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CNN
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
South Korea's unique housing culture has inspired a major new exhibition
There is something peculiar about entering a building only to be greeted by another one inside it, so it takes a moment to adjust upon arriving on the second floor of London's prestigious Tate Modern art gallery. Directly in front of the entryway is a 1:1 scale facsimile of Do Ho Suh's childhood home in Seoul, which he wrapped in mulberry paper and carefully traced in graphite to produce an intricate rubbing of the exterior. It is just one of many versions of home envisioned by the Korean artist over the past 30 years. Running at Tate Modern through to October, 'Walk the House' is Suh's largest solo institutional show to date in the UK, where he has been based since 2016. Before that, he lived in the US, having studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University in the 1990s. The exhibition's name stems from an expression used in the context of the 'hanok,' a traditional Korean house that can be taken down and reassembled elsewhere, thanks to its construction and lightweight materials. The buildings have become rarer over time, because of urbanization, war and occupation, which led to the destruction of many traditional homes in the country. Suh's own childhood home was an outlier amid Seoul's changing cityscape during the 1970s, which underwent rapid development after the Korean War left the city in ruins. It spurred the artist's ongoing preoccupations with home as both a physical space that could be dissolved and reanimated, but also a psychological construct that can reflect memory and identity. Among the show's exhibits are embroidered artworks, architectural models in various materials and scales, and film works involving complex 3D techniques. The detailed outlines picked up in Suh's hanok rubbing are echoed in two closely related large-scale pieces on display for the first time, both of which visitors can walk inside. 'Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul' (2024) takes various 3D fixtures and fittings from homes Suh has lived in around the world and maps them onto a tent-like model of his London apartment. 'Nest/s' (2024) is a pastel-hued tunnel, again based on different places he has called home, this time splicing together incongruous hallways — an environment that holds symbolic meaning for the artist. 'I think that the experience of cultural displacement helped me to see these in-between spaces, the space that connects places. That journey lets me focus on transitional spaces, like corridors, staircases, entrances,' Suh told CNN at the show's opening. The exhibition also features 'Staircase' (2016), a 3D structure that was subsequently collapsed into a red, sinewy 2D tangle. 'I think in general we tend to focus on destinations, but these bridges that connect those destinations, often we neglect them, but actually we spend most of our time in this transitional stage,' Suh said. There's a translucent quality to much of the work on display. Fine, gauzy textiles are used directly within many of the pieces, as well as in the form of a subtle room divider — the closest thing to an internal wall in the main space. 'For the first time since 2016, the galleries of the exhibition will have all their walls taken down in order to accommodate the multiple large-scale works that will be materialized within them, as well as the multiple times and spaces that those works carry,' said Dina Akhmadeeva, assistant curator for international art at Tate Modern, who co-curated the show with Nabila Abdel Nabi, senior curator of international art at the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. 'In doing so, the open layout will form not a linear passage or narrative, but instead encourage visitors to meander, return, loop back, evoking an experience closer to the function of memory itself.' Suh's emphasis on spatial interventions poses creative challenges for curators as well as the institutions that hold these works. One such example is 'Staircase-III' (2010), acquired by the Tate back in 2011, which often needs to be adapted to wherever it is shown by measuring new panels to fit each space. 'I wanted to disturb the habitual experience of (encountering) an artwork in a museum,' said Suh by way of explanation. Akhmadeeva added that the approach challenged the 'idea of permanence — of the work and of the space around it.' Removing the gallery walls also reflects Suh's interest in peeling environments back to their foundations. 'It's just the bare space that the architects originally conceived,' he said. Suh's work often focuses on spatial experiences rather than material goods because, just like the rooms and buildings we inhabit, an empty space behaves like a 'vessel' for memories, he explained. 'Over the years and the time that you've spent in the space, you project your own experience and energy onto it, and then it becomes a memory.' The artist does occasionally focus on ornaments and furnishings, however, as seen in his monumental film, 'Robin Hood Gardens' (named after the East London housing estate it captures), which used photogrammetry to stitch together drone footage taken inside the council building awaiting demolition. It marked a rare instance of Suh documenting both residents and their belongings. The film illustrates the subtle politics of Suh's practice. 'Often in my case, the color and the craftsmanship and the beauty in my work distract from the political undertone of it,' he said. Issues such as privacy, security, and access to space are intimately connected to class and public policy, but his commentary is covered in a soft veil of fabric or the gentle rub of graphite. The latter is also used in 'Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater' (2012), which reflects on the deadly Gwangju Uprising of 1980. The artwork resembles the shell of a room that is unravelled to form a flat, vertical structure, like a deconstructed box. It is based on a rubbing that was taken by Suh and his assistants while blindfolded — a nod to the censorship of the military's violent response and its absence from South Korean collective memory. The exhibition is bookended by pieces that address sociopolitical questions. 'Bridge Project' (1999) explores land ownership among other issues, while 'Public Figures' (2025), an evolution of a piece Suh made for the Venice Biennale in 2001, is a subverted monument featuring an empty plinth, directing focus to the many miniature figurines upholding it. For Suh, it was intended to address Korea's histories of both oppression and resilience. While these two exhibits may feel distinct, for Suh, all of his work interrogates the boundaries between personal and public space, and the conditions that force transience or enable permanence. The tension between public and private was thrown into sharp relief during the pandemic, when lockdowns forced people to spend most of their time indoors. Although Suh 'scrutinized' all corners of his home during this time, the lockdowns didn't materialize in his practice in the way one might expect. Instead, it elicited a more tender reflection on what is often the making of a home: people. It explains why, among the substantial, often colorful structures in the exhibition, there are two small tunics made for (and with) his two young daughters, adorned with pockets holding their most cherished belongings, such as crayons and toys. 'As a parent, it was quite a vulnerable situation. Other families, I cannot speak for them, but it really helped us to be together,' said Suh.
CNN
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
South Korea's unique housing culture has inspired a major new exhibition
There is something peculiar about entering a building only to be greeted by another one inside it, so it takes a moment to adjust upon arriving on the second floor of London's prestigious Tate Modern art gallery. Directly in front of the entryway is a 1:1 scale facsimile of Do Ho Suh's childhood home in Seoul, which he wrapped in mulberry paper and carefully traced in graphite to produce an intricate rubbing of the exterior. It is just one of many versions of home envisioned by the Korean artist over the past 30 years. Running at Tate Modern through to October, 'Walk the House' is Suh's largest solo institutional show to date in the UK, where he has been based since 2016. Before that, he lived in the US, having studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University in the 1990s. The exhibition's name stems from an expression used in the context of the 'hanok,' a traditional Korean house that can be taken down and reassembled elsewhere, thanks to its construction and lightweight materials. The buildings have become rarer over time, because of urbanization, war and occupation, which led to the destruction of many traditional homes in the country. Suh's own childhood home was an outlier amid Seoul's changing cityscape during the 1970s, which underwent rapid development after the Korean War left the city in ruins. It spurred the artist's ongoing preoccupations with home as both a physical space that could be dissolved and reanimated, but also a psychological construct that can reflect memory and identity. Among the show's exhibits are embroidered artworks, architectural models in various materials and scales, and film works involving complex 3D techniques. The detailed outlines picked up in Suh's hanok rubbing are echoed in two closely related large-scale pieces on display for the first time, both of which visitors can walk inside. 'Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul' (2024) takes various 3D fixtures and fittings from homes Suh has lived in around the world and maps them onto a tent-like model of his London apartment. 'Nest/s' (2024) is a pastel-hued tunnel, again based on different places he has called home, this time splicing together incongruous hallways — an environment that holds symbolic meaning for the artist. 'I think that the experience of cultural displacement helped me to see these in-between spaces, the space that connects places. That journey lets me focus on transitional spaces, like corridors, staircases, entrances,' Suh told CNN at the show's opening. The exhibition also features 'Staircase' (2016), a 3D structure that was subsequently collapsed into a red, sinewy 2D tangle. 'I think in general we tend to focus on destinations, but these bridges that connect those destinations, often we neglect them, but actually we spend most of our time in this transitional stage,' Suh said. There's a translucent quality to much of the work on display. Fine, gauzy textiles are used directly within many of the pieces, as well as in the form of a subtle room divider — the closest thing to an internal wall in the main space. 'For the first time since 2016, the galleries of the exhibition will have all their walls taken down in order to accommodate the multiple large-scale works that will be materialized within them, as well as the multiple times and spaces that those works carry,' said Dina Akhmadeeva, assistant curator for international art at Tate Modern, who co-curated the show with Nabila Abdel Nabi, senior curator of international art at the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. 'In doing so, the open layout will form not a linear passage or narrative, but instead encourage visitors to meander, return, loop back, evoking an experience closer to the function of memory itself.' Suh's emphasis on spatial interventions poses creative challenges for curators as well as the institutions that hold these works. One such example is 'Staircase-III' (2010), acquired by the Tate back in 2011, which often needs to be adapted to wherever it is shown by measuring new panels to fit each space. 'I wanted to disturb the habitual experience of (encountering) an artwork in a museum,' said Suh by way of explanation. Akhmadeeva added that the approach challenged the 'idea of permanence — of the work and of the space around it.' Removing the gallery walls also reflects Suh's interest in peeling environments back to their foundations. 'It's just the bare space that the architects originally conceived,' he said. Suh's work often focuses on spatial experiences rather than material goods because, just like the rooms and buildings we inhabit, an empty space behaves like a 'vessel' for memories, he explained. 'Over the years and the time that you've spent in the space, you project your own experience and energy onto it, and then it becomes a memory.' The artist does occasionally focus on ornaments and furnishings, however, as seen in his monumental film, 'Robin Hood Gardens' (named after the East London housing estate it captures), which used photogrammetry to stitch together drone footage taken inside the council building awaiting demolition. It marked a rare instance of Suh documenting both residents and their belongings. The film illustrates the subtle politics of Suh's practice. 'Often in my case, the color and the craftsmanship and the beauty in my work distract from the political undertone of it,' he said. Issues such as privacy, security, and access to space are intimately connected to class and public policy, but his commentary is covered in a soft veil of fabric or the gentle rub of graphite. The latter is also used in 'Rubbing/Loving: Company Housing of Gwangju Theater' (2012), which reflects on the deadly Gwangju Uprising of 1980. The artwork resembles the shell of a room that is unravelled to form a flat, vertical structure, like a deconstructed box. It is based on a rubbing that was taken by Suh and his assistants while blindfolded — a nod to the censorship of the military's violent response and its absence from South Korean collective memory. The exhibition is bookended by pieces that address sociopolitical questions. 'Bridge Project' (1999) explores land ownership among other issues, while 'Public Figures' (2025), an evolution of a piece Suh made for the Venice Biennale in 2001, is a subverted monument featuring an empty plinth, directing focus to the many miniature figurines upholding it. For Suh, it was intended to address Korea's histories of both oppression and resilience. While these two exhibits may feel distinct, for Suh, all of his work interrogates the boundaries between personal and public space, and the conditions that force transience or enable permanence. The tension between public and private was thrown into sharp relief during the pandemic, when lockdowns forced people to spend most of their time indoors. Although Suh 'scrutinized' all corners of his home during this time, the lockdowns didn't materialize in his practice in the way one might expect. Instead, it elicited a more tender reflection on what is often the making of a home: people. It explains why, among the substantial, often colorful structures in the exhibition, there are two small tunics made for (and with) his two young daughters, adorned with pockets holding their most cherished belongings, such as crayons and toys. 'As a parent, it was quite a vulnerable situation. Other families, I cannot speak for them, but it really helped us to be together,' said Suh.
Time Out
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Don't miss these 7 fantastic new London art exhibitions arriving in May 2025
I know we say this every month, but May really is looking like a particularly great time for art-lovers – not least because you have two bank holidays to fill with shows, as well as two major institutional openings as the V&A East Storehouse opens its doors and the National Gallery unveils its refurbished Sainsbury Wing. Of course, there are a load of excellent art and photography exhibitions already on, but if you want to see what's brand-spanking new, look ahead for our round-up of the best exhibition openings this month. From the Tate Modern's eagerly anticipated Genesis Exhibition, where you can see Do Ho Suh's vast, architectural fabric installations in the flesh, to Alberto Giacometti's spindly human-like sculptures and another photography takeover of Somerset House, London is basically bursting with new things to see and ponder over. All you need to do is find the time to go. The best new London art exhibitions in May 2025 1. ' The Genesis Exhibition – Do Ho Suh: Walk the House ' at Tate Modern The home, migration, global displacement: these are all themes Do Ho Suh explores in his work, consisting of videos, drawings, and large translucent fabric installations of interiors, objects, walls and architectural structures. Often brightly coloured, skeletal and encompassing, this survey exhibition at Tate Modern will showcase three decades the celebrated Korean-born, London-based artist, including brand-new, site-specific works on display. 'The Genesis Exhibition – Do Ho Suh: Walk the House' at Tate Modern is open from May 1 until October 26. More details here. 2. 'Fake Barn Country' at Raven Row Organised by three Londoners to reflect a 'year of discussion', this exhibition is set to explore the shared approaches and creative dialogues between a wide selection of artists. Featuring works that recall specific shows at Raven Row itself, the art you'll see tends to play on realism, making use of found objects and reused materials – you might see everyday household items or DIY tools incorporated, for example. Expect to see works by artists including Terry Atkinson, Rachal Bradley and Andrea Büttner. 'Fake Barn Country' at Raven Row is open from May 8 until July 6. More details here. 3. 'Encounters: Giacometti' at Barbican Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti was a bit of a big dawg when it came to post-WWII figurative sculpture: you might recognise his creepily elongated human figures with stretched-out limbs and wiry arms, which seem lonely, fragile, alien. Often mediating on existential themes about the human psyche, and leaning into surrealist and cubist styles, he had a huge influence on artists working with the human form. This show at Barbican is a three-part series showcasing contemporary sculptors alongside his historic works, launching in May with an exhibition of works by Huma Bhabha, followed by Mona Hatoum in September and Lynda Benglis in February 2026. 4. 'Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road' at British Museum Japan's Edo period – from 1603 to 1868 – is thought to have been mostly a time of civic peace and development, allowing new art forms to flourish. In the later part of that era, Utagawa Hiroshige produced thousands of prints capturing the landscape, nature and daily life and became one of the country's most celebrated artists. This new exhibition at the British Museum offers a rare chance to see his never-before-seen works up close (this is the the first exhibition of his work in London for a quarter of a century), spanning Hiroshige's 40-year career via prints, paintings, books and sketches. The National Gallery is celebrating its 200th birthday, and to celebrate, they've gone and refurbished their Sainsbury Wing, which has been closed for two years and houses some absolute gems of art history: Byzantine altarpieces, early renaissance works and Paolo Uccello's three-part war scene epic 'The Battle of San Romano'. The refurbed wing will include a whole room dedicated to the theme of gold and all the entire National Gallery collection is also going to be rehung. Talk about fresh. 6. Photo London at Somerset House Not quite an exhibition, but an opening no less: this year marks the 10th anniversary of Photo London, the annual photo fair taking over Somerset House with galleries and exhibitors travelling from New York, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Hsinchu City to bring some of the hottest photography talents of the world right now, from the documentary to editorial, experimental and everything in between. This year features work from photographers like David Bailey, Antony Cairns, Jamie Hawkesworth and Joy Gregory. Photo London at Somerset House is open from May 15 until May 18. More details here. 7. 'Leonardo Drew: Ubiquity II' at South London Gallery Leonardo Drew's works are silent, but they may as well be loud: they're explosive, chaotic, large-scale installations that look like you're witnessing the aftermath of an earthquake. The American artist is taking over South London gallery for his first London solo show with a site-specific work in the main gallery, made with intentionally distressed wood which looks like it's 'been through extreme weather events'. Oh, and it's free.
Telegraph
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Korean artist Do Ho Suh: ‘Space is just a vessel for containing our memories'
'As soon as we're born,' says Do Ho Suh, 'without knowing it, we're influenced by the architecture and the objects that we're surrounded by.' The Korean artist has taken a break from installing Walk the House, a two-decade survey of his work at Tate Modern, to explain to me the ideas that underpin his delicate, apparition-like installations. These huge, yet seemingly weightless, hanging works – fashioned from gauzy, coloured polyester or paper – recreate, at one-to-one scale, the architecture of some of the many places Suh has called home, in Korea, the US and elsewhere. Now 62, Suh has something of the monk about him: with shaven head and round-rimmed glasses, he is the kind of unassuming character one could imagine contemplating the essence of things in a sparsely furnished study, or else embarking on an itinerant life, in which home is nowhere and everywhere. It's certainly an image that fits with his sculptures, which seem to embody a philosophical paradox. On the one hand, in their meticulous rendering of every cornice and architrave, every skirting board and doorknob, light switch, plug socket, window frame, sconce, shelf, hinge and air conditioning, they feel like a love letter to the concrete reality of everyday life. On the other, they are fearfully fragile, barely there at all: like a memory that has taken on just enough tangible form to come back from the past. No wonder they're often described as 'ghosts'. In this way, for more than 20 years, Suh has given shape to how we relate ourselves to past and present – both as individuals and as a society – while reflecting on how place and memory define us. That aspect of remembrance has a strong cultural root; when Suh was growing up in 1970s South Korea, then still under military rule and in the throes of rapid industrialisation and modernisation, his family home was unusual. While the tower blocks were going up all around them, his parents – artists and intellectuals active in the movement to preserve Korean culture – built their own traditional hanok house, employing craftsmen who still knew the old techniques. 'I was fortunate enough to witness the entire process of construction of the building,' Suh tells me. 'Of my generation, I would have probably been one of very few people who saw it.' At the Tate, he'll also be showing one of the works from his Rubbing/Loving series, a recreation of that childhood hanok constructed entirely from paper, in which the actual building was wrapped, and each timber, beam and panel painstakingly rubbed over with graphite to capture the grain of the wood and the house's carvings. One of a group of similar paper-rubbing works, it's a spectral thing, but compared with the translucent, textile sculptures, it's loaded with a more intimate, tactile sense of something of value being preserved. Started in 2013, it was not shown until 2022. Suh says that when, in the mid-1990s, the political crisis had escalated between North and South Korea, 'I was already living in America... we only found out later quite how dire the situation was. I had a great fear of losing the house completely by bombing, because we were on the verge of war. On top of that, my parents were getting older. It was those feelings that gave me the motivation to do the rubbing pieces.' The play between permanence and transience is fundamental to the different styles of buildings that have ended up in Suh's work, from the Korean hanok to the New York City apartment where Suh lived for 20 years, until 2016. 'With Asian architecture,' he says, 'especially Korean architecture, the buildings are quite permeable. There are no solid walls. You have columns, and then in between, the walls are made from sliding screens, which can be reconfigured or removed according to the season of the year, or throughout the day. So the [distinction] between inside and outside is a bit ambiguous.' By contrast, the Western traditions of architecture favour a much more 'man-made' environment, he suggests. 'The room is air-conditioned [in summer], or heated, when outside is freezing cold. That type of clear distinction in Western architecture versus this ambiguity in Asian architecture was something I found interesting from the beginning.' From the permeability of traditional Asian architecture, Suh took his cue to make semi-transparent recreations of buildings originally made from brick and concrete. Through the strange effect that their transparency produces, Suh's gauzy works somehow manage to mess with one's sense of time and place. At Tate Modern, he will be showing the recently completed Nest/s, a huge fabric work made up of a sequence of changing architectural sections, arranged so that each one merges into the next, together forming a kind of broad corridor through which the viewer can walk. But each segment – based on actual buildings the artist has occupied in the past – also has a door or a window to the 'outside': European-style French windows in glowing canary yellow; anonymous fire doors in cherry red; the sliding screens and shutters of a Korean house in mint green. There's nothing to see through these apertures, of course, except for the sight of other gallery-goers, firmly in the here and now. And yet, Nest/s manages to telescope together the many places and moments through which a human life has been lived. Such hard-and-fast distinctions as 'now' and 'then'' need questioning, Suh says. 'It's become a cliché that we're always told that we should be 'living in the moment'. But I think that maybe even 99 per cent of our thoughts are of the past,' he explains. 'I live in London, so I say that London is my home, but in my head, I still live in Seoul and New York as well. So the 'nests' are all overlapping, and some of them are completely encapsulated by the other spaces.' It's perhaps not surprising to learn that Suh has a taste for metaphysics. The artist who once wanted to study marine biology (though, he recalls, the entrance exams proved impossibly hard) now says that if he could have his life over again, he would have wanted to be a theoretical physicist, 'to study where time started', he says, since 'space and time don't really exist. They're concepts we've created because we move constantly, so time is a trace of our movement, in a way, and then space is a vessel that our memories are contained in.' Suh's dedication to drawing the past into the present might well make him visual art's answer to Marcel Proust. Perhaps inevitably, the experience of migration and living abroad have also played their part in shaping Suh's work; the initial move away from Korea to the US in the early 1990s, to study first at the hip US Rhode Island School of Design, and then at Yale, came out of a desire to put some distance between his work and the more traditional, historically-minded currents that dominated the Korean art scene of the time. That and the fact that his father was by then an influential painter in his own right, as well as a professor at Seoul National University where Do Ho had spent much of the 1980s studying painting. 'I loved having a famous artist as a father,' Suh says now, 'but I started to notice that everything I did was somehow associated with his legacy.' Suh's history of globetrotting might appear to fit the archetype of the international artist, but rather than coming up with a kind of blandly globalised aesthetic, or then again, the opposite sort of art, more obsessed with the particulars of cultural identity, Suh instead taps into a more universal sense of everyday differences. He's less attuned to some loud polemic about migration or multiculturalism than to an intuition of what it means to be at home, wherever you are. But, alongside his installations focused on the home and its architecture, Suh has also pursued a line of works that comment on the more collective, nationalistic identity of South Korea; one fêted early piece was the sinister Some/One (2001), a darkly glittering robe-like shape, sleeves outstretched, composed entirely of military dog-tags, which cascade down and outwards across the surrounding floor. At the Tate, he'll be showing a version of Public Figures (1998), a towering but empty classical plinth held aloft by hundreds of little striding men and women. It's an ironic comment on conformity and anonymity, yet ambiguous in its celebration of collective endeavour, which may not need strong leaders or political ideologies to drive it on. When I ask Suh if he would ever want to go back to live in South Korea, he responds by talking instead about the making of Rubbing/Loving. Maybe retrieving this pale imprint of his childhood home is enough of an imaginative return. After all, his life is now in London, with his British wife and their two young daughters, who, he laughs, are suddenly more interested in all things Korean now that K-Pop and Korean drama have become global fashions. Later, though, Suh is scribbling on a notepad, explaining to me how the Chinese ideograms for 'time' and 'space' and 'human being' all incorporate the character for the idea of 'between'. It's an effort, since different languages frame concepts in ways that don't perfectly align. 'The thing is,' he says, 'I never paid attention to how language is a sort of material, like an object, until I left Korea. The Korean language was 'transparent' when I was living there, like the concept of home, and I didn't pay attention to it. But now it's something I'm very sensitive to.' In other words, home, as many migrants discover, isn't always somewhere you can go back to, even if you wanted to.
The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hiroshige's peerless prints, McCartney's unseen snaps and Vancouver's blue skies – the week in art
Hiroshige: Artist of the Open RoadIt's not hard to see why Hiroshige was Van Gogh's favourite Japanese printmaker – his colours have a radiant intensity almost without equal in art. British Museum, London, from 1 May until 7 September Do Ho Suh: Walk the House Installations that play with images of home by the noted Korean artist based in London. Tate Modern, London from 1 May until 19 October The World of King James VI and I The 17th-century ruler of both Scotland and England presided over an edgy cultural golden age. Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh from 26 April until 14 September Robert Thomas James Mills: Extratemporal An exploration of the nature of time and space by this Glasgow artist. CCA, Glasgow from 3 May until 24 May Lisa Milroy: The Colour Blue Paintings of blue skies and memories of a Vancouver childhood from an artist best known for her still lifes. Kate MacGarry, London from 3 May until 31 May Here you can see Brian Epstein, Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall setting off, with four mop-topped popsters, for New York in February 1964; one of the hitherto unseen glimpses into Beatlemania's birth shared by Paul McCartney, opening at the Gagosian gallery in Beverly Hills, California, today. Read the full story here The days of controversial and shocking Turner prize shortlists are over Scientists weren't sure a paint in the 'new' colour they've discovered has the right mix Mao Ishikawa's photographs honour people regarded as 'less than human' elsewhere Yinka Shonibare has filled a 2,200 sq m building in Madagascar with his works Royal exhibition will show 70 artworks of Charles touring the world over 40 years Richard Wright's new show is a mind-bending and mesmerising visual adventure Survivors of abuse have curated work by once revered sexual abuser Eric Gill JMW Turner, born 250 years ago this spring, remains Britain's greatest artist Ali Cherri's primeval sculptures use ancient artefacts to make new work Graven Hill, the UK's biggest self-build experiment, has lost some creative chaos Nymphs Surprised By Satyrs by Franchoys Wouters, about 1650-60 This painting belongs to a genre that flourished for hundreds of years, so it presumably pleased someone. First take your woodlands – tenderly, atmospherically painted by Wouters in shades of green and brown – then depict nude women resting in a leafy bower, in this case on luxurious bedding. It was a combination pioneered by the Venetian artists Giorgione and Titian in the early 1500s and taken up by later artists including Poussin and Rubens – in whose studio the painter of this canvas had worked. Such peepshow pastorals were among the first canvases to be bought by private collectors for personal enjoyment. Yet in this example, Wouters (again, following Titian) mocks the male viewer by adding lustful satyrs who peep at the snoozing women: look all you like, he laughs, but don't think you're better than these goatish voyeurs. He adds another twist. The two nymphs face each other and their feet touch as they lie in close tranquility: the satyrs have chanced on same-sex forest lovers. As ever in art, there's more going on than first meets the eye. National Gallery, London If you don't already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
