M+ Throws Everything at the Wall for ‘Picasso in Asia’ Exhibition

Just two years ago, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, dozens of museums across the globe put on shows that took seemingly every angle possible on the artist’s career and legacy. There was Hannah Gadsby’s notoriously maligned “Pablo-matic” exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, a grand survey of works on paper at the Centre Pompidou, and a Met show about a Picasso commission that never came to fruition. There was even an entire MoMA show about a single summer in Fontainebleau. But, in the end, none of these shows provided much in the way of new insights about Picasso.

In 2025, a Picasso show needs to do a lot to appear fresh. That’s something that the curators of “Picasso in Asia—A Conversation,” a new exhibition at Hong Kong’s M+ museum, seem to understand. The show, by far the most extensive exhibition of Picasso’s work in Asia in decades, features 60 works by the artist, mostly on loan from Musée National Picasso-Paris that are situated alongside around 130 pieces by Asian and Asian diasporic artists drawn from the M+ collection. In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Suhanya Raffel and Cécile Debray, museum director of M+ and president of Musée Picasso, respectively, write that the show offers “a new methodology and a bold narrative” for understanding Picasso. That new methodology is certainly bold, if confusing.

There are three curatorial themes in “Picasso in Asia.” The first is that of “Archetypes,” which divides the show into four sections to examine Picasso’s life: the genius, the outsider, the magician and the apprentice. Accompanying wall text throughout the show makes the argument for how Picasso embodied or played with each of these archetypes. The “Outsider” section, for example, features several paintings from the Blue Period to illustrate how he “rebelled against artistic traditions” and was “constantly changing his own artistic language.”

Then there is “Picasso in Focus” in which the curators draw out narrower moments or themes from the artist’s biography to link smaller collections of works. One “In Focus” section shows the evolution of Picasso’s dove of peace—how it was representative of his politics, and how its legacy has changed in Asia. “In Focus” is also where the curators thread in newer scholarship around Picasso’s treatment of his romantic partners or the marginalization of women artists as solely his “muses.” (Though it must be said, it’s hard to take such interventions seriously when the concurrent “Archetype” track seems to position Picasso as a near-mythic figure.)

Running alongside these two threads is the “in Asia” part of the show. The works here range from fellow modernists like Isamu Noguchi and Luis Chan to contemporary darlings like Haegue Yang and Jes Fan. These works occasionally illustrate a direct connection to Picasso, either by influencing his work or him influencing theirs. Take the case of Pleasure of Picasso—Mother and Child, a series of over 500 paintings by Japanese artist Keiichi Tanaami painted from the outbreak of Covid until his death last year. The paintings, which playfully modify and reinterpret Picasso’s compositions, were directly inspired by Picasso’s own insistence on artistic production in the face of his mortality. These works, like many of Picasso’s pieces in his later years, exude a childlike simplicity and bold coloration. But there are plenty of cases where the connection between Picasso’s art and that of one of his supposed successors isn’t obvious at all.

If this all sounds both overdetermined and underbaked, that’s because it is. The overlapping curatorial strategies overwhelm each other, making it difficult to understand what, if anything, the curators are trying to say about Picasso as an artist or his relationship to Asia. Is the show arguing that Picasso is the archetypal modern artist from which our understanding of contemporary art and artists spring? Is it saying that our understanding of Picasso’s influence on Asian art is underknown? Or is it merely pointing out some uncanny resonances between Picasso’s work and art made by Asian artists? 

In the catalogue, Doryun Chong, the artistic director of M+, seems to acknowledge this ambiguity, with an essay that largely argues for each Asian artist’s inclusion in the show. Among the rationales, Chong cites homage (Zeng Fanzhi), tangential connection (Isamu Noguchi), critique (Saori Akutagawa), and “echo” (the self-portraits of the post-Cultural Revolution painters, the “No Name Group”). But Chong is careful to note, particularly of the Chinese artists, that “the resemblances and resonances of subject form, and ideas, are not meant to suggest they were influenced by Picasso.” 

This halting mishmash of identification and non-identification renders the show disjointed and short-circuits any deep insights. In its place are a variety of juxtapositions of varying degrees of success, and a lot of excellent work from Asian and Asian diaspora artists. Perhaps it’s telling that the most exciting “conversations” are the ones that pair Picasso’s portraits of women with feminist works or those that subvert gender norms.

In a section called “The Artist and His Muse,” Picasso’s 1931 painting The Sculptor, depicting a self-satisfied artist gazing upon a sculpted woman’s bust, is placed opposite a series of tender and humorous photographs by New York–based Chinese artist Pixy Liao. The photographs depict Liao as the artist and her male partner as the muse, as they portray figures from pop culture and art history. Liao may not be working in opposition to Picasso, but placed alongside each other, the two works illuminate the absurdity and misogyny embedded in the outdated male artist/female muse dynamic.

By a similar token, there are multiple Picasso’s works in the show in which he depicts himself as a minotaur that seems set to ravish or terrorize Dora Maar or Marie-Thérèse Walter. Those pieces are paired with Saori Akutagawa’s striking paintings from the 1950s that depict women rendered monstrous by their emotions and transformed into figures from Japanese folklore. Akutagawa’s God of Spring (1954), featuring a large serpent-like figure depicted in bold golden lines, is hung so that it looms over the Picasso works, its deity here acting as a clear rejection of his supine women-muses and perhaps a protector of them too. Meanwhile, Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Maar (1937) is paired with Nalini Malani’s digital animation Ballad of a Woman (2023), depicting the afterlife of a murdered woman who finds the world remains unaffected by her killing. Maar stares out from her portrait, looking on as Malani’s tormented figure cleans up her own crime scene and mourns herself.

Portions of the show devoted to still lifes or depictions of the body are less successful. The curators here want to highlight resonances or divergences in conceptual strategies or aesthetics, but mostly, the juxtapositions seem random. In one room, Picasso’s wooden sculptures The Bathers (1956) is set up alongside Haegue Yang’s Totem Robots (2010), composed of clothing racks, electrical devices, and other domestic bric-a-brac assembled together. Why are these works similar? Because they attest “to the power of artistic imagination,” according to a wall text. Sure, why not.

The connections may be forced, and the curation is overstuffed. But at least the work that isn’t by Picasso is high-quality, and there’s value in a wide range of museum-goers being exposed to it. Plus, the scale of the show has given M+ the ability to give some of these artists big budgets for new commissions.

In M+’s basement, Lee Mingwei recreates Guernica (1937) in sand, transforming Picasso’s already monumental painting into something unfinished, impermanent, and near architectural in size. A day’s worth of work on the sand painting is left undone. This June, Lee will finish the work, then invite its destruction by having performers sweep it away. Guernica on Sand best captures the impulse of “Picasso in Asia”: it uses the institutional weight of a Picasso show not just to revisit the past, but to make something new from it.