A Hong Kong Picasso Show Aims to Help Viewers See Him ‘in a New Light'

New York Times

20-03-2025

Pablo Picasso stands, cigarette in hand, gazing intently at the viewer. A white pocket square pokes out of his suit jacket; strands of hair reach up to the top of the canvas.
'Picasso' is a 2011 oil portrait by the Chinese contemporary artist Zeng Fanzhi, and it is the first piece visitors see walking into a new exhibition at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong: 'The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia — A Conversation.'
Running through July 13, the show combines 72 Picasso works — most of them loans from the Picasso Museum in Paris — with about 140 works by 31 Asian and Asian-diasporic artists, most pulled from the museum's own collection. The aim is to set up a dialogue between the Spanish master and four generations of Asian artists, the oldest born in the 1860s, and the youngest in the 1990s.
Zeng, who was born in 1964, explained why Picasso was important.
'His work impressed me with its vitality — the fearless innovation, as well as the ventures into the unknown,' Zeng said in an email interview. While he started studying Picasso in his student days, and was long inspired by the Spanish master's Rose Period, Zeng said that he kept making surprise discoveries, when, for instance, he saw the sketches and preparatory drawings recently shown at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the sculptures in the 2015-16 survey of Picasso's three-dimensional works at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
'Picasso's career was no static journey,' Zeng said. 'I was struck by this pioneering spirit.'
Five decades since his death, and nearly 150 years since his birth, the 20th century's most famous artist continues to dominate the international art conversation. And now, M+, a museum of visual arts and culture that opened in Hong Kong in late 2021, is continuing that conversation with this exhibit — the first of its kind.
Picasso has, in recent years, been blasted for his treatment of the women in his life, notably in the 2023 Brooklyn Museum exhibition 'It's Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,' curated by Gadsby, an Australian comic who had taken on the artist in a Netflix special. The M+ exhibition curators have deliberately mentioned those debates in the show. Yet as Doryun Chong, the artistic director of M+, writes in the catalog, the 'revisionism' of the past few years appears not to have 'curbed the public interest in, if not the appreciation of, Picasso's art in our time.'
In a video interview, Chong, who co-curated the exhibition, explained that while the show contained direct homages to Picasso such as the Zeng painting and Simon Fujiwara's 2024 revisiting of Picasso's 'Massacre in Korea' — 'Who vs Who vs Who? (A Picture of a Massacre)' — 'it was also really important to think about other modalities of relationship' besides 'the one-way direction from the master to the follower.'
Chong and his exhibition co-curator François Dareau (an associate curator at the Picasso Museum in Paris) worked out that Picasso represented four archetypes (or commonly held views) of the artist: the genius, the outsider, the magician and the apprentice. Those archetypes are the four component sections of the exhibition.
In early 20th-century Asia, Picasso was widely known, and many artists painted in the style of synthetic Cubism (a later stage of the Cubist movement) in Japan, Korea, China, India and different parts of Southeast Asia, Chong said. But from the mid-20th century onward, artists in Asia didn't necessarily 'think of him and his particular style as an inspiration anymore,' he added, because they were more interested in artists such as the Abstract Expressionists.
Chong said that for the general public, however, the interest in Picasso 'continues and even grows' across Asia, irrespective of controversies and debates. 'There is a bit of a gap between his influence on more recent generations of artists and the public's continued and increasing passion for his work,' he said.
Among Western artists, Picasso continues to have impact and influence. As the catalog points out, numerous living artists in the West represent him or his art in their work, such as David Hockney, George Condo and Maurizio Cattelan.
Yet Picasso himself was not interested in spawning a following, said Anne Baldassari, one of the world's foremost Picasso scholars. Baldassari was the president of the Picasso Museum in Paris from 2005 to 2014, and in 2012 staged what was then the largest Picasso exhibition in Hong Kong: a solo show with 56 paintings and sculptures from the museum's collections.
'Picasso always denied wanting to establish a 'school' or contribute to any artistic movement,' Baldassari said. She added that having gone through 'what he viewed as years of sterile academic training in the exact representation of reality,' he was 'an anarchist and a freethinker' who sought a 'complete break' with what came before.
He also liked working away from the public eye. Between 1906 and 1914, a period of experimentation during which he radically reinvented painting, he refused to exhibit his paintings or allow them to be published or marketed, said Baldassari. Only those who visited his atelier or acquired the works — such as his collectors Gertrude and Leo Stein — could see them, she noted.
What is also true is that during his lifetime, Picasso actually met few Asian artists: 'You could count them with the fingers of one hand,' said Dareau, the M+ exhibition's co-curator.
How did the Picasso Museum decide what to lend to the M+ show? Dareau noted that the works selected enabled 'an interesting and coherent dialogue' with the M+ collections, and allowed 'a visitor to the exhibition who knows nothing about Picasso to get a sense of the different periods and styles in his career.' There are loans from the Blue Period, the Cubist period, and from Picasso's Surrealist period, in a variety of media: painting, sculpture, drawing, prints and ceramics.
The largest Picasso loan from Paris — and the work that ends the M+ exhibition — is 'Massacre in Korea,' completed in January 1951. The work, which Dareau said was the only painting by Picasso of an Asian subject, shows gun-wielding men in armor taking aim at a group of naked women and children. It was inspired by past art-historical masterpieces: Goya's 'The Third of May 1808 in Madrid' (1814), and Manet's 'The Execution of Emperor Maximilian' (a series painted between 1867 and 1869).
Chong noted that 'Massacre in Korea' was a powerful antiwar manifesto, completed 14 years after 'Guernica,' at a time when Picasso was known across the world as a pacifist and the creator of a famous series depicting the white dove of peace.
Chong said that the 'less than savory aspect' of Picasso's personality — his relationship with women — was explored in the second section of the show, focusing on the idea of the artist as outsider and on the 1920s and 1930s, when the human body was Picasso's main subject. The painter's successive female partners are represented alongside allusions to the abuse and mistreatment that they experienced.
Chong noted that by displaying these Picasso works alongside 'artists making feminist or postfeminist critiques' about 'gender dynamics,' you end up with 'an indirect but still very pointed critique' of Picasso's relationships with women. One example in the show is the work of the Shanghai-born, New York-based artist Pixy Liao, whose humorous photographs portray her and her male life partner in a variety of poses. They 'subvert conventional representations of heterosexual relationships and challenge traditional notions of masculinity,' Chong writes in the catalog.
Chong said he hoped that visitors to the exhibition would see Picasso as an artist who was still 'a relevant and very productive interlocutor,' and one who was 'able to have a dialogue with artists from our part of the world.'