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.

No one wanted to let the rain win. This celebration had been a long time coming. The previous edition of Asia’s most important biennial, in 2021, was a painfully low-key affair. It ran for only a little over a month, after two Covid delays, and because of South Korea’s strict travel quarantine, almost none of the selected artists got to see it. (They missed a smart, dreamy show.) Only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands that typically attend came.

This year, the Gwangju Biennale’s artistic director—Sook-Kyung Lee, a curator at Tate Modern in London—has clearly prepared for big numbers. Her show, which opens today and runs through July 9, is airy and judiciously paced, giving each of her 79 artists room to breathe. Will the public flock to it? Let us hope. This is a crowd-pleasing and crisply coherent affair. Even as it broaches thorny topics, it is unafraid of a good time, teeming with visual, conceptual, and even tactile delights.

You can grab a crayon and trace the glide of your arm along paper stuck to a wall, a “Bodyscape” by the South Korean living legend Lee Kun-Yong, then stroke a life-size sculpture of an elephant, slightly abstracted and covered with white wool, by Oum Jeongsoon, also of South Korea. Next, revel beneath the 16-foot freestanding tower of a painting that Thailand’s Thasnai Sethaseree has contributed, with garish blobs of color atop images of Bangkok, a metropolis overflowing with energy. No, sorry, you cannot mount the tall, evil-looking metal chairs that Seoul’s Chang Jia has arrayed in a circle, but you can at least imagine the sensations they impart. Each seat rests above an old-timey wheel adorned with foot pegs and feathers—a carnival ride, an industrial machine, and a medieval torture device all in one.

All this crackling ambition and easy accessibility are a relief. First reading the show’s focus—“to imagine our shared planet as a site of resistance, coexistence, solidarity and care,” per an introductory text—I blanched. It sounded like a well-worn approach, repeating longstanding fixations of the curatorial class. Its title, “Soft and Weak Like Water,” also sounded familiar, echoing the New Museum’s 2021 triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone.” (It alludes to the Tao Te Ching’s assertion that “there is nothing softer and weaker than water, and yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things.”)

In fact, “Soft and Weak Like Water” is a stirring and original show, surpassing its stated aims. It shows artists fighting to keep traditions alive, passing on knowledge via art and ritual, and digging through wreckage to try to make something new. Fairly often, they succeed.

Scenes of catastrophe and trauma pile up. A camera glides over the skeletal remains of architecture standing in water, in Larry Achiampong’s Reliquary 2 (2020), as a father speaks in a voiceover to his children about being separated from them during a Covid lockdown. The Seoul-based collective IkkibawiKrrr screens footage of the World War II-era military ruins on Pacific islands, as war again looms in the region. In a serene, elegiac, and somewhat ponderous hour-long film by Naeem Mohaiemen, a man and a woman are alone in an abandoned hospital in Kolkata, and she is dying.

As an old world decays and crumbles, artists are directing discarded materials toward new ends. Outside the Gwangju National Museum (one of the biennale’s four satellite locations beyond its central exhibition hall on that rain-soaked plaza), the Cambodian sculptor Sopheap Pich has planted silver trees that he hammered together from slices of recycled aluminum. They are bewitchingly realistic, and almost appear to dance.

At the rustic Horanggasy Artpolygon art space, tucked away on a sylvan hill, there are humble hanging pieces that the late Jeoung Jae Choul made by stringing together castoff objects (fishing floats, anonymous plastic bits) that he found along the coastline of his native South Korea. They seem slight until you see the detailed maps that he painted on paper to record his discoveries with tender attention. And in the main hall, the Polish-Roma artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas has rendered lucid scenes of everyday life with clothes donated by family and friends.

Children—our only real hope—are stars in this show. They conceive a play in a theater workshop that Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi recorded in a spectral five-channel video, they discuss being bullied as they hug in a film by the Dutch artist and “cuddle workshop facilitator” melanie bonajo, and in a potent video installation by South Korean Soun-Gui Kim, girls read poems by women writers from the Joseon Dynasty as fearsome waves crash alongside.

Water is everywhere in “Soft and Weak Like Water,” to a degree that some works feel redundant. Robert Zhao Renhui investigates the history of an unnamed stream in his hometown of Singapore in an intricate constellation of video and sculpture, while Taiki Sakpisit trains his video camera on a section of the Mekong River with a violent history. Alan Michelson cruises New York waterways to shoot footage that he projects atop oyster shells, and Emilija Škarnulytė crafts a lush video that that captures an unidentifiable being from overhead as it glides along the surface of water. Individually, these are sharp works; together, their effects are blunted. (Ditto for the surfeit of mediocre painting on view.)

But just when the situation is becoming too controlled and predictable, you find an artist engaged in the kind of freewheeling, genre-busting action that too rarely finds a place in these august showcases. Anne Duk Hee Jordan has bathed the tiny basement rooms of Horanggasy Artpolygon in black light and installed kinetic sculptures—goofball underwater robot animals that start moving when you enter. One is a long phallic form (a sea cucumber?), slowly rising. Over at the Mugaksa temple, Hong Lee Hyun Sook is climbing a nearby mountain in a short video that follows her hands as she finds her way. (Touch and hands recur in the biennial: hugging, experiencing elephants, or communicating the nuances of American Sign Language in a characteristically crystalline piece by Christine Sun Kim.)

One of the most exhilarating pieces was being brought to life at the main hall on Thursday afternoon. As onlookers filmed, the New York–based Guadalupe Maravilla used padded mallets on the gongs that hang in his inimitable sculptures, which suggest thrones or sacrificial altars, made of wood, steel, and objects that he collected while retracing his path as a child in the 1980s, migrating from El Salvador to the U.S. border. He was unleashing torrents of sound. He views these works as “healing machines,” and as his sonorous tones wash through you, you believe it.

This idea—that artworks can be conduits for healing, or at least point the way toward repair—is a central premise of “Soft and Weak Like Water.” Betty Muffler, an Aboriginal Australian artist, has provided richly patterned paintings, white acrylic on dark linen, that refer to her work as a ngangkari (traditional healer), and Buhlebezwe Siwani has built a sprawling multimedia installation that draws on her efforts as a spiritual healer in South Africa, with song, dirt, and ropes that allude to the belts worn by Zion church members, tying them to their ancestors. Like so much of the art in this year’s exhibition, Siwani’s display is about how culture can create communities, and how it can help those communities connect to their pasts. Those are goals that carry special resonance in Gwangju, whose biennial was established as a memorial to the citizens who rose up in 1980 against the South Korean military dictatorship and were killed.

The danger in positioning any artwork as means of remembrance, or activism, or healing is that it gets reduced to that, a mere tool with a confined function. But wandering through this year’s show, taking in its calls to preserve the natural world, enjoy our bodies, and redress history’s wrong, what I sensed, more than any single message, were heartening dashes of hope, the result of artists gamely meeting their moment, channeling the thrill and dread of being alive today.

That feeling was especially present in Arthur Jafa’s video LOML (2022), a compact masterpiece that is a tribute to the late writer Greg Tate. As at least two overlapping songs play (they are hard to make out), the screen is largely black, but a fragment of amorphous light keeps flickering about, undergoing quicksilver changes: a portrait of something that is refusing to be pinned down. Hope was in the air on Thursday night, too, as two artists stood on a stage, unspooling strange new music—sounds that few had ever heard before—as the rain kept falling.

Wang soon returned to school—this time to pursue art, getting an M.A. in Beijing and an M.F.A. in Boston. In the almost decade since, he has gone on to make poetic, multivalent, and philosophical films. His most recent, The Second Interrogation (2023), is a striking two-part affair (each part just under 30 minutes), and it forms the core of his incisive, heartening current solo show at Blindspot Gallery in Hong Kong. It seems likely to cement his status as one of China’s most important emerging artists. As in much of his previous work, The Second Interrogation delves deep into history, using what it finds there to craft a sharp lens for examining the fraught present. “The subject matter I care about most is reality in China,” Wang told me, “and how to solve all kinds of problems.”

The Second Interrogation involves an intricate back-and-forth between an artist and a censor about the relationship between art and politics and the role of an artist in an authoritarian environment. It begins during a public Q&A and continues in private spaces, as their positions change, artist becoming censor and vice-versa. Central to their conversation are the notorious performances staged as part of the 1989 “China/Avant-Garde” show in Beijing, which came to be known as the “Seven Sins”: Wu Shanzhuan selling shrimp, and Xiao Lu firing two bullets into her installation. Hong Kong’s M+ museum has on view documentation of the performances, which led to the shutdown of “China/Avant-Garde.” Soon after, the doomed protests began in Tiananmen.

“China had an underlying possibility to reform more than 30 years ago, even if it was only for the system’s self-protection and continuation,” one of the film’s characters argues. “But just like the ‘seven sins’ that caused the system’s reactive suppression of contemporary art, the movement that happened that year strangled the possibility of the system’s reform in its infancy.” Photos from the protests appear, and there is footage of the performances being restaged by the artist character. It is a two-channel production, and both screens largely follow the same action (from different vantage points), but Wang has angled them so you cannot take them in at once and notice where their narratives diverge. Where you stand shapes how you understand the piece.

Wang showed this first part of The Second Interrogation at the Art Basel fair in Switzerland last year, and he has been clear that it would not be possible to do so in mainland China. “You’d definitely get in trouble or punished,” he told me during the call earlier this month. “In Hong Kong, they say the context is much better, but it’s getting there.” He has viewed his exhibition in the city “like a test,” he said. “I’m a little bit concerned about it.” But, he added, “Everything will be fine. I hope people can understand it’s just art.”

At Blindspot, Wang is also premiering the second part of The Second Interrogation, a newly finished one-channel video that follows the artist character as he rehearses a group performance in a large exhibition hall, which features banners with the logo for the “China/Avant-Garde” show: a no U-Turn sign. There are a few dozen young people on hand, and they move in formation, jostle each other, and at one point scream wildly. The censor from the first part is there, too, and (partial spoiler alert) he has a gun.

“I think this performance is about how a great mass of people in China could be awakened, and to gather as a collective, and to restart the Enlightenment process in China,” Wang said. In another sequence, a different artist character talks about politics, history (particularly China’s 1919 anti-imperialist May Fourth Movement), and how to bring about change with a ghost-like figure who is cloaked in a sheet (a reference to Ren Xiaoying’s “Seven Sins” contribution). At one point, the obscured person offers this: “To decide how to live is the original ‘power of the powerless.’ ”

When Wang decided to change his path, he enrolled in the painting program at Tsinghua University, and at Blindspot he is presenting intimate portraits he has painted of unnamed friends—artists, journalists, musicians, and poets. “Their way of living, to me, is the best way of resistance nowadays in China,” he told me. “They don’t want to get a job. They don’t want to be complicit with this system.” His view is that “as long as we have these kinds of people in China, I think this country has hope.” These lucid canvases, which are richly colored and slightly abstracted, have a bold title: “Weapons.” In China, people do not really have weapons, Wang said. “The basic tool we have is the body and also the way of living is sort of a weapon.”

Near the end of our interview, we got to talking more about how Wang has developed as an artist, and he brought up Lu Xun (1881–1936), who quit his study of medicine to become an influential, politically engaged writer, thinking that, “as a doctor, he could just only save lives—comfortable lives—but if he could be a writer, he could save the mind of the Chinese,” Wang said.

He paused for a brief moment before adding, “Yeah, so I think I just believe in the power of art, a lot. I think art can really change people.”

Shen, who is 34 and based in New York, is something of a rollercoaster connoisseur, and has made pilgrimages to cult coasters like The Voyage, a Mayflower-themed beast (the second-longest wooden one on earth) at Holiday World & Splashin’ Safari in Santa Claus, Indiana. (Only in America!) Rollercoasters are “so excessive,” the artist said over lunch this week in Hong Kong. “They’re hyper-engineered—they’re meant to push your body to its physiological limits, to the point where your body and mind think you’re going to die.” Their careful design leads to an “extremely safe environment” for that harrowing endeavor, she noted.

At its very best, art can operate in a parallel manner. (Think of Edmund Burke’s famous line that the sublime can be generated by things that “excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is analogous to terror.”)

Granted, art will not simulate a near-death experience (not usually), but it will help you get outside of yourself, and maybe shake you up a bit, as Shen’s works do here. Little Chair (2023), as her intricate centerpiece is called, invites visceral memories of confinement: as a child, being inculcated into domestic life, or even as an adult, put in a position of authority (as first chair cellist, say). It is alluring and precarious.

Lining the walls of the Vacancy’s booth are photos that also draw on the world of rollercoasters, showing mysterious little circles in mountain landscapes. These are images that Shen found online of hair ties that people regularly throw when riding Expedition Everest, a $100 million steel coaster at Disney’s Animal Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. She has printed them in black-and-white, on paper with curving edges, so that they suggest the tintypes of a distant era (perhaps the one from which her highchair comes).

Riders deposited these artifacts—marking their presence, or perhaps trying to distract themselves—while strapped in place, at a moment of giddy joy, extreme fear, or even boredom. Now they are gone, but a trace of them has been left behind. “People, over time, participating in this indeterminate and informal activity [are] quite beautiful to me,” Shen said.

A jampacked umbrella repair store has taken up residence that would look right at home in one of the narrow streets nearby, with its boxes of products in a panoply of colors, shapes, and sizes. (Few such stores remain in the city.) There’s a simple black one tagged at HK$65 (about US$8.30) and a handsome leopard-print piece for HK$135 (US$17.20), but they are not for sale. That is something of a surprise, since this is the work of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who has previously hawked T-shirts and served free food to all-comers, some of which will be restaged at his upcoming survey at MoMA PS1 this fall. (It is also a shame, since rain is in the weather forecast for the coming days.)

However, the entire shop—the centerpiece of Tiravanija’s elegant and oddball solo debut with Zwirner, titled “The Shop” and up through May 6—can be purchased.

Even more unexpected sights await as you pass through that cramped store to the rest of the exhibition, which continues just behind the exit and downstairs. Stroll through (do not miss the winning cutout image of Tiravanija sporting an umbrella hat), and you emerge to find an empty room with black carpeting and a robot vacuum cleaner hard at work. Down a set of stairs, four 3D printers—sizable transparent boxes, like high-tech Larry Bells—are slowly building red objects. Next to that room, still more vacuums (flat, circular, black Eufy models) glide across the carpeting. The mood is a little unsettling, and maybe even a touch menacing: a world of sleek, mass-produced machines going about their business, heedless of human presence.

What is going on here? Some answers come via a press text and helpful staffers.

The vacuums have been programmed to trace the Chinese characters for “dark forest,” the title of a 2008 science-fiction book by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. (It is part of Liu’s epic, and President Obama–approved, The Three-Body Problem trilogy, which concerns a showdown between an alien civilization and Earth. The phrase itself refers to a pessimistic theory about how a species can pursue survival in the universe.) The robots leave lines on the carpet that are faintly visible, but they disappear as people walk on them. In the shop, a radio plays a recording of someone reading an excerpt of Death’s End (the trilogy’s final book, from 2010) in Cantonese that involves a spinning umbrella that protects a character—the series is rather trippy. As for the 3D printers, they are creating replicas of broken umbrellas, and an augmented-reality program lets visitors see still more broken umbrellas (black, crumpled almost into abstractions) floating in the space.

This would all feel somewhat esoteric, but for the fact that umbrellas have particular resonance in Hong Kong, which goes unmentioned by the gallery. Demonstrators famously used them in the 2014 protests over universal suffrage (when the Umbrella Movement was coined), to shield themselves from pepper spray, rubber bullets, and surveillance, and again in the 2019 actions over the National Security Law. At the time, some Chinese e-commerce sites stopped selling them to buyers with Hong Kong addresses.

“If you compare the umbrella with the weapon the others are using to attack us, the umbrella is nothing for that,” one activist told Bloomberg in 2019. “Actually, umbrellas are really easily broken and we only use it to protect ourselves.”

As you mull that context, you could also take Tiravanija’s exhibition in a more general sense, as a tribute to human invention—to tools that are variously futuristic or rudimentary, disposable or essential, or that have special powers when wielded in an unusual way. He has turned vacuum cleaners into artistic collaborators. And he has made umbrellas that are non-functional. They are damaged, hiding in plain sight, or not for sale, but some are being reconstituted in strange new forms. All the while, his robots cruise the floors, trying to keep their writing visible, aiming to maintain cleanliness.

“Stay six, seven days,” Hong Kong dealer Fabio Rossi has been telling people, “because there’s so much to do and to see right now, especially if you haven’t been for four years.” As co-president of the Hong Kong Art Gallery Association (HKAGA), Rossi is required to boost the city, but he has a point. Herzog & de Meuron’s long-delayed M+ museum finally opened in late 2021, and the Hong Kong Palace Museum followed this past summer. All the while, the gallery scene has been growing, with the young HKAGA aiming to continue the momentum.

Most major art economies have some sort of dealer association, but HKAGA is unusual in several ways. For one, it was founded only in 2012, as the city’s market ascended. (By comparison, the New York–based Art Dealers Association of America dates to 1962, the Society of London Art Dealers, to 1932.) Also, “we are still relatively small, because that’s the reality in Hong Kong,” Rossi said in a recent video from Dusseldorf, as he was on his way to attend the TEFAF Maastricht fair in the Netherlands. The HKAGA counted 62 members at the end of last year—a modest number compared to the ADAA’s almost 200—but up from the 49 it had at the start of 2021.

In other locales, such gallery groups are heavily involved in government lobbying, but Rossi pointed out that Hong Kong already has a quite favorable environment for art dealers. His Rossi & Rossi firm also has operations in London, where taxation, artist’s resale royalties, and Brexit are sources of concern. Hong Kong has none of those issues (it does not even have a sales tax), so the association has focused on strengthening the commercial gallery community.

When the pandemic hit in early 2020, the HKAGA got to thinking about what it could do, dealer Amanda Hon, of Ben Brown Fine Arts, said, “because everyone is now bored in Hong Kong because we’re stuck here because of the stupid quarantine.” It quickly put together a miniature fair called Unscheduled, with a dozen member galleries, each showing one artist apiece in space provided by the Tai Kwun art center. Just about every participant sold to new clients, Hon said, and they repeated it the next year, with a few more participants.

The association also regularly hosts professional development activities on topics like art handling and shipping, teaching the kind of mundane skills that are essential for an art scene to thrive. “The staff that we have here, that we tend to hire, the resumes that we tend to get, are not as extensive as New York or London,” said Hon, who was on the call from Dubai, after taking part in the fair there. (Also—and this is no small thing, given that people have been away for so long—HKAGA has compiled a robust guide, online and in print, to the exhibitions on offer all over the Special Administrative Region this week.)

All these efforts come as other Asian cities are hosting major art fairs and watching as foreign dealers set up outposts. Do Hongkongers think about potential rivals? “I think especially this year,” Hon said wryly, “with all the media that’s been surrounding, you know, Korea and Singapore, people are like, ‘No, we are not letting any—I don’t care—we need to squash them.’” Rossi cut in: “Just kidding! Just kidding!” 

Journalists love a rivalry, but the truth is that Hong Kong continues to tower over its potential competitors, at least when measured by dollar value. South Korea also has a largely tax-free setup, and in 2022 did a record 1.04 trillion won (about $782 million) in total art sales, according to government statistics; meanwhile, at just its spring auction in Hong Kong, Sotheby’s rang up nearly $500 million. (For 2021, ArtPrice put Hong Kong’s total auction turnover at $1.7 billion.) The bluest of blue chips continue to operate in the city, a key hub for the $13.4 billion Chinese market. Over in Singapore, the VAT is going from 8 percent to 9 percent next year, and at the Art SG fair there in January, “the amount of supply did not match the amount of demand,” Hon said. (There was more of the former.)

Which is not to say that Hong Kong is a panacea. Tensions over Taiwan could upend the situation in an instant, and political changes in the city have led some artists to decamp for democratic climes. Rossi said that he respects anyone who leaves, “but there are a lot of people who could leave, and have decided to stay, and actually that’s the majority of people.”

As Rossi sees it, “it’s great if other places in Asia develop their own ecosystems as well,” and he pointed to the landscape in Europe. “You have London, you have Paris, you have even Brussels, Basel,” he said. “So, you have different moments, and different things happen.”

Now, though, as some 180 exhibitors take over the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre for Basel, it is the city’s moment. “You have to understand that we had two illnesses, one after the other, not one illness,” Rossi said. “So we had a social unrest and then when we were just recovering from that, we had the pandemic. So imagine your body had two major illnesses, one after another. Now we are healed, we are ready to go and we are excited, and we want to show what we have to offer. That is not what Singapore has to offer, that is not what Seoul has to offer. It’s different and hopefully it has its advantages.”

Hon summed up the attitude in the city succinctly. “There is a sense of pride in being in Hong Kong, even though we all have other passports,” she said. “We all come from different places. We choose to make Hong Kong our home.”

If all goes according to plan, these halls of tremendous power will soon be joined by one more: a museum for more than 20,000 artworks and antiquities from the collection of the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, once the richest person in the nation—and one of its most controversial, convicted twice on tax- and corruption-related charges and pardoned twice by past presidents.

Following Lee’s death in October 2020, at 78, after more than six years in a coma, his heirs donated 23,000 pieces from his immense art and antiquities holdings to seven South Korean museums. They were facing the highest estate-tax bill in the country’s history, and they thereby avoided taxes on the gifted works. Exhibitions of the trove in Seoul and elsewhere in the country drew vast crowds, and provided a rare glimpse into the activities of the notoriously secretive, scandal-plagued family. Debate has ensued about how and where to present Lee’s collection permanently—and about perceived shortcomings in South Korea’s approach to art.

One hot summer afternoon, an official from the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism involved in bringing this high-stakes museum to fruition, Lee Dangkweon, sat in a corner office of the 10th-floor Foreign Press Center, with Gyeongbokgung visible behind him, to discuss the plans for a Lee Kun-hee Collection museum on a lot just east of Gyeongbokgung. The donation has “shined a bright light on culture,” Lee, the Ministry’s director of cultural infrastructure, said via an interpreter. An architectural competition was being prepared, with the aim to open in December 2027. He acknowledged the competing views for the museum, but said of the ministry’s approach, “the ultimate goal is for more people to enjoy the collection.”

Since its founding in 1938 in the city of Daegu, the Samsung Group has always been a family affair. Lee Byung-chul (aka B.C. Lee) established the company as a trading concern for dried fish and other staples, and in the following decades grew it into a multifarious behemoth. It entered the electronics game in the late ’60s. Its best-known entity, Samsung Electronics, hauled in more than $200 billion last year, but it is only the largest piece in a vertigo-inducing web of companies involved in everything from shipbuilding to hotels, credit cards to life insurance. The largest chaebol (family-run conglomerate) in South Korea, its annual revenue is by some estimates equal to 20 percent or more of the country’s gross domestic product.

After Lee Byung-chul’s death in 1987, his son Lee Kun-hee became chairman and, in dramatic fashion, continued to expand Samsung—and the seeds of an art collection his father left behind.

Samsung’s art holdings in South Korea are not as byzantine as its corporate structure, but they are, in their own way, just as formidable. There are two impressive museums responsible for safeguarding artworks from throughout the ages, and run by the Samsung Foundation of Culture; then there is privately owned art, cloaked in darkness, purchased by Lee and his wife, Hong Ra-hee, and other family members.

“No one really knows the breadth and depth of the Samsung family collection,” one Korean art dealer told me. (The Lee family is notoriously private and does not speak with journalists. One art insider likened trying to talk with them to requesting an interview with a monarch.)

For Lee Kun-hee, art was intimately intertwined with his soaring ambitions for his company. In 1993, he famously summoned 200 Samsung executives to a luxury hotel in Frankfurt, Germany, and berated them for three days about the need to improve the quality of the firm’s janky electronics, stating that “faulty products are the root of all evil,” as Geoffrey Cain recounts in his 2020 book, Samsung Rising. In the preceding years, Lee had made the pursuit of quality the cornerstone of his collecting, tasking a scholar on payroll, Lee Chong-sun, to acquire 100 traditional Korean artworks classified as National Treasures, the highest government designation. In his 2016 (Samsung-approved) book on these efforts, Lee Chong-sun links the chairman’s management and collecting philosophies, describing his willingness to spend enormous sums for the best, writing that the refrain in the Korean art market became, “All good things go to Samsung.”

B.C. Lee, by contrast, was a more modest buyer, who saw his collecting as a means of preserving traditional Korean culture, which had been under threat during the Japanese colonial period, when many examples were shipped abroad. Lee Kun-hee continued to collect older material while moving into modern and contemporary art with Hong, who is seen as a discerning collector, and a tastemaker in elite circles. During a recent showing of highlights from the Lee donation at the National Museum of Korea (NMK), one pairing showed this juxtaposition of the ancient and modern in full force: stone statues of children—cemetery guardians in the Joseon era—stood beneath a wall opening that looked into a room with a Monet “Water Lily” painting, the first Monet to enter a Korean museum collection.

Lee Kun-hee was relentless as both an art buyer and executive, and even a meeting with an artist could occasion an opportunity for him to score a victory for Samsung. In the late ’80s, he convinced Korean American artist Nam June Paik to use his TVs instead of those of archrival Sony, the Korea Times has reported. But that apparently didn’t stop Paik from using Sonys in Brahms, a 1993 assemblage with three screens (the Sony logo now obscured), two cellos, and a keyboard that was part of the NMK show.

In 1982, as Lee fils was taking on greater responsibility at Samsung, B.C. Lee built the Ho-Am (his pen name), a private museum to display some of his acquisitions, in Yongin, about 40 minutes south of Seoul. The stately two-story traditional structure, surrounded by a gracious garden, now has at its edge a menacing Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture. (The Ho-Am is next to Samsung’s amusement park, Everland, which made headlines in 2008 when police raided its warehouses, hunting for art. Hong was questioned about allegedly using an illegal Samsung slush fund to acquire art, including early pieces by Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella. She was not charged.)

In 2004, Lee and Hong opened a museum of their own, the Leeum Museum of Art, on a hill not far from their home in the wealthy Seoul enclave of Hannam, for everything from ancient to contemporary art. It is a grand production, its three buildings conceived by three different starchitects: Rem Koolhaas, Jean Nouvel, and Mario Botta. (Samsung, after all, translates to “three stars” in Korean hanja.)

“It is the one and only museum that I would introduce people to who are visiting Korea,” another dealer told me. “It is so tasteful.” Under the direction of Hong, the Leeum became a venue for venturesome shows by leading artists like Do Ho Suh and Matthew Barney, with a collection stocked with prime examples by giants like Alberto Giacometti, Kim Whanki, Lee Bul, and Mark Rothko.

And then, in 2017, it all came to a halt.

Lee Kun-hee was in a coma, and his and Hong’s only son, Lee Jae-yong, better known as Jay Y. Lee, was serving as Samsung’s de facto leader when, in February, he was charged with bribery related to his succession. In short order, Hong quit her post as Leeum museum director, and her sister, deputy director, followed her out. All special exhibitions were canceled. Jay Y. Lee was convicted and began serving prison time, then had his sentence suspended on appeal. When the pandemic arrived in early 2020, the Leeum closed its doors, but unlike most other Korean museums, it did not reopen. In January 2021, a court sent Lee back to prison. Rumors abounded about when the museum might return, the timing perhaps tied to his release.

When Lee Kun-hee died in 2020, the family faced the prospect of colossal inheritance taxes, thanks to South Korea’s 50 percent estate-tax rate, which can rise to 60 percent in some cases. They had six months to calculate it and begin paying. There was speculation that the collection might be auctioned to defray the taxes; politicians called for legislation to allow the art to be used to cover taxes, as in other countries.

That April, the family announced that it would pay around $11 billion, one of the highest tax bills probably ever totaled anywhere. They also said they would give about $900 million to health care causes, and they detailed the art donation. More than 20,000 antiquities (a majority of which are books) went to the NMK. Preparing complete catalogues on the works is expected to take five years. Almost 1,500 pieces (primarily superb examples of Korean modernism along with that Monet, plus a smattering of Western works by Picasso, Chagall, and a few others) went to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). About 100 pieces went to five institutions beyond Seoul: the Daegu Art Museum, the Gwangju Museum of Art, the Park Soo Keun Museum in Yanggu, the Jeonnam Museum of Art in Gwangyang, and the Lee Jung Seop Art Museum on Jeju island.

The lucky recipients were quick to open shows, and the MMCA’s included an 18-foot Kim Whanki painting from the 1950s depicting women at work in a pastel-hued abstract environment. Over the course of 11 months, including two extensions, it brought in a quarter million people (even more impressive, given pandemic restrictions). During the closing weekend this past June, the average wait to get in was four hours, according to the museum.

The show “played a pivotal role in promoting a culture of charity and public interest in the art market,” MMCA director Youn Bummo told me via email, saying that the Lee gift had also inspired others to make donations to the institution.

But Youn declined to comment about what happened early in his exhibition’s run: The Ministry of Culture announced that the Lee gifts to the MMCA and NMK would be redirected to a dedicated museum focused on the Lee Kun-hee Collection, its location to be determined by an expert panel.

The battle lines were drawn. Before long, more than 20 mayors, governors, and other officials were lobbying for the proposed museum to be sited in their districts, citing their region’s ties (however tenuous) to the two deceased Samsung chairmen and the company itself. Even the typically strait-laced Korean wire service Yonhap was moved to write that their reasons were “as varied as they are ingenious.”

Simultaneously, a lobbying effort began from some in the Korean art world for the creation of a national museum for modern art, holding Lee gifts in that area, with the MMCA then focusing on contemporary. An advocate of that plan, Chung Joon-mo, a former MMCA chief curator, has argued that placing the donated works in a museum devoted to the Lee gift—rather than museums for specific types of art—would make South Korea a “laughing stock” in the global art world.

In any case, after months of campaigning, the national government came to a decision on the location of a dedicated Lee museum. It settled on … Seoul.

The designated spot is near not only the Blue House and Gyeongbokgung but also two other major palaces, the MMCA’s main Seoul branch, and high-power galleries Kukje, Hyundai, PKM. “We are going to create a cultural belt,” Lee Dangkweon, the ministry director, said.

But even some dealers with Seoul galleries question the idea. “So many good things are crowded in this area,” one told me, proposing that there is “a serious unbalance in terms of cultural infrastructure for this country.” (Almost 40 percent of the country’s art museums are in the Seoul region.) This dealer lamented that the Lee museum “was an optimal opportunity” for another city to get “a wonderful museum, creating a new vibrant environment.”

Lee Dangkweon said the ministry’s position has been that a dedicated space for the collection will be most “meaningful and interesting to the public,” and Seoul has the unique resources to accommodate research, and can provide easy access. An emphasis of the new Yoon administration is “striking a balance between Seoul and other cities in the future,” he said. The collection is touring widely throughout the country, hitting more than a dozen museums by 2024. Its Western art is now on view at MMCA’s Gwacheon branch, south of Seoul.

The Lee Kun-hee Collection could soon help fuel South Korea’s soft power efforts, which it has mastered in music, food, and film. The NMK is in talks to tour works to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Lee said. In Seoul, one can see a Samsung chairman’s treasures being a potent draw for foreign tourists.

For some in South Korea, however, the planned Lee museum calls attention to an uncomfortably close relationship between the government and some of its richest citizens. Sangin Park, a vocal Samsung critic and economist at Seoul National University, said in an interview that building a museum for the collection is a kind of “embellishment for the Lee family,” adding, “it is another indicator of how powerful and significant the Samsung family is in Korean society.”

The resulting fracas has also underscored the challenges faced by existing Korean museums. The Lee Kun-hee donation may not have been the collection’s “cream of the crop,” but “it certainly surpasses anything that the MMCA has,” the dealer who discussed the opacity of the family’s holdings told me. (The museum previously had no substantial Western art.) With a yearly acquisitions budget of under $4 million, the MMCA cannot imagine competing at the top end of the market, and South Korea does not offer tax incentives for art donations like those in the United States and elsewhere. “The country needs a reasonable and transparent policy or system to draw good artworks into the public museum,” the dealer critical of the planned museum’s Seoul location said. Prominent figures in Korea’s art scene have called for those tax changes.

Meanwhile, the Leeum has roared back to life.

Last fall, a couple months after Jay Y. Lee was paroled (he had served more than half his sentence), it reopened with a handsome renovation and a group show that included blue-chip artists from its collection, like Yves Klein and Cindy Sherman, with emerging local figures like Haneyl Choi. Members of Blackpink and BTS dropped by, and their fans followed. (In August, President Yoon pardoned Jay Y. Lee, though he still faces trial on other allegations.)

Like the business, the museum remains in the family. While Jay is said to be interested in traditional art, his sister Lee Seo-hyun is passionate about contemporary. A trustee of the Dia Art Foundation in New York, she now chairs the Leeum’s steering committee, and about two years ago brought aboard Kim Sung-won, a dynamic professor of art history from the Seoul National University of Science and Technology, as deputy director. (The director chair previously occupied by Hong remains empty.)

Asked about the enthusiastic response that Leeum’s reopening has received, Kim proposed that the Lee Kun-hee Collection exhibitions had played a part. They showed “how a passion for art contributes to cultural values and a collective legacy,” she said in an email. “In this sense, the exhibition of Lee’s collection helped reach out to the audience, and in turn, drew them closer to the museum.” A major Ian Cheng exhibition and a sharp showcase of young Korean artists ran earlier this year. Dealers here say that the Leeum is actively buying. Many good things continue to go to Samsung. 

A version of this article appears in the 2022 edition of ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors issue, under the title “Samsung Saga.”

Yang, 36, explained via an interpreter that her paintings often begin as offhand photographs. She has shot abandoned buildings in the fast-changing metropolis, domestic interiors, mannequins, friends. She prints the images, perhaps marks out a section, reworks the picture in her head, and finally picks up her brush. She earned degrees in traditional East Asian painting (BFA 2008, MFA 2010) at Sungshin Women’s University in the capital, and typically works with diluted acrylic on a type of hanji, paper made from mulberry tree bark that she pulls taut around stretcher bars or affixes directly to the wall. This highly absorptive material allows her to build many layers of color, controlling its intensity. Carefully mediated through paper and paint (blues, grays, browns), her subjects take on an otherworldly quality. Familiar moments feel ever so slightly off, filtered into a hazy and alluring cinematic ambience.

Dread and possibility commingle in this universe. People are alone: in pain, in contemplation, or gazing silently. Sometimes all that is visible is a single hand. The modest-size paintings in Yang’s solo show at Chapter II in Seoul earlier this year depicted various figures: a person’s face with tears streaming down, another apparently gazing through a grate (the shadows across the eyes offered the only clue), and a menacing individual, presented in three-quarter profile from below, slightly out of focus. In the bewitching Untitled 2 (2021), two people—a man and a woman, probably—kiss deeply as their faces blur into one another. Yang said that she is interested in “the thing that exists between what is in reality and what is seen or captured in a photograph,” and so she makes a point of rendering blurs and glitches in her work.

Yang’s paintings probe both the limits and power of photography—its sinister and seductive concision, its partiality. Intriguingly, over the past few years, she has been working on pieces of hanji whose tall, narrow proportions roughly match those of a smartphone. Ten examples are slated to be installed in a long row for the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, marking the first appearance of Yang’s work outside South Korea or Japan. One of them, Memory (2021), shows a white blouse held awkwardly, even uncomfortably, on a wire hanger. An earlier work in her studio, Curtain (2019), suggests a hotel room glimpsed on a first morning waking there, as one tries to apprehend the scene. The painting exemplifies, for me, what Yang meant when she said, “I want my works to be like a thorn in your mind that pricks from time to time, or like a very gentle fever.” A sliver of sunlight, represented by raw paper, is breaking through the fabric covering the window. The air is unsettled and anxious. There are clearly things here that we cannot quite see yet.  

About 110 exhibitors from around the world are filling the cavernous halls of Coex for Frieze (and another 160-plus exhibitors are on hand for Kiaf—the Korea International Art Fair—in a hall below). The place is jam-packed with people, and it no doubt will be through the event’s end on Monday: the appetite for art here is voracious, and the material is strong.

There are revered modernists, young guns, and even some ancient items, thanks to a small Frieze Masters subsection: a booth for everybody. Below, the nine best presentations on offer.