Art – Center for Intercultural Dialogue

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.

Backtalk: Artists on Native, African, and African American Stereotypes, Online exhibit, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA.

Backtalk: Artists on Native, African, and African American Stereotypes is part of a collaborative, broad-reaching examination on the persistence of racial and cultural stereotypes. Following the vision of Johnnetta Betsch Cole, director emerita, National Museum of African Art (NMAfA), to examine stereotypes across cultures, this online exhibition explores how select visual artists interrogate and engage racial and cultural stereotypes in their creative practice. The curatorial team chose to focus on a diverse group of artists from various backgrounds, geographies, and contexts who are represented in Smithsonian Institution collections and have addressed intersecting themes and subjects relevant to the impact of cultural and racial stereotypes. Backtalk features works by nine 20th- and 21st-century artists who capture, reflect, and/or speak back to the stereotype.

The project began as an examination of the ways in which artists are rewriting historical narratives that reinforce racial, cultural, and gender stereotypes through appropriation and subversion of the images traditionally used to stigmatize them. The pieces chosen are each in a Smithsonian collection and represent a range of strategies, including satire, parody, humor, and masking, in response to colonialist depictions of “the Other.” Audiences are invited to view the portrayals of race, gender, and culture in canonical Western paintings through a different lens—one in which the spectacle becomes the spectator and the passive subject becomes the agent. In the process, the power of artists to unveil and respond to social and cultural norms that perpetuate stereotypes is brought to life.

Related materials: KC55: Stereotypes provides a basic introduction to the topic intended to be accessible to undergraduates. This online exhibit would be a great extension of the topic for students.