Picasso for Asia – A Cross-Cultural Dialogue at M+ Hong Kong
- Team Written
- Mar 22
- 6 min read
Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District is hosting a groundbreaking exhibition that places Pablo Picasso’s art in conversation with modern and contemporary Asian works. Picasso for Asia – A Conversation is not just another Picasso showcase; it’s a carefully curated dialogue spanning continents and centuries.
The exhibition is officially titled “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia – A Conversation.” It opened to the public on 15 March 2025 and runs through 13 July 2025. This marks Hong Kong’s first major Picasso show in over a decade. The venue is the M+ museum’s West Gallery (Level 2) in West Kowloon – Asia’s new hub for contemporary visual culture. Co-organized by M+ and the Musée National Picasso-Paris (MnPP), the show is also part of the French May Arts Festival 2025.
This East-West dialogue is expansive. More than 60 original Picasso works are on loan from the Musée Picasso in Paris , spanning his Blue Period. Highlights include Portrait of a Man (1902–03) from the Blue Period, The Acrobat (1930), Figures by the Sea (1931), Large Still Life with Pedestal Table (1931), Portrait of Dora Maar (1937), and the haunting anti-war painting Massacre in Korea (1951) .
In counterpoint, the exhibition features around 130 works by 30 Asian and Asian-diasporic artists drawn from the M+ collections.The participating artists include canonical names and contemporary voices such as Isamu Noguchi, Luis Chan, Gu Dexin, Nalini Malani, Keiichi Tanaami, and Haegue Yang . Notably, Isamu Noguchi’s bronze sculpture Strange Bird is on display, exemplifying how an Asian-American modernist dialogued with Picasso’s era. Seoul-born artist Haegue Yang’s work also features. The show further includes new commissions by Simon Fujiwara and Sin Wai Kin, created for this context. British-Japanese artist Simon Fujiwara contributes Who vs Who vs Who? (A Picture of a Massacre) (2024), a piece that riffs on Picasso’s Massacre in Korea by inserting his cartoon bear character into a wartime scene. Performance artist Sin Wai Kin (from Toronto via Hong Kong) is also contributing new work. Lee Mingwei, a Taiwanese-American artist known for participatory installations, is presenting a parallel installation at M+ that complements the exhibition’s themes.
One striking aspect of Picasso for Asia is its thematic organization. Visitors explore Picasso’s multifaceted identity through four archetypal lenses: “The Genius,” “The Outsider,” “The Magician,” and “The Apprentice.” These archetypes structure the exhibition’s sections and interpretive approach .
The Genius highlights Picasso’s prodigious talent and fame, examining why he’s often hailed as the quintessential 20th-century artist . The Outsider considers Picasso’s role as a rule-breaker – an immigrant in Paris and an avant-gardist who defied conventions. The Magician delves into the almost alchemical creativity Picasso wielded, transforming forms and materials in innovative ways. Finally, The Apprentice frames Picasso as both a student of art history and a source of inspiration for those who followed. This implies a circular dialogue: Picasso learned from past masters (and non-Western art) even as he became a teacher figure to future artists. The show asks fundamental questions about Picasso’s enduring influence – essentially deconstructing the “magic” behind his genius.
The first Chinese intellectual to meet Picasso was likely Cai Yuanpei, a renowned educator and reformer. Cai visited Picasso’s studio in Paris in June 1915, at a time when Picasso’s Cubist works were radical and controversial in Europe. According to historical accounts, Cai Yuanpei conversed with the artist and even purchased at least five of Picasso’s pieces to bring back to China. This extraordinary encounter shows that Picasso’s art entered Chinese discourse by the 1910s. It suggests that forward-thinking figures in Asia were tracking European modernism closely.
In Japan, Picasso’s influence also made early inroads. Japanese artists in the 1910s and 1920s (such as Yorozu Tetsugorō and Togo Seiji) experimented with Cubism soon after its emergence. While these early Japanese Cubists had limited immediate impact, their exposure to Picasso’s style shows that his fame had reached Japan’s art circles by the Taishō era. Additionally, Japanese art journals like Shirakaba (1910–1923) introduced Western modern art to readers, likely featuring Picasso along with Cézanne, Matisse, and others as exemplars of the avant-garde. By the 1930s, Picasso’s name was firmly familiar worldwide – Guernica’s exhibition in 1937 and a major Picasso retrospective in Tokyo in 1951 further cemented his renown in Asia.
Picasso’s political affiliations add another layer of East-West connection. It’s well documented that Picasso joined the French Communist Party in 1944, after the liberation of Paris . He remained a member until his death in 1973, using his art and celebrity to champion leftist causes. Many post-war Asian intellectuals and artists were keenly aware of global communist movements. Picasso’s famous dove lithograph became an international peace symbol, and his stance against the Korean War (expressed in Massacre in Korea, 1951) resonated in Asia’s Cold War context. The exhibition includes Massacre in Korea, explicitly described by M+ as “the Guernica of the Cold War” due to its political theme and as a communist and anti-war activist, he was engaging (from afar) with the Korean conflict .
Perhaps the most legendary meeting was between Picasso and the great Chinese painter Zhang Daqian. In 1956, Zhang Daqian – often dubbed “the Chinese Picasso” – visited Pablo Picasso at his villa in Cannes, France . The two exchanged paintings as gifts. Picasso showed off some of his own attempts at imitating Chinese ink painting, and Zhang (ever the frank critic) told him he was using the wrong kind of brushes! According to contemporary reports, this East-meets-West encounter was heralded as a “summit” of the art world. They became friends and even kept up a correspondence afterward. Picasso gifted Zhang hundreds of sketches (many inspired by Chinese art) and asked for lessons in drawing bamboo. Their meeting is a historical record of the cross-cultural dialogue that the M+ exhibition is now framing for the public. It shows that the “conversation” between Picasso and Asian artists isn’t a modern invention – it began in real life decades ago.
No conversation about Picasso is complete without acknowledging his towering presence in the art market – including in Asia. Picasso’s 1950 family portrait Claude et Paloma was sold at Christie’s New York on 4 November 2013. It fetched $28.165 million, soaring well above its $9–12 million estimate. Notably, the winning bidder was mainland Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin, who acquired the painting through Rebecca Wei, then Christie’s Asia managing director. This headline-grabbing sale was widely seen as a sign of China’s growing “art-buying firepower” and reflected at the time how Asian collectors were beginning to dominate marquee sales. Auction houses now routinely preview major Picasso lots in Asia to court buyers. For instance, in 2018 Sotheby’s toured Picasso’s Woman with Beret (1937) to Hong Kong before a London sale, and the chairman of Sotheby’s Asia, noted the “very strong buying power” of Asian collectors for high-value art. She highlighted that in a recent New York auction, half of the top ten lots were purchased by Asian clients. In the 2010s, a small group of Chinese collectors began targeting Picasso in international auctions.
The exhibition extends beyond paintings on walls. A particularly evocative installation by Lee Mingwei accompanies Picasso for Asia, although it is presented as a parallel program in the museum. Lee Mingwei’s “Guernica in Sand” is exactly what it sounds like: a full-scale recreation of Picasso’s iconic 1937 mural Guernica, rendered on the floor using colored sand. Lee, known for works that involve audience participation and impermanence, first conceived this piece in 2006 and has staged it in various cities. At M+, Guernica in Sand runs from 8 March to 13 July 2025 (essentially concurrent with the Picasso show) in a space called The Studio.
The installation culminates with a ceremonial performance. On 28 June 2025, as the exhibition nears its end, Lee Mingwei and collaborators will let visitors walk across the sand painting – literally treading Guernica underfoot – and then gently sweep the sand into new patterns, erasing Picasso’s image in an act of creative destruction. This performative element underscores themes of transformation. As Lee explains, the goal is to highlight “the creative power of transformation rather than the pain of clinging to things as they are”. Guernica in Sand uses 6 tons of sand and ~860 hours of labor to recreate the epic painting, indeed, this is one of the highlight installations of the entire project, it’s a spectacular sight that merges a Tibetan sand mandala vibe with Picasso’s anti-war message.
In Hong Kong, a city long at a crossroads of cultures, Picasso’s work finds new meaning. We see him not just as the solitary “genius” in a Western canon, but as a figure who – much like a shape-shifting magician – can be viewed from many angles. He was at once a revolutionary artist and a lifelong learner (an apprentice to global influences). He stood outside tradition, yet mastered classical techniques. He conjured magic from ordinary materials. The M+ exhibition encapsulates these paradoxes by pairing Picasso with artists who had their own responses to modernity, colonialism, war, and identity. It’s a conversation across time: for example, a 1930 Picasso painting of an acrobat hangs near a 2021 Keiichi Tanaami canvas reimagining Picasso’s motifs. Luis Chan, a Hong Kong painter from the mid-20th century, displays a Cubist Sea Shore (1959) that clearly nods to Picasso’s style. It affirms that art history is not static: it’s an evolving conversation, one that Hong Kong proudly stages by placing Picasso face-to-face with Asia.
Picasso for Asia – A Conversation (The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series)
15 March 2025 to 13 July 2025
M+ West Gallery, West Kowloon, Hong Kong
Standard: HKD 240
Concessions: HKD 120
