As a journalist based in Seoul, much of my year-end top ten, which follows below, comes from South Korea, but I am grateful to have finally been able to bounce around the region a fair amount this year with ease.

The best art I saw was on a visit to Kyoto this summer, when, coincidentally, the millennium-old Gion Matsuri festival was taking place with full pageantry, after scaled-back versions during the pandemic. Towering floats—fantasias of ornate architecture, some adorned with sumptuous tapestries—crawled through the streets, pulled by relentless teams of volunteers. It was captivating. However, as an annual event, that glorious affair is not eligible for this list, which is reserved solely for temporary exhibitions that were on view in 2023.

Before revealing my top ten, I have to note a few remarkable shows that did not make the list: feminist artist’s Yun Suk Nam’s captivating portraits of women who fought for Korean independence (plus more than 1,000 painted sculptures of dogs) at the Daegu Art Museum in South Korea; the essential “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul (and at the Guggenheim for a couple more weeks!); a revelatory survey of painter Guei-Hong Won (1923–1980), a chronicler of postwar daily life in Seoul, at the Sungkok Museum in Seoul; the excellent Yooyun Yang’s presentation of her latest cinematic, mysterious paintings at Primary Practice; Wang Tuo’s time-bending video treatises on Chinese history and censorship at Blindspot in Hong Kong; Rirkrit Tiravanija’s piquantly odd umbrella-repair shop and robots at David Zwirner in Hong Kong; the MMCA’s richly rewarding retrospective for the beloved painter Chang Ucchin (1917–1990) at its Deoksugung branch in Seoul; and Do Ho Suh’s invigorating, interactive installation at the Seoul Museum of Art’s Buk-Seoul location, which invited children to take brightly colored clay and keep adding, and adding, and adding to it.

Without further ado, my top ten:

Roldan, a trim and youthful 70, was sitting inside Green Papaya Art Projects, a multifarious art space he cofounded that embodies that ethos. It began in 2000 in Metro Manila, and it is now the longest-operating artist-run organization in the country. However, if all had gone according to plan, it would no longer exist. In 2020, Roldan, its artistic director, was taking steps to shut it down—the Asia Art Archive was helping to preserve its records—when a fire tore through the building it called home. Astonishingly, many of its materials survived, and the AAA website for the space now offers an exhilarating glimpse at the performances, shows, and events it hosted.

Instead of hastening Green Papaya’s closure, the disaster spurred Roldan and some of his collaborators to keep the venture going, and it has since relocated to Roxas City, an hour southeast of the capital by plane. Roxas has a population of about 180,000 people, and it is where Roldan was born, one of six children of an architect father and a mother who ran a printing press.

The day we spoke, activity hummed around Roldan at Green Papaya, and he was wearing a T-shirt, his trademark white beard, and a baseball cap with the word “adventure” emblazoned on it. I asked about the hat. “I just randomly picked this,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything, actually.” He paused for a second, and continued, “Or maybe, yes. I’m here for a new adventure.”

Or new adventures, perhaps—in a life that has already had many of them. Green Papaya is now running a residency for Thai, Vietnamese, and Filipino artists, a rural architecture forum with a local university, an initiative with local Indigenous people, and projects with surrounding fishing and farming communities. Announcing its reopening earlier this year, it quoted Charles Bukowski: “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

Meanwhile, Roldan has been continuing to make his own art, which collages disparate materials to address the fraught history of the Philippines and its contemporary struggles. These works are incisive, elegant, and often elegiac, and six of them will comprise a solo booth at Art Basel Miami Beach this week from Silverlens, the New York and Manila gallery. In May, at the gallery’s Manhattan location, Roldan will stage a one-person show, his first in the United States.

“There’s always a question for me: How can we speak about the past?” Roldan said, discussing his practice. “It was only yesterday. How can we look at the past within the context of now? Because for me, they are so intertwined.” For a series called “100 Altars for Roberto Chabet” that he began in 2014, he has been building ziggurat-like assemblages with architectural elements of demolished homes in the Kamuning neighborhood of Quezon City, where Green Papaya was located at the time, along with old photographs and sundry possessions. (Two of these “Altars” will be in the ABMB booth.)

You could see these wall-hung pieces as reliquaries for areas that have been cleared in the name of progress, for urban renewal and development, and for the people who lived there. “We’re losing a lot of cultural landmarks, architectural landmarks, things that we can preserve,” Roldan said. The works encapsulate the way that people protect their memories as they move elsewhere and age: in fragments, always inevitably incomplete. No. 23, for example, has jazzy faded wallpaper, black-and-white images of people gathering in groups and trying to look their best, the odd bit of latticework, and tiny old vases and cans. It suggests a life that has been well lived.

The ziggurat form nods to the shape of famous works by Chabet, a godhead of conceptual art in the Philippines who died in 2013 at 76. “I was too old to become a student of Roberto Chabet,” Roldan said, “but he became a very good friend through Green Papaya. He was a great mentor or friend and adviser. The few times that I wanted to close down Papaya, he was there to stop me.”

That may be true, but is hard to imagine Roldan quitting. Exuding a can-do optimism, he seems like the rare type of artist who was always going to make it, or at least the type that was never going to give up. So it’s intriguing to learn that he did not originally set out to become an artist.

Roldan entered a seminary at the age of 11. “I knew after finishing eight years that I was not going to be a good priest,” he said. Instead, he pursued visual communications at a school in Manila in the mid-1970s, a path into advertising—“a very lucrative job,” he said. “Very glamorous, as well. And that attracted me. It was also creative enough.”

In the early 1980s, Roldan’s then-wife inherited a sugar farm on the island of Negros, where conditions for workers are notoriously exploitative. “That got me politicized when I got there,” he said. “Realizing that there is really something wrong with Philippines society, if the condition of that island was allowed to happen for so many generations.” He became involved in activism—he learned to build communities and educate, skills that would help him later—and he began developing an art practice. By 1987, concerned about his safety, he decamped to Australia for an advertising job. When he got back to the Philippines in 1990, he kept organizing, creating the Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference, the nation’s oldest biennial.

“I knew from the very start that I was not going to live off my art,” Roldan said. “So from the very beginning, I always had a day job.” He was raising two children. But in 1998, as he neared 50, he decided to focus more on his art, and quit his job as a creative director at the media company ABS-CBN (which was targeted by President Rodrigo Duterte).

Roldan’s unorthodox past—his on-the-ground political activities, his near-priesthood—comes through in his work. One 2012 painting, owned by the Guggenheim Museum, pairs an American F-16 flying over Afghanistan with a quotation posthumously attributed to US President William McKinley about the need to “uplift and civilize and Christianize” Filipino people after the US had acquired the country following the Spanish-American War. Roldan “situates the religious or spiritual discourse within a political sensorium, mixing post-colonial conceptualist approaches with hybrid folk imagery and knowledge systems,” said Patrick D. Flores, professor of art studies at the University of the Philippines, deputy director of the National Gallery Singapore deputy director, and curator of a Roldan retrospective at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum in Quezon City in 2017.

Other works that will be at Art Basel include textile pieces that resemble ceremonial banners that might be used in a Catholic mass or procession. They are radiant, richly symbolic, and subversive. Relacion de las Islas Filipinas 2 (2023) features three layers of fabric, “representing the three layers of Philippines society,” Roldan said.

The bottom layer is a pink floral pattern that denotes the “the folk or masses,” its edges adorned with demonetized Filipino coins, Roldan explained. “They may look decorative, but it also connotes how poor their economies [are] at the fringes.” Next is an intricate black lace: the elites.

Finally, on top, is earth-colored fabric dyed by a young artist named Giah De los Reyes, which “represents the revolutionary movement against the persisting social inequalities,” Roldan said. At its center is a 19th-century “amulet” vest bearing Catholic iconography, a thin undergarment of the kind worn by revolutionary fighting against Spain. This symbolic, spiritual armor was believed to provide protection in battle against colonial forces. That struggle still resonates today, Roldan said, in “the context of the revolution against the continuing oppression and harassment in the countryside” and, he told me later, “against our colonized selves.”

While the solo booth will be a major event for Roldan’s career, he will not be making the trip to Florida. He has plenty going on. Besides his upcoming solo outing in New York, he is gearing up for a yearlong residency for Green Papaya in Berlin via DAAD, in which all six of its current members will be taking part. There is also the matter of the “100 Altars for Roberto Chabet.” There are around “30 altars right now,” Roldan said. “Far off the target of 100. But I am continuing the series to get to that.” There is conviction in his voice. You know that he will get there.

That story came to mind while soaking in the Chang Ucchin retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Deoksugung Palace branch in Seoul during the last days of summer. Its four galleries are jam-packed with some 300 pieces by the 20th-century painter, who “became almost a mythic figure in Korea,” as art historian Hong Sunpyo writes in the show’s robust catalogue. Depicting tranquil, harmonious, sometimes dreamy scenes of rural Korea with an economy of marks on a flat plane, almost all the pieces charm. Birds fly in a row through the sky. Trees stand proud. People peer from tiny houses. At first glance, they could be the work of a very good illustrator of books for young children.

Keep looking. These seemingly simple, modest size paintings (generally only a little larger than a sheet of paper) are potent—and yes, radical—born of tough, self-imposed restraints. As his native South Korea went through seismic political and economic changes, and as peers like Kim Whanki and Yoo Youngkuk ventured into thrilling abstract terrain, Chang honed his language to absolute essentials. He rendered eyes with just two dots or circles, and people frequently as just stick figures or a precise stain of paint. For decades, he stuck largely to the same few subjects: humans (many of them children) and animals outside in the world, together, at peace.

Chang was singular, uncompromising. “When people talk about my paintings, they often comment that they’re too small,” he once wrote. But as he saw it, “as the scale increases, the painting starts to get diluted.” In 1951, as he was entering his mid-30s, he painted an indelible self-portrait on paper (the Korean War had made canvas scarce) about the size of a postcard. It seems to announce both the style that he would pursue for the next 40 years and himself as a major but idiosyncratic talent. He is in the foreground, debonair in a suit and tie (his wedding attire), on a road that stretches far behind him into hills that vibrate with minute gold and green strokes. A black dog follows him, and four blue birds fly overhead. With a top hat and an umbrella in his hands, he suggests a man ready for a leisurely stroll or, perhaps, to open a variety show. Either way, you can hear him calling for you to join him.

Who was he? Chang was born on January 8, 1918, in what is now the South Korean municipality of Sejong, then Yeongi County in Japanese-occupied Korea. (The artist’s birth date is widely cited as November 26, 1917—correct in the lunar calendar, which he preferred.) Like many ambitious Korean artists of the time, he studied in Tokyo and picked up on the latest international art currents via publications.

In the newly independent Korea of 1945, Chang found work at the National Museum, where he was involved in restoration projects and observed the excavation of ancient tombs, according to Bae Wonjung, the MMCA curator who organized this richly researched exhibition. The country was rediscovering itself after foreign domination, and Chang’s works are filled with tributes to its deep heritage—ceramics, folk paintings, and enduring iconography. A 1949 oil painting depicts a sturdy clay jar that might be used to ferment kimchi, and many hold both the sun and the moon, as they appear in traditional Joseon Dynasty paintings. In an impressive bit of scholarship, art historian Kang Byoungjik notes that 440 of Chang’s roughly 730 oil paintings (around 61 percent!) contain magpies, a bird with auspicious connotations in Korea.

These plainspoken paintings were produced through tremendous labor, the artist repeatedly applying paint, then wiping it away. (For a stretch of the 1960s and ’70s, this occurred in a remote studio without electricity.) The results have a rare solidity, some with the rough-hewn firmness of Buncheong stoneware, a sensation heightened by Chang’s restraint with his brush. “According to his family, the technique of wiping off or scratching paint was also a way for Chang to empty his mind,” art historian Choi Yeob writes in a lucid catalogue essay on the Buddhist nature of his art. Chang did not identify as a Buddhist, but his wife, Lee Soonkyung, did, and one of his masterpieces is a spare 1970 portrait of her in a serene state of contemplation: Zinzinmyo: My Wife’s Buddhist Name (the name means “absolutely stunning beauty”).

This may all sound nostalgic or backward-looking. It is not. What saves Chang’s art from those traps of kitsch is his unrelenting invention. He was modernist in the line of Elie Nadelman and Bob Thompson, plumbing history and transfiguring it in an inimitable style. He built powerful symmetries and patterns in his compositions, and Bae connects him with Paul Klee, a similarly superb colorist. Reveling in everyday life, he was aligned with visions like those of Grandma Moses, Florine Stettheimer, and of course, Park Soo Keun, and like, say, Bill Traylor’s paintings, his evince an astute understanding of the inner beings of animals, with personalities and emotions like us. (His bulls seem prepared to crack jokes.)

Nothing is extraneous or wasted in these worlds, where day and night overlap. Signs of contemporaneity are absent. (A military jeep intrudes in a 1953 picture, though it seems oddly jaunty.) All is well here, and families and nature are in accord; Hong astutely terms them “self-sufficient spaces.” Real life can fall short of that. But Chang’s art is not after utopia. It distills the nobility of quotidian, fleeing moments, which is a project tinged with melancholy. The MMCA show is titled “The Most Honest Confession,” riffing on an intriguing claim from the artist: “My paintings are my true self. I confess myself in my paintings, I reveal and release myself entirely.”

In his last 15 years, Chang developed a method of cutting his oil paint with turpentine so that he could work more rapidly, almost as if he were painting with ink (another one of his talents, as examples here attest). That allowed him to be more prolific—80 percent of his oils come from this period—yet for me, these lack some of the fulsome symbolic mystery of his prior work. But they are still delightful, and they see him embracing a more surreal stance, as notions of space become even more topsy-turvy. In a 1990 piece, Night and an Old Man, made just a few months before his death, there is a road curving over a hill and the titular elder floating in the sky above it. Only the moon is visible, a hemisphere of white. This man’s journey may be done, but the road below him is alluring, a golden orange, and quite bizarrely, there is a young child scampering down it.

But at least one art fair has set out to do things differently. Behold Art Collaboration Kyoto, a young public-private entity that asks each selected Japanese gallery to partner with one or two galleries from abroad on a single display. That intriguing conceit has “a synergistic effect on the quality of the booth,” Yukako Yamashita, ACK’s program director, argued in an interview with ARTnews ahead of the event, which opens this weekend. (Typically, the Japanese gallerist invites the foreign colleague, but the fair also sometimes assists.)

“It’s just such a nice way of doing something with colleagues from the other side of the world, sharing resources,” Paris-based dealer Robbie Fitzpatrick said. His eponymous gallery will be in a booth with Anomaly (of Tokyo) and ROH (of Jakarta); each is bringing work by three of their artists, including Hannah Weinberger, Kei Imazu, and Dusadee Huntrakul, respectively.

ACK debuted in 2021, when Japan’s borders were still closed amid the pandemic; they reopened fully last October, weeks before its second edition. And so the latest outing, which runs October 28 to 30 at Sachio Otani’s 1960s sci-fi Kyoto International Conference Center, has the feel of being a major event, with exhibitors coming from around the globe.

New York’s 47 Canal, for one, has linked up with Tokyo’s Misako & Rosen to show some of the beguiling impressionist landscapes that Trevor Shimizu, who is represented by both galleries, has been making in recent years. This will be dealer Jeffrey Rosen’s third time doing ACK, having collaborated with São Paulo’s Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in 2021 and London’s Herald Street in 2022. “It was fun, and because it was fun, it generated business,” Rosen said of that second fair, adding that he “met Japanese collectors that we did not otherwise know.”

Yamashita, who started out as a dealer (she showed at the first ACK), said that she has heard collectors lament at big fairs that “there are too many things to see.” In Kyoto, just 64 dealers will be on hand—which “should be a comfortable size for visitors to go through the fair and fully digest the artworks on view,” she said.

Thanks to the shared format, that means the fair has only about three-dozen booths. (Art SG, by contrast, had over 150, and even the fairly compact Tokyo Gendai had more than 70.) Eleven of those are in a section called Kyoto Meetings, where solo dealers can display art with a special connection to the city. Neugerriemschneider, of Berlin, will be presenting Olafur Eliasson pieces informed by its Zen gardens, and New York–based Karma will have a group display that includes paintings of food and drink that Dike Blair made based on photos he took during a 2009 trip.

ACK is part of a small group of niche fairs that have been sprouting up in recent years that you could see as antidotes to the gargantuan behemoths. There’s Independent 20th Century (from the “consciously scaled” Independent art fair team), which convened around 30 exhibitors in New York for a second edition last month, and Paris Internationale, the outré-minded, dealer-founded fair that brought together 64 galleries earlier this month, timed to Art Basel’s Paris+ fair. On the more experimental end of things, you could also point to events like Basel Social Club, which was cofounded by Fitzpatrick and runs during Art Basel in Switzerland, and Our Week, which debuted to high acclaim during Frieze Seoul this year.

The model of ACK—whose backers include the Contemporary Art Dealers Association Nippon and Kyoto Prefecture—is indicative of the Japanese art world, which “has always distinguished itself from the art worlds of, let’s say, the US and Europe in being much more collaborative, mutually supportive, and cooperative,” Rosen said. “In order to take advantage of that, it makes sense that there would be a fair highlighting this element. And it makes sense that this fair would also be relatively small in keeping with the size of the art world, the size of the market.”

The fair’s location—in the treasure-filled city that was Japan’s capital for more than a millennium—is also a selling point. “Visiting an art fair is not just about spending time at the fair but also about visiting and experiencing the fair’s host city,” Yamashita said. Special exhibitions in association with ACK are being held at the Komyoin Temple, the Heian-jingu Shrine, and the conference center, and additional events around this town of 1.5 million are part of the festivities.

“The city of Kyoto itself played a significant role in my decision to participate,” said Jaewoo Choi, of Johyun Gallery in Busan, South Korea, which is collaborating with Tokyo’s Tomio Gallery on a display that will include Lee Bae, Kim Chong Hak, Jo Jong Sung, and Kishio Suga. Their works “might not necessarily be characterized by strong colors, unique material properties, or striking imagery,” he said, but they will get at “the essence of Kyoto.”

Dealers have been known to bemoan their relentless travel schedules off the record, but the ACK’s dealers seemed ebullient in the lead up to the fair. For Choi, the chance to partner with foreign colleagues is “truly captivating.” It’s “very innovative and exciting,” said Yuka Watanabe, of Anomaly. Matthew Brown, of Los Angeles, noted that it will be his first time exhibiting in Japan, alongside Blum, the LA giant that has had a Tokyo branch for a decade. “I’ve always looked up to Tim,” Brown said, “and when he proposed we collaborate on a presentation for Art Collaboration Kyoto, I immediately said yes.”

Brown is showing paintings by Paris-based Julie Beaufils, who has an “affinity for Japanese aesthetics—the flattened perspective, simplicity of form, and asymmetry achieved through a reduced palette,” he said. Blum, for its part, is showing three artists, including paintings by the Tokyo-born Asuka Anastacia Ogawa—“in one of the most beautiful cities in the world,” its director in the Japanese capital, Marie Imai Kobayashi, noted.

After more than 20 years in the Japanese art world, Rosen sees ACK “as part of a curious apparent growth” in its market, “which has been developing slowly and steadily, and as a consequence of that, probably, arguably, more sustainably and positively than elsewhere. And I also see that as a nice complement and—maybe even to be a little cheeky—counterbalance to some of the hype surrounding developing art markets within Asia more generally.”

“It’s a model that I think could be emulated in different places,” said Fitzpatrick, who grew up in Tokyo and hopped on a plane right after Paris+ to take part in ACK. It’s “a “direction,” he continued, “that more and more fairs and galleries should consider as we move forward—how to create more collaborative events that unify us.”

Now 65, Cai has been using his signature materials, gunpowder and fireworks, for more than three decades, arraying and igniting them in ingenious ways to create sprawling performances and paintings that awe and beguile. His efforts have graced not only many of the world’s most august art spaces—the Guggenheim in New York in 2008, the Palace Museum in Beijing in 2020, and the National Art Center in Tokyo this summer—but also some of the era’s most important political pageants, perhaps most notably the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

Realizing his elaborate displays is not aways simple. Cai’s most dramatic events require formidable financial resources, negotiations with various authorities, and patience, but he seems well-suited to such matters. In the moving, intimate 2016 documentary Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang, he is indefatigable as he navigates setbacks. One revealing moment comes as he conceives a fireworks display for the 2014 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation in Beijing and meets with Communist Party officials—all men—who have been nixing elements of his plan. Cai, who was born in Quanzhou, China, and has been based in New York since 1995, extolls the advances that have been made in environmentally friendly fireworks, and one the men tells him, between drags of a cigarette: “The innovation is great, but as I mentioned, security and stability are equally important.”

“I’m telling you, the government is here to help you,” the man goes on, explaining that “you have to figure out something creative with all these chains on you.” Off-camera, we hear Cai bemoan, “Why am I still here?” But he sorted it out, and proceeded to light up the night sky above international dignitaries. Even in a grainy clip from Chinese TV, it is tantalizing. The bureaucrats must have been reasonably satisfied, too, since Cai was tapped to do fireworks for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games.

This year, Cai’s major patron has been the luxury brand Saint Laurent. The label (take note, future scholars) has co-organized his Tokyo survey, “Cai Guo-Qiang: Ramble in the Cosmos—From Primeval Fireball Onward,” and last month, its creative director, Anthony Vaccarello, commissioned a fireworks display on Japan’s east coast, along Yotsukura Beach, in the city of Iwaki, about three hours by car north of Tokyo.

The fireworks took place in broad daylight, at noon, on a Wednesday. “Nighttime fireworks rely on light for their effects; their brilliant bursts will return to darkness,” Cai said in an email interview. “Daytime fireworks rely on smoke to take shape; although there is also a poetic purpose, they are superimposed on social realities and nature.” In his view, “daytime fireworks are closer to paintings.”

Saint Laurent produced a crisp three-and-a-half-minute video of the 30-minute display, which Cai titled When the Sky Blooms with Sakura. One after another, a series of irresistible events transpire via some 40,000 fireworks shells, vaguely suggesting botanical delights: thin white columns rocket upward and then burst into countless lines, strange black waves streak skyward at a diagonal, and finally the cherry blossoms promised in its title come into existence, a glorious, gigantic expanse of pink as pure, fluffy, and delicate as cotton candy. Thanks to high-res drone footage, the video is a richly immersive experience, and it has racked up a cool 3.4 million views over the past four weeks.

The piece and the retrospective represent a kind of homecoming for Cai, who moved to Japan in 1986 and lived there for the next nine years, as he honed the practice that would make him an international superstar. In 1993, he took up residence in Iwaki to prepare for a solo show at the Iwaki City Museum of Art, and on March 7, 1994, he staged an astonishing gunpowder performance along the same coast he used last month. The Horizon from the Pan-Pacific: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 14 (no one does titles quite like Cai) involved gunpowder fuses measuring 5 kilometers long (about 3.1 miles); lit in darkness, they traced the curve of the earth.

While residing in Iwaki in the mid-’90s, Cai became close with many in the community. Residents raised funds for the gunpowder fuses, and “they even initiated a collective action of turning off lights in every household during the event, to make the earth’s outline more beautiful for the universe to witness,” Cai told me. They have helped him realize other pieces since then, and “over the years, we witnessed each other’s hair becoming grey and our movements less nimble,” he added. “This long-lasting friendship, conveyed through art, has transcended the political and historical differences between nations.”

In the wake of the 2011 Japan earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster, “many residents—including my friends from Iwaki—were displaced from their homes,” Cai said. He auctioned artworks to raise funds for rebuilding, which people instead decided to use for an initiative to plant 10,000 cherry blossom trees. “The project envisions that in the future, the land once contaminated by the nuclear plant incident will appear like a pink ocean of cherry blossoms when viewed from afar,” Cai said.

Through the fireworks display, Cai was also trying to reckon with the tragedy. Some of his shows have been fantastically over-the-top, bringing to mind the art critic (and pyromaniac) Peter Schjeldahl’s belief “that proper fireworks should be all the good parts of war and none of the bad parts.” But in Iwaki last month, he wanted to make something “more simple, solemn, and monumental, evoking the feeling of Zen,” he said. His aim was “to commemorate the victims and pay tribute to the awe-inspiring power of nature, while drawing upon Eastern philosophy, where rebirth is attained through transcending trauma, to convey a theme of hope.”

Creating a memorial out of materials that are designed for spectacles is a complicated and thorny notion. But at least judging by the documentation, Cai pulled it off. The forms that he conjured are achingly beautiful, but they are also fragile and fleeting. Born of humble ingredients, they begin to vanish just as they coalesce, brushed away by the wind.

Despite the apparent precision of his art, Cai is never exactly sure how his chosen tools will behave. “The charisma of gunpowder lies in its uncontrollability and spontaneity,” he told me. Out on the beach, some of what he had envisioned ended up not taking place. Two acts that were to be staged by more than 400 drones outfitted with firework shells could not be realized because of issues communicating with them. “It is true that I was upset by the setback,” Cai said, “but I was also relieved, because I am still young and still around!” (That Cai, midway through his 60s, can still see himself as young probably explains some of his success.)

Cai was also feeling thankful. He said that staging the Tokyo exhibition (which runs through August 21) has been a way “to express my gratitude. My first few years in Japan were both extraordinarily difficult and immensely rewarding.” They have stuck with him. “I often feel that I am an adored child of the God,” he said at one point. “I grew up under the support of the whole world, while so many hardworking artists still end up in poverty. But where is the God? It has been important people and opportunities that have helped me and shaped me into who I am.”

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.