There are few artists as instantly recognisable as Pablo Picasso, whose paintings, sculptures, and drawings have enthralled audiences for a century with their rich symbolism, evocative palettes, and revolutionary approaches to space and form. Adopting a fresh perspective on the European master, The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia—A Conversation, a new Special Exhibition at M+ co-organised with the Musée national Picasso-Paris (MnPP), places Picasso’s masterpieces in dialogue with around 130 works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists from the M+ Collection. Spanning generations, continents, and contexts, this unique exhibition invites audiences to reconsider aspects of Picasso’s practice and to find resonances across a wide variety of artworks. The following conversation with M+ Artistic Director and Chief Curator Doryun Chong delves into the curatorial concept and unravels the connections between Picasso and Asia.

What is the curatorial vision for and intent behind Picasso for Asia—A Conversation?

When we reached out to the MnPP about three years ago to start a conversation about a possible Picasso exhibition, it was already very clear to us that we didn’t want to do a typical monographic presentation focusing on the ‘genius’ and his masterpieces. Since we opened three-and-a-half years ago, every exhibition has had a unique angle that defines the M+ voice and methodology, and we knew this Picasso show would be no exception.

From the beginning, the MnPP was intrigued by our approach of placing Picasso’s works in dialogue with works from the M+ Collections. Starting from 2023, the teams from both institutions were able to visit each other, and it became clear immediately that it would be a challenge to create a conversation across time and across very different cultural contexts between Picasso and Asian artists. We realised we needed some kind of a translator for these two very different collections, orientations, and contexts to be able to talk to each other. It took some time before I hit upon the idea of using ‘archetypes’ to explain Picasso and the artists from the M+ Collections. The exhibition is structured by four archetypes: the Genius, the Outsider, the Magician, and the Apprentice. The archetypes govern the artworks chosen from the MnPP as well as M+ collections; I think of the two checklists of works as a pair of intertwining strands, like a DNA double-helix.

What did you learn about Picasso’s influence in and connection to Asia during your research for this exhibition? Picasso never actually travelled to Asia.

In fact, he travelled very little. His art and his imagination went everywhere, but his physical environment was extremely limited. After moving from his native Spain to France, he spent most of his life in Paris and South of France. He visited just a few countries in Europe outside Spain and France, and he never travelled to the United States, where his international reputation as a modern artist was cemented even earlier than in Europe thanks to some pioneering museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

One thing we learnt is that although Picasso certainly never travelled to Asia, he was present in people’s consciousness in Asia quite early on. His works had been publicised, exhibited, and even collected in Japan before World War II, and in China and India, Picasso and Cubism had already been written about in fine arts magazine and news media as early as the late 1910s.

And then there’s a generation of Asian artists who went to Paris to study and brought back the ideas and styles of Cubism, which he pioneered with his fellow painter Georges Braque. Picasso was not a teacher, but he certainly influenced many people around him in Parisian artistic circles and a number of Synthetic Cubists such as André Lhote (1885–1962) did teach including Asian artists. So these lessons then propagated like a ripple effect.

Walk us through the pairing of M+ Collection works and Picasso works and the ideas behind such pairings.

In the first room of the ‘Genius’ section, you’ll find the three earliest works in the exhibition, all painted in 1895, when the artist was barely 14 years old. The first two are representational portraits of anonymous figures on the margins of society: an old man wearing a cap and a young barefoot girl in a red dress. The third is a portrait of Picasso’s father, José Ruiz y Blasco (1838–1913), who was a painter and an art teacher. I always point out to our audiences that these paintings represent the origin of Picasso’s art.

There’s a famous story that is often told about Picasso’s early years: his father, recognising his son’s natural talent, gave up his own painting because he had already been surpassed by his teenage son. But this is not true, because we know that Picasso’s father continued to work as a professional artist. This demonstrates how a myth of genius is generated and perpetuated. Looking at those three works, we may ask, do they prove that he was already a genius as a teenager? That remains an open question. This first room is all about posing questions.

The trio of works is juxtaposed with a dozen portraits and self-portraits by the Wuming (No Name) Group, who worked underground in Beijing in the 1970s. These artists painted themselves and each other—the easiest subject available to them—on small pieces of paper or canvases that could easily be hidden away. At this point in China’s history, the mandate of Socialist Realism was that all artistic expressions had to be in the service of the state, the party, and the workers; individual expressions were not allowed. It wasn’t until later in the 1980s that artists could make art to manifest their own thoughts and ideas. I describe these beautiful, often melancholic, portraits from the mid-1970s as the daybreak of contemporary art in mainland China. Here’s another moment of origin if not of genius then of the idea of art for individual expression.

Facing these walls on the other side of the room is a section that revolves around the idea of the artist and their muse. There’s Picasso’s painting The Sculptor (1931) along with bronze sculptures inspired by his muses and lovers. He subscribed to the idea that artistic genius comes from the studio, with a male artist inspired by his female muses, which is not Picasso’s invention but has a long tradition going back centuries. Then we have a series of photographs by Pixy Liao (b. 1979) that completely turns this traditional motifon its head. She is the one who controls the camera shutter and composes the shots with her male muse, Moro, who is also her life partner. I don’t know if Liao was thinking about Picasso when she made these works, but she was certainly thinking about the prevailing gender dynamics and hierarchy. By putting her work right next to Picasso’s traditional notion of the male artist and female muse, we’re reminding the audience that many decades after Picasso’s lifetime, artists are engaging in sometimes subtle, other times explicit revisions or critiques of what he and his art represent.

There are some key new commissions for the exhibition. Could you tell us more about them and why these artists and works were selected? 

The first artist I want to talk about is Nalini Malani (b. 1946), who has a close relationship with M+. Her work consistently and fiercely addresses the issue of violence against women, and when I approached her about a commission for this Picasso exhibition, she instead offered to show Ballad of a Woman (2023), which she felt already crystallised everything she wanted to say about him. The animation is inspired by a poem by Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) that tells a story of a woman who is murdered by her husband and who, as a ghost, still has to get up and clean up the mess because that’s what women’s station and fate have been for ages. Nalini told us that as a feminist, she’s critical of certain aspects of Picasso’s life, but as an artist, she’s also very much influenced by Picasso and was thinking about him a lot at the time she made Ballad of a Woman. We decided to project Nalini’s work opposite iconic portraits of women in Picasso’s life—Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and his second wife, Jacqueline Roque—because we know that these almost religious images of women’s faces do not tell the full story of the heartache and violence as well as of the love and obsession between them and Picasso.

We also have a new commission by Simon Fujiwara (born 1982), Who vs Who vs Who? (A Picture of a Massacre) (2024), featuring the character Who the Bær from his ongoing project. Who is a generic, identity-less cartoon character that represents contemporary human beings, voraciously ingesting information and imagery. It rampages through art history, taking over iconic images, including Picasso’s Guernica (1937). I had a discussion with him about commissioning a new work and brought up Picasso’s Massacre in Korea (1951), which is the only work in his oeuvre that deals with an Asian subject. Specifically, it was Picasso’s response to a news report of alleged killings of civilians by American military during the Korean War. It turned out Simon had seen the work and was surprised at how much smaller it was than he had imagined, so for his version, he doubled the width and height to give the presence that he felt this violent and heavy subject deserves. He also appropriates the visual language of Guernica as well, so it’s a hybrid of two politically engaged paintings where Picasso expressed his anti-fascist, anti-war convictions.

Finally, in Reality War (2024), Sin Wai Kin (b. 1991) recreates central figures from Picasso’s Guernica in the guise of their alter egos: the fabulous drag performer V Sin plays a dead soldier, and The Mask takes the place of the bull. Sin invents a third character, the matador, who stands for the fascist leader Francisco Franco (1892–1975). It’s also reminiscent of Picasso’s obsession with bullfighting, which I think he may have seen as not only an affirmation of human dominion over nature but also an agonistic way to think about our existence as a series of confrontations and conflicts. When I look at Reality War, I think it really delves into the subconscious psychology of what Picasso may represent.

Why do you think Picasso’s works continue to fascinate people today? How have they remained relevant over the decades?

As a curator, I decided to take on the challenge of this exhibition because I was curious about this question, and I’m not sure I have the answer. I think part of the fascination is the name, and that’s what celebrity is. Part of his allure in Asia specifically may be the fact that Picasso comes from a different cultural origin but has obtained global fame and success.

A more enigmatic side of Picasso’s attraction is that that his art is not easy. His works can disturb; they don’t offer conventional beauty. But I think people are fascinated because they cannot pin him down. In our exhibition, you can see how he shapeshifts all the time. Static pictures and sculptures seem to be metamorphosing in front of our eyes.

I wonder if the more disturbing and contentious aspects of his biography—the misogyny and the abuse—also add to fascination. Culturally influential and consequential figures, even geniuses, are not necessarily morally upright people. There are talented creators who have such flaws in their lives. What does their art mean? Do I still like the art, knowing about the artist’s abusive streak? I hope this will be an opportunity for people to ask themselves these questions.

This exhibition is neither a slavish celebration of the canon nor an activist takedown of it. It’s a decontextualising and recontextualising of Picasso. Though still very young, M+ has a confident curatorial identity and position and a collection that is rich and wide-ranging, which allow us to take the so-called masters of the western canon and bring them into our fold, giving them new context, meanings, and relevance. The legacy of Western art is also part of our own DNA and legacy.