of the fulsome symbolic mystery of his prior work. But they are still delightful, and they see him embracing a more surreal stance, as notions of space become even more topsy-turvy. In a 1990 piece, Night and an Old Man, made just a few months before his death, there is a road curving over a hill and the titular elder floating in the sky above it. Only the moon is visible, a hemisphere of white. This man’s journey may be done, but the road below him is alluring, a golden orange, and quite bizarrely, there is a young child scampering down it.

But at least one art fair has set out to do things differently. Behold Art Collaboration Kyoto, a young public-private entity that asks each selected Japanese gallery to partner with one or two galleries from abroad on a single display. That intriguing conceit has “a synergistic effect on the quality of the booth,” Yukako Yamashita, ACK’s program director, argued in an interview with ARTnews ahead of the event, which opens this weekend. (Typically, the Japanese gallerist invites the foreign colleague, but the fair also sometimes assists.)

“It’s just such a nice way of doing something with colleagues from the other side of the world, sharing resources,” Paris-based dealer Robbie Fitzpatrick said. His eponymous gallery will be in a booth with Anomaly (of Tokyo) and ROH (of Jakarta); each is bringing work by three of their artists, including Hannah Weinberger, Kei Imazu, and Dusadee Huntrakul, respectively.

ACK debuted in 2021, when Japan’s borders were still closed amid the pandemic; they reopened fully last October, weeks before its second edition. And so the latest outing, which runs October 28 to 30 at Sachio Otani’s 1960s sci-fi Kyoto International Conference Center, has the feel of being a major event, with exhibitors coming from around the globe.

New York’s 47 Canal, for one, has linked up with Tokyo’s Misako & Rosen to show some of the beguiling impressionist landscapes that Trevor Shimizu, who is represented by both galleries, has been making in recent years. This will be dealer Jeffrey Rosen’s third time doing ACK, having collaborated with São Paulo’s Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in 2021 and London’s Herald Street in 2022. “It was fun, and because it was fun, it generated business,” Rosen said of that second fair, adding that he “met Japanese collectors that we did not otherwise know.”

Yamashita, who started out as a dealer (she showed at the first ACK), said that she has heard collectors lament at big fairs that “there are too many things to see.” In Kyoto, just 64 dealers will be on hand—which “should be a comfortable size for visitors to go through the fair and fully digest the artworks on view,” she said.

Thanks to the shared format, that means the fair has only about three-dozen booths. (Art SG, by contrast, had over 150, and even the fairly compact Tokyo Gendai had more than 70.) Eleven of those are in a section called Kyoto Meetings, where solo dealers can display art with a special connection to the city. Neugerriemschneider, of Berlin, will be presenting Olafur Eliasson pieces informed by its Zen gardens, and New York–based Karma will have a group display that includes paintings of food and drink that Dike Blair made based on photos he took during a 2009 trip.

ACK is part of a small group of niche fairs that have been sprouting up in recent years that you could see as antidotes to the gargantuan behemoths. There’s Independent 20th Century (from the “consciously scaled” Independent art fair team), which convened around 30 exhibitors in New York for a second edition last month, and Paris Internationale, the outré-minded, dealer-founded fair that brought together 64 galleries earlier this month, timed to Art Basel’s Paris+ fair. On the more experimental end of things, you could also point to events like Basel Social Club, which was cofounded by Fitzpatrick and runs during Art Basel in Switzerland, and Our Week, which debuted to high acclaim during Frieze Seoul this year.

The model of ACK—whose backers include the Contemporary Art Dealers Association Nippon and Kyoto Prefecture—is indicative of the Japanese art world, which “has always distinguished itself from the art worlds of, let’s say, the US and Europe in being much more collaborative, mutually supportive, and cooperative,” Rosen said. “In order to take advantage of that, it makes sense that there would be a fair highlighting this element. And it makes sense that this fair would also be relatively small in keeping with the size of the art world, the size of the market.”

The fair’s location—in the treasure-filled city that was Japan’s capital for more than a millennium—is also a selling point. “Visiting an art fair is not just about spending time at the fair but also about visiting and experiencing the fair’s host city,” Yamashita said. Special exhibitions in association with ACK are being held at the Komyoin Temple, the Heian-jingu Shrine, and the conference center, and additional events around this town of 1.5 million are part of the festivities.

“The city of Kyoto itself played a significant role in my decision to participate,” said Jaewoo Choi, of Johyun Gallery in Busan, South Korea, which is collaborating with Tokyo’s Tomio Gallery on a display that will include Lee Bae, Kim Chong Hak, Jo Jong Sung, and Kishio Suga. Their works “might not necessarily be characterized by strong colors, unique material properties, or striking imagery,” he said, but they will get at “the essence of Kyoto.”

Dealers have been known to bemoan their relentless travel schedules off the record, but the ACK’s dealers seemed ebullient in the lead up to the fair. For Choi, the chance to partner with foreign colleagues is “truly captivating.” It’s “very innovative and exciting,” said Yuka Watanabe, of Anomaly. Matthew Brown, of Los Angeles, noted that it will be his first time exhibiting in Japan, alongside Blum, the LA giant that has had a Tokyo branch for a decade. “I’ve always looked up to Tim,” Brown said, “and when he proposed we collaborate on a presentation for Art Collaboration Kyoto, I immediately said yes.”

Brown is showing paintings by Paris-based Julie Beaufils, who has an “affinity for Japanese aesthetics—the flattened perspective, simplicity of form, and asymmetry achieved through a reduced palette,” he said. Blum, for its part, is showing three artists, including paintings by the Tokyo-born Asuka Anastacia Ogawa—“in one of the most beautiful cities in the world,” its director in the Japanese capital, Marie Imai Kobayashi, noted.

After more than 20 years in the Japanese art world, Rosen sees ACK “as part of a curious apparent growth” in its market, “which has been developing slowly and steadily, and as a consequence of that, probably, arguably, more sustainably and positively than elsewhere. And I also see that as a nice complement and—maybe even to be a little cheeky—counterbalance to some of the hype surrounding developing art markets within Asia more generally.”

“It’s a model that I think could be emulated in different places,” said Fitzpatrick, who grew up in Tokyo and hopped on a plane right after Paris+ to take part in ACK. It’s “a “direction,” he continued, “that more and more fairs and galleries should consider as we move forward—how to create more collaborative events that unify us.”

Now 65, Cai has been using his signature materials, gunpowder and fireworks, for more than three decades, arraying and igniting them in ingenious ways to create sprawling performances and paintings that awe and beguile. His efforts have graced not only many of the world’s most august art spaces—the Guggenheim in New York in 2008, the Palace Museum in Beijing in 2020, and the National Art Center in Tokyo this summer—but also some of the era’s most important political pageants, perhaps most notably the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

Realizing his elaborate displays is not aways simple. Cai’s most dramatic events require formidable financial resources, negotiations with various authorities, and patience, but he seems well-suited to such matters. In the moving, intimate 2016 documentary Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang, he is indefatigable as he navigates setbacks. One revealing moment comes as he conceives a fireworks display for the 2014 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation in Beijing and meets with Communist Party officials—all men—who have been nixing elements of his plan. Cai, who was born in Quanzhou, China, and has been based in New York since 1995, extolls the advances that have been made in environmentally friendly fireworks, and one the men tells him, between drags of a cigarette: “The innovation is great, but as I mentioned, security and stability are equally important.”

“I’m telling you, the government is here to help you,” the man goes on, explaining that “you have to figure out something creative with all these chains on you.” Off-camera, we hear Cai bemoan, “Why am I still here?” But he sorted it out, and proceeded to light up the night sky above international dignitaries. Even in a grainy clip from Chinese TV, it is tantalizing. The bureaucrats must have been reasonably satisfied, too, since Cai was tapped to do fireworks for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games.

This year, Cai’s major patron has been the luxury brand Saint Laurent. The label (take note, future scholars) has co-organized his Tokyo survey, “Cai Guo-Qiang: Ramble in the Cosmos—From Primeval Fireball Onward,” and last month, its creative director, Anthony Vaccarello, commissioned a fireworks display on Japan’s east coast, along Yotsukura Beach, in the city of Iwaki, about three hours by car north of Tokyo.

The fireworks took place in broad daylight, at noon, on a Wednesday. “Nighttime fireworks rely on light for their effects; their brilliant bursts will return to darkness,” Cai said in an email interview. “Daytime fireworks rely on smoke to take shape; although there is also a poetic purpose, they are superimposed on social realities and nature.” In his view, “daytime fireworks are closer to paintings.”

Saint Laurent produced a crisp three-and-a-half-minute video of the 30-minute display, which Cai titled When the Sky Blooms with Sakura. One after another, a series of irresistible events transpire via some 40,000 fireworks shells, vaguely suggesting botanical delights: thin white columns rocket upward and then burst into countless lines, strange black waves streak skyward at a diagonal, and finally the cherry blossoms promised in its title come into existence, a glorious, gigantic expanse of pink as pure, fluffy, and delicate as cotton candy. Thanks to high-res drone footage, the video is a richly immersive experience, and it has racked up a cool 3.4 million views over the past four weeks.

The piece and the retrospective represent a kind of homecoming for Cai, who moved to Japan in 1986 and lived there for the next nine years, as he honed the practice that would make him an international superstar. In 1993, he took up residence in Iwaki to prepare for a solo show at the Iwaki City Museum of Art, and on March 7, 1994, he staged an astonishing gunpowder performance along the same coast he used last month. The Horizon from the Pan-Pacific: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 14 (no one does titles quite like Cai) involved gunpowder fuses measuring 5 kilometers long (about 3.1 miles); lit in darkness, they traced the curve of the earth.

While residing in Iwaki in the mid-’90s, Cai became close with many in the community. Residents raised funds for the gunpowder fuses, and “they even initiated a collective action of turning off lights in every household during the event, to make the earth’s outline more beautiful for the universe to witness,” Cai told me. They have helped him realize other pieces since then, and “over the years, we witnessed each other’s hair becoming grey and our movements less nimble,” he added. “This long-lasting friendship, conveyed through art, has transcended the political and historical differences between nations.”

In the wake of the 2011 Japan earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster, “many residents—including my friends from Iwaki—were displaced from their homes,” Cai said. He auctioned artworks to raise funds for rebuilding, which people instead decided to use for an initiative to plant 10,000 cherry blossom trees. “The project envisions that in the future, the land once contaminated by the nuclear plant incident will appear like a pink ocean of cherry blossoms when viewed from afar,” Cai said.

Through the fireworks display, Cai was also trying to reckon with the tragedy. Some of his shows have been fantastically over-the-top, bringing to mind the art critic (and pyromaniac) Peter Schjeldahl’s belief “that proper fireworks should be all the good parts of war and none of the bad parts.” But in Iwaki last month, he wanted to make something “more simple, solemn, and monumental, evoking the feeling of Zen,” he said. His aim was “to commemorate the victims and pay tribute to the awe-inspiring power of nature, while drawing upon Eastern philosophy, where rebirth is attained through transcending trauma, to convey a theme of hope.”

Creating a memorial out of materials that are designed for spectacles is a complicated and thorny notion. But at least judging by the documentation, Cai pulled it off. The forms that he conjured are achingly beautiful, but they are also fragile and fleeting. Born of humble ingredients, they begin to vanish just as they coalesce, brushed away by the wind.

Despite the apparent precision of his art, Cai is never exactly sure how his chosen tools will behave. “The charisma of gunpowder lies in its uncontrollability and spontaneity,” he told me. Out on the beach, some of what he had envisioned ended up not taking place. Two acts that were to be staged by more than 400 drones outfitted with firework shells could not be realized because of issues communicating with them. “It is true that I was upset by the setback,” Cai said, “but I was also relieved, because I am still young and still around!” (That Cai, midway through his 60s, can still see himself as young probably explains some of his success.)

Cai was also feeling thankful. He said that staging the Tokyo exhibition (which runs through August 21) has been a way “to express my gratitude. My first few years in Japan were both extraordinarily difficult and immensely rewarding.” They have stuck with him. “I often feel that I am an adored child of the God,” he said at one point. “I grew up under the support of the whole world, while so many hardworking artists still end up in poverty. But where is the God? It has been important people and opportunities that have helped me and shaped me into who I am.”

How does an artist stand out amid that kind of action? The German painter Katharina Grosse modeled an exemplary approach in a solo outing at Gagosian with a dozen large canvases, easily the hardest-punching of any new paintings on offer in the city. Wielding her trademark spray tools, Grosse shot thin bands of overlapping paint diagonally atop white grounds. Her attack was so quick that each tight mass of acrylic appears to be blazing across the surface, smoking at its edges. The paintings deliver an almost comic dose of wall power: Morris Louis’s “Unfurled” series at warp speed, unsettled and unfixed. Conservative? Sure. Also very satisfying.

Those seeking genuine Color Field work could venture one floor below Gogo in the Pedder Building, where Pearl Lam Galleries had on view attractive, atmospheric paintings made by the New Yorker Cynthia Polsky between 1963 and 1974 using Chinese ink brushes and sponges. Informed by her travels in Asia, these drippy, speckled, and generally bright all-over abstractions suggest hazy visions of distant nebulae or rough translations of hallucinogenic visions. Many dazzle at first glance, but then betray a disconcerting formlessness as you spend time with them. They are trying to do just a bit too much.

The most potent show of painterly force came not from a gallery but from an art advisory: Art Intelligence Global marshaled a bunch of heavyweight Gerhard Richter “Abstrakte Bilder” in a single gallery within one of the towers that line Wong Chuk Hang Road on Hong Kong Island’s south side. There were a couple certifiable classics by the Meister here, the chief one being a beguiling 8½-foot-tall example from 1990 with blues and reds smoldering through a scraped field of icy gray—a koan-like exegesis on the role of chance in determining what is seen and what is obscured. Some fraction of the pleasure came from the severity of it all: black-suited security guards, dramatic lighting, the sense of walking into an anonymous vault stocked with high-value assets.

After inhabiting such hypoxia-inducing environs, a little warmth, some evidence of human presence, is called for. Mercifully, the South Korean artist Kimsooja is an expert in such matters, and had an airy solo show a few blocks away at Axel Vervoordt, “Topography of Body.” It had just eight pieces, created through simple movements, like tiny clay spheres arrayed in a circle on a pedestal, and Korean rice paper that had been crumbled and then smoothed, its surface covered with craggy lines from the pressure. The main attraction was an 18-minute video, Thread Routes–Chapter III (2012), that intercuts sequences of intricate architecture in India, like the Sun Temple of Modhera, with artisans doing meticulous work: sewing, weaving, block printing, and more. In a neighboring room, Kimsooja displayed an installation from 2012–15, comprising cotton sheets used by block printers to cover their tables thin, slightly tattered, and stained with indigo—hanging from twine. What saved all this from becoming too precious (or Pottery Barn bland) was the reverence with which the artist treated her raw materials. Presenting these work surfaces just as they are, unaltered, she mounted a tender paean to the possibilities that result from joining skill and repetition.

Over at De Sarthe, the art stared back. Beijing-based Wang Jiajia printed tall glowing, glowering pairs of eyes on canvas and surrounded them with swirling waves of paint. A news release for the solo show (titled “A/S/L,” after the archaic chatroom introduction meaning “age, sex, location”) cleverly compared these menacing cartoon eyes to those of the final bosses that loom at the conclusion of video games. They are goofy, mildly endearing pictures, teasing fears about the identities and agendas that loom behind screens—and contemporary artworks. If they are also repetitive and one-note, well, so are most online (and art) experiences.

Over in nearby Aberdeen, at one of Kiang Malingue’s spaces, Guangzhou’s Liu Yin exhibited paintings that give Shōjo manga–like faces to pink roses, juicy pears, and (why not?) a gargantuan skull that sits on grass and winks at the viewer as butterfly-fairy hybrids flutter about. (The show’s title: “Spring.”) The cuteness level is off the charts in these charismatic pictures, which range from watercolors smaller than a sheet of paper to canvases almost 7 feet across. In one, a group of flowers has tears in their eyes; another has a pair sharing a passionate kiss. Liu hijacks kawaii tropes and lays bare how easily they can manipulate, even though (or because) these characters are generic and impossible to differentiate. Seductive artworks about seduction, they have their cake as they eat it. Liu also has a talent for slipping bizarre notes into otherwise benign scenes: one work contains a bunch of cyclopic bananas; cute for a minute, they’re likely to reappear in nightmares.

More discomfort was in store at Empty Gallery’s Aberdeen branch where new wall works by Tishan Hsu smashed bodies into digital space. Their inkjet-printed patterned surfaces teem with additional sculptural elements, such as unplaceable orifices and the odd body part, including at least one glaring eye. A rare sculpture from the New York–based artist took the form of a futuristic life-size hospital bed on top of which silicone molds resembling hunks of a person—a pale blue face, expanses of sticky looking tan skin—appear to be awaiting implantation. Surveillance-style images are embedded in some of Hsu’s pieces, like the 2023 pareidolia-conjuring screen-body-data, which sports a black-and-white still of footage from CCTV. It shows a man in a balaclava standing in an empty room and doing something on his phone—a slice of raw reality intruding into the artist’s harsh, unreal world.

While Liu toys with the coercive power of popular culture, Wang and Hsu channel the dark truth that someone or something is always watching these days, whether on social media or within a bureaucracy, and threatening to act. In Hong Kong the week of the fair, a theatrical run of the slasher flick Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023) was canceled under hazy circumstances (the adorable bear has been used as a caricature of Chinese president Xi Jinping, and censored in the mainland in the past), and the Sogo department store removed a video by Angeleno Patrick Amadon from a digital-art program running on its LED billboard after the artist revealed that it included information about pro-democracy activists jailed in Hong Kong.

It can be risky for dealers and artists to address anything remotely controversial when a fair is on—it is a time for selling, not activism—and a brutal political crackdown hardly helps matters, yet there were a handful of exhibitions engaging the difficult present.

In the tony H Queen’s tower, at David Zwirner, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija installed the kind of well-outfitted umbrella repair store that was once common in Hong Kong. Visitors walked through it to enter the rest of his exhibition (titled “The Shop”), which housed 3D printers manufacturing red sculptures of broken umbrellas and robot vacuum cleaners that cruised wall-to-wall black carpeting, tracing Chinese characters. An accompanying text explained that these various components referred to novelist Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy “Three-Body Problem,” but it was also tempting to read the show in the context of Hong Kong’s 2014 Umbrella Movement, when protesters fighting for universal suffrage used umbrellas as shields against pepper spray and surveillance. In Tiravanija’s realm, nonfunctional umbrellas are being memorialized as machines try to maintain order and cleanliness; every single person walking through thwarts their efforts.

Meanwhile, at Blindspot Gallery, on the 15th floor of a Wong Chuk Hang Road warehouse, the Beijing filmmaker Wang Tuowas showing The Second Interrogation (also the name of his one-man exhibition), an elegant and incisive two-part video production that pits an artist and a censor against each other in a public forum and a private tête-à-tête. The two debate how artists should operate amid authoritarianism and why democracy has never taken hold in China. As their talks progress, they appear to switch positions. Wang trained as a painter, and he also hung vivid portraits of artists, musicians, and writers in China—a network operating outside or underneath the system. Some read books, one sings into a microphone. He titled the series “Weapons,” implying that the way one chooses to live can be a means of fomenting change or defending oneself.

A similar punk commitment was evident in scattered places around town all week. The magic of viewing art here is that marginal spaces still somehow endure amid extreme wealth. “Hong Kong is very small, isn’t it?” as Kitty Fane tells her about-to-be-ex-lover (with a dash of menace) in Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil (1925). And so you can be at the latest luxury mall one moment, and after a brief MTR ride, find yourself at the alternative space Current Plans, above a café in Sham Shui Po, where wig artist Tomihiro Kono and photographer Sayaka Maruyama, both Japanese, teamed up for a multifarious show centered on Kono’s outrageous avant-garde wigs, which suggest alien life-forms. Or you might stroll to the commercial Property Holdings Development Group, in a disused rooftop clubhouse high in the sky, and find Hong Konger Michele Chu’s “You, Trickling,” an experiential show about the traces that people leave behind, with heaters at the entrance, an invitation to hold incense, and emotionally loaded sculptures. One that would make Joseph Cornell proud involved a wooden drawer from the home of Chu’s family filled with salt, her fingernails, and cigarette butts, like the remains of an occult ritual.

But the most heartening and vertiginously exciting material I saw while traversing the Special Administrative Region was actually in the heart of officialdom, at Tai Kwun Contemporary, the former police station renovated in 2018 by the Hong Kong Jockey Club and the local government. “Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III,”curated by Inti Guerrero and Chantal Wong, articulated a vast universe of LGBTQ art from Asia and its diasporas, via more than 60 artists spanning almost a century, some of it coming from collector Patrick Sun’s Sunpride Foundation. Among the highlights were a luscious 1941 drawing by the Filipino American Alfonso Ossorio of a nearly nude Job, resplendent and attractive despite the sores consuming his body, and alluring 2018 prints by siren eun young jung that collage images she acquired while researching yeoseong gukgeuk, a theatrical form in her native South Korea that emerged in the mid-1940s as a protest against the patriarchy of the country’s theater world. The show has already made stops in Bangkok and Taipei, and if no one brings it Stateside, it will be a shame.

Again and again, with humor, and mischief, and invention, the artists in “Myth Makers” make and remake history, cultural tropes, and even the Bible (who knew Job could be hot?). In an unforgettable little painting from 1962, Self-Portrait with Friends, Patrick Ng Kah Onn depicts a rollicking party in Kuala Lumpur. It is a kaleidoscope of colors and patterns, as five people in ultra-chic outfits dance. The scene is—returning to the poet Huang—“embroiled in a sea of music and song.”

Lozano did nothing half-heartedly. Soon she was painting precise geometric abstractions and embarking on wild conceptual endeavors. She smoked pot constantly for more than a month for one work, she abstained from it for another, and she invested in stocks for a third. The Pinacoteca show’s title, “Strike,” alludes to another radical effort, General Strike Piece (1969), which Lozano described like this, writing in capital letters, as was her wont: “GRADUALLY BUT DETERMINEDLY AVOID BEING PRESENT AT ALL OFFICIAL OR PUBLIC ‘UPTOWN’ FUNCTIONS OR GATHERINGS RELATED TO THE ‘ART WORLD’ . . .” In 1972, two years after she had a solo outing at the Whitney Museum, she vanished from the scene entirely—a move that may or may not have been an artwork unto its itself—and her whereabouts became hazy.

“Strike” is Lozano’s first survey in Italy, and it is the latest milestone in the posthumous rise of her reputation. When she died of cervical cancer in 1999 at the age of 68, she was impecunious and little known. She had been living off the art-world grid in Dallas, where she had family since 1982. The year before her passing, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, had shown her final paintings, the “Wave” series—11 panels of bewitching waveforms made between 1967 and 1970—while three Manhattan galleries had highlighted various aspects of her career. One of the dealers, Mitchell Algus, has said that he had trouble moving her drawings at $1,500. In 2018, a modestly sized graphite and pastel drawing of a razorblade, Hard (1964), went at auction at Sotheby’s for $175,000. The powerhouse mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth now represents her estate and has staged seven Lozano shows since 2007, more than she had during the dozen or so years that she was actively exhibiting.

There are plenty of tales of underappreciated artists experiencing sudden market booms, of course. What makes Lozano’s story intriguing is how charged—how distinctly unconfinable and indigestible her work can still seem. She makes even some of her vanguard contemporaries look tame. “SEEK THE EXTREMES, THAT’S WHERE ALL THE ACTION IS,” she once wrote.

For decades now, Lozano has been an artist’s artist par excellence. The painter David Reed argued that her “late abstract paintings were the most advanced paintings being done at the time,” when art historian Katy Siegel published a package on Lozano in Artforum in 2001. Sol LeWitt, who regularly visited her studio, said of her beguiling “Wave” paintings in that feature, “everyone agreed it was a major statement.” Algus, who is also an artist, said in a recent phone interview that her work appeals to artists because “it’s very smart. It’s out-there.” (Her associates in New York had included Carl Andre, Hollis Frampton, and Dan Graham. “If you read the text pieces,” Algus said, “she’s interacting with everybody in the Downtown scene in the ’60s.”)

“When I first saw her work, it looked to me like a visual translation of the riot-grrrl sentiments I shared, of the desire to be perceived as non-binary, or a kind of basic rage in living as a woman in the patriarchy,” the artist Davina Semo, 41, said in an email. “I felt a kinship with her, this person who was all-in with her work; the way her work seemed to be inextricably linked to her being.” (Semo makes tough, elegant, industrial pieces—hanging bells, cast-bronze wall works—and recently had shows at Broadway gallery in New York and Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, which closed earlier this month.)

But despite Lozano’s growing renown, it has stretched only so far. “Believe it or not, texts on Lee Lozano in Italian and French do not exist,” Cosulich said. The Pinacoteca show will travel to the Bourse de Commerce in Paris in September—its founder, luxury magnate François Pinault, is a deep Lozano collector—and the two institutions will release a catalogue that will remedy that.

Lozano did not exactly make it easy for people to become her supporters, it has to be said. In 1971, she stopped speaking with women, a temporary experiment that became her practice for the rest of her life, it is believed. That blunt reckoning with gender and power has a particular resonance at the Pinacoteca, a former factory for Fiat cars that Renzo Piano transformed into arts center in 2003. “We are in a place that was dominated by men,” Cosulich said. The museum’s permanent collection also happens to have a churning 1913 painting by the Futurist Giacomo Balla, Velocità astratta (“Abstract Speed”) that parallels Lozano’s abstract works, she noted.

New generations have come to Lozano’s art via a steady stream of shows, but also through her writings. Primary Information published some of her notebooks in 2010, and Karma has been releasing meticulous facsimiles of the 11 little spiral-bound notepads (each labeled “PRIVATE” on its cover) that the artist used from 1968 to 1970 to record her activities, ideas, and sometimes-distressing thoughts: “I AM AFRAID OF MYSELF. I DON’T LIKE MYSELF.” (There are stories of substance abuse and mental illness. Reed told Artforum that Lozano stayed with him in the 1970s after she had lost her SoHo loft, but that he had to kick her out after a few days. He saw her as “a kind of warning about what could happen if you mixed art and life too closely.”)

In 1972, as Lozano seems to have been heading toward the exit, she edited those 11 journals. As the writer and curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer put it in her perspicacious 2014 book, Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece, they are “Private but edited. Protected but prepared. We are trespassing, and yet she has been expecting us.” Lozano would not be surprised by her current profile, I suspect. She knew she was important. In a notebook entry quoted by Lehrer-Graiwer, she recalls telling the powerful German curator Kasper König, “I’m a very good painter and not a nice girl!” (He had contended that she was a “good painter and a nice girl,” she claimed.)

Given that today’s artists are expected to perform on the international social circuit at a certain level of professionalism, Lozano’s decision to depart looks potently refreshing. Who has not mulled a career change during an interminable gallery dinner? But the danger when discussing an artist who made such bold, indelible work—and life choices—is that it all becomes a mere series of one liners: the lady who smoked pot, who quit the art world, etc.

The truth is that Lozano seems to have always been on the hunt for better ways to make art, to understand people, and to live in the world. After boycotting women, she hoped, “COMMUNICATION WILL BE BETTER THAN EVER.” She pursued her General Strike against art events “IN ORDER TO PURSUE INVESTIGATION OF TOTAL PERSONAL & PUBLIC REVOLUTION,” she explained. A Dialogue Piece she wrote up in 1969 involved her asking “PEOPLE YOU MIGHT NOT OTHERWISE SEE” to visit your loft for dialogues—“JOYOUS SOCIAL OCCASIONS,” she termed them.

Lozano grasped for community at the same time as she shunned it, and imposed rigorous systems on her life as she ceded control of her place in the New York art world, a sphere in which she had exceled. “She’s full of constant contradictions,” Cosulich said, “and the challenge is to explain to the public that these contradictions make up her coherence.” True of Lozano, true of us all.

Correction, April 17, 2023: An earlier version of this article misstated Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti‘s museum affiliation. She is chief curator of the Pinacoteca Agnelli, not an independent curator.