Month: May 2025

Picasso for Asia: A Conversation, Hong Kong Jockey Club Series, M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 15 March-13 July 2025.

…the exhibition poses an interpretative framework for examining the works of the twentieth-century European master in relation to contemporary Asian and Asian-diasporic artists active today and in the recent past.

M+, Asia’s global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, proudly presents The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia—A Conversation. The Special Exhibition is a rich intercultural and intergenerational dialogue between more than sixty masterpieces by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) from the Musée national Picasso-Paris, which holds the largest collection of works by Picasso in the world, and around 130 works by thirty Asian and Asian-diasporic artists from the M+ Collections, and select loans from a museum, a foundation, and private collections. Co-organised by M+ and MnPP, this exhibition is a significant milestone in which masterpieces from MnPP are being shown alongside works from a museum collection in Asia for the first time. It is also the first major showcase of Picasso’s works in Hong Kong in over a decade, offering an unprecedented and unique perspective on the artist’s wide-reaching influence and what it means to be an artist in our time.

This Special Exhibition introduces four artist archetypes that encapsulate why Picasso is considered the quintessential twentieth-century artist and how the legacy of his art and life continues to influence contemporary artists as well as the public to this day. The four archetypes also serve as the sections of the exhibition and as powerful paradigms to which the contemporary Asian artists in the exhibition respond in their diverse, individualistic practices. The four are: the genius, the outsider, the magician, and the apprentice.