Best art exhibitions in late 2025: Asia-Pacific

Born in 1891, Robert Lehman was the third generation of a great banking dynasty in New York. His father Philip was part of a group of American collectors — also including Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Clay Frick and J.P. Morgan — who began using their fortunes to fill their mansions with European Old Masters.

Robert followed in his father’s footsteps initially, buying pictures by Bellini and Botticelli. But during the 1940s his tastes shifted to the 19th century, and he started to purchase pieces by Van Gogh, Matisse, Renoir, Gauguin, Seurat and Degas. Around the same time, he was elected to the board of trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, subsequently becoming its vice president. When he died in 1969 — two years after being elected chairman of the board — he left some 2,600 works of art to the institution, which went on display his bequest in a dedicated wing.

Until 12 October, 81 of those works, dating from between 1850 and 1950, and mostly by French artists, are being loaned from the Met’s holdings to go on show at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. The exhibition is divided into five thematic sections: ‘The Body’; ‘Portraits and Personalities’; ‘In Nature’; ‘From the City to the Country’; and ‘By the Water’. Standout paintings on display include Cezanne’s Trees and Houses Near the Jas de Bouffan, Gauguin’s Tahitian Women Bathing and Renoir’s Two Young Girls at the Piano.

The potter Lucie Rie was born and trained in Vienna, but it was in London — where she lived after escaping the Nazi regime in 1938 — that she made her name as one of Britain’s most influential studio ceramicists.

Rie pioneered new techniques and styles, including her distinctive raw glazes, a modernist aesthetic and the inclusion of subtle variations and irregularities that reveal her work’s organic character. Her ceramics have been described in paradoxical terms: functional yet decorative, light and dark, economic and precious. Rie herself said that her work has ‘nothing sensational about it, only a silent grandeur and quietness’.

It’s little surprise, then, that Rie’s work is widely admired in Japan. A new show at Kanazawa’s National Crafts Museum charts Rie’s life and examines her ties with East Asian ceramics. It contains work from the museum’s own holdings, as well as important loans from other national institutions and private collections. There is also a range of sublime ceramics on display created by the other successful — mostly male — studio potters she associated with, including Hans Coper and Bernard Leach.

Prism of the Real examines the art that emerged in Japan during first two decades of the Heisei era, from 1989 to 2010, and explores how Japanese culture made waves across the world during the period.

The show is split into three areas. The first looks at how, as the Cold War came to an end, artists continued to engage with themes of conflict and its impact on society. The second follows the rise of globalisation and focuses on art that interrogates issues of identity and exchange. The third features projects that both engage with existing communities and seek to build new ones.

Co-curated with M+ in Hong Kong, where it will travel to next, the exhibition features work by more than 50 artists who sought out new ways to understand the turbulent times they lived in. Among them are familiar Japanese names such as Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, Tatsuo Miyajima and Mariko Mori, alongside international artists like Cai Guo-Qiang, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno.

Seoul’s MMCA is mounting the first large-scale posthumous retrospective devoted to Kim Tschang-Yeul. The Korean painter is celebrated for his photorealist depictions of water droplets, but sometimes overlooked as a key figure in the country’s modern-art canon.

The show is divided into four sections. The first deals with the impact on the artist’s early career of Korea’s liberation from Japan, its division and the subsequent war, as well as his role in developing a Korean branch of Art Informel and his participation in biennials in Paris (1961) and São Paulo (1965). The second follows the artist’s journey to Paris in 1965 and his eventual settling four years later in New York, where he experimented with refined surfaces and geometric forms. The third looks at the evolution of his hallmark raindrop motif during the 1970s, while the fourth charts how he started to incorporate text, in the form of newspapers and calligraphy, into his work in the 1980s.

A fifth and final space serves as an appendix to the show and is filled with archival material, including photographs of Kim’s Parisian studio, which became a meeting place for fellow artists and friends — who affectionately referred to him as ‘Monsieur Gouttes d’eau’, or ‘Mr Water Drop’.

Taiwan’s second largest city, Taichung, is set to unveil a new museum that promises to bridge the domestic and global art scenes. It’s part of a new, wider hub called the Taichung Green Museumbrary, which is located in a 67-hectare park and includes a library and rooftop ‘cultural forest’. Covering 58,000 square metres, the landmark development is the largest project to date by the Pritzker Prize and RIBA Royal Gold Medal-winning Japanese architects SANAA, who designed its eight glass and white-metal structures around themes of transparency and fluidity.

To mark the opening, the Taiwanese artist Michael Lin and the Korean artist Haegue Yang have been commissioned to make site-specific works. The former has created a series of monumental painting installations that incorporate patterns from traditional Taiwanese textiles. The latter’s huge sculpture draws inspiration from the region’s tradition of venerating old trees, and is located in the museum’s 27-metre-high atrium.

The inaugural exhibition is A Call of All Beings: See you tomorrow, same time, same place, and draws inspiration from the museum’s natural and urban surroundings. It features work by artists from 20 nations, including Joan Jonas and Joseph Beuys, alongside a selection of local modern and contemporary practitioners.

One of Louise Bourgeois’s six editions of Maman (1999) — her iconic, gargantuan bronze spider — has been towering over the traditional gardens of South Korea’s Hoam Museum of Art since 2021, becoming an emblem of the institution.

It’s also the inspiration behind the museum’s current exhibition, Louise Bourgeois: The Evanescent and the Eternal, the first major solo show in South Korea to be dedicated to the French artist in a quarter of a century. Joining Maman are more than 100 additional works, including other celebrated sculptures such as Cell XI (Portrait), from 2000, which shows a caged, triple-headed figure with three faces of confusion, ambivalence and hysteria. There are also paintings, drawings and some of the artist’s personal writings, from diaries to psychoanalytical notes.

In all, they provide a comprehensive overview of Bourgeois’s world, from the trauma of her father’s infidelities and her mother’s sudden early death to her relocation to New York in 1938, subsequent friendships with the American Abstract Expressionists, and then her first retrospective at MoMA in 1982. It rounds off with a group of late pieces, which illustrate how the artist was still creating work that charted the dark depths of the human psyche right up until a week before her death in 2010, aged 98.

Lee Bul is one of Korea’s most significant contemporary artists. Born in 1964, she first gained widespread attention in the 1990s with genre-defying works that interrogate utopian ideals and technological transformation, spanning sculpture, installation, performance and painting.

Last year she was commissioned by the Met in New York to create a series of sculptures for the niches on the façade of its headquarters on Fifth Avenue. They were on view until June.

Lee Bul: From 1998 to Now is a major survey at Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art, co-organised with M+ in Hong Kong, which is the next stop on the exhibition’s international tour. It includes some 150 works, from early pieces involving cyborgs (one of the artist’s most recognisable motifs) to the huge, disorientating mirrored installations she has been making more recently.

In 1921, Thea Proctor returned home to Sydney from London, where she had spent most of the previous two decades working as an artist, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Arriving back in her homeland, however, she was surprised to find herself labelled ‘dangerously modern’.

Taking that description as its cue, this new show — organised in partnership between the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, and Adelaide’s Art Gallery of South Australia — is the first ever to examine how Proctor, along with 49 other Australian women artists, played a vital role in shaping modernism.

It includes more than 200 works, spanning paintings, prints, sculptures and ceramics, by antipodean women who pursued international art careers at the turn of the 20th century. Working predominantly between bohemian Paris and London, they joined movements including Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism and the very beginnings of abstraction. Alongside some of the better-known names, including Nora Heysen, Margaret Preston, Dorrit Black and Grace Cossington Smith, are many that the curators have spent years salvaging from obscurity.

Boston was one of the first cities in America to embrace Impressionism. When the local St Botolph Club hosted Claude Monet’s first non-commercial show anywhere in the world, in 1892, residents owned so many of his paintings that no fewer than 20 were excluded because they simply couldn’t fit on the walls. Today, their legacy is the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, which holds one of the finest collections of Impressionist works outside France.

In 2021, the MFA generously lent a collection of its Impressionist masterpieces to the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, but they were barely out their crates when Covid struck. They were sent back to the United States, then returned to Melbourne for a rehang between June and October this year. From there, the blockbuster show travels to Singapore.

The Singapore edition has a slightly different curatorial approach, examining Impressionism’s themes of urbanism, as well as including some additional drawings and archive material. The core 100 paintings, however, remain the same, featuring some of the most cherished pictures by Renoir, Cezanne, Degas, Manet and, of course, Monet — many of which have never visited the Asian nation before.

In 1982, the American artist Robert Rauschenberg travelled to Anhui province in China to collaborate with papermakers at one of the world’s oldest mills. He documented his journey in more than 500 photographs of the country’s markets, monuments, streets and scenes from everyday life, capturing a sense of local traditions, aesthetics, history and religion. After returning to the United States, he famously collaged 52 of these images into a single, 100ft-long photograph entitled Chinese Summerhall.

A new show at M+ in Hong Kong, opening in the centenary year of Rauschenberg’s birth, brings together a major collection of his work to examine how his visits to Asia, including China, Japan and India, influenced his approach to materials and methods. Take his 7 Characters series of collages, for example: they represent seven Chinese characters, collaged using traditional paper-pulping techniques and local textiles in the form of silk ribbons and cloth medallions.

The show also looks at how the artist’s travels inspired him to establish the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, which between 1984 and 1991 organised a global programme of travelling exhibitions in cities including Lhasa, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur. In November 1985, when Chinese Summerhall went on show as part of ROCI CHINA at the National Art Gallery in Beijing, 300,000 people flocked to see it.

A Legacy of Light pays homage to the role played by more than 70 women in shaping photography during the first three quarters of the 20th century. Among them are the French Surrealist Dora Maar, the American photojournalists Lee Miller and Dorothea Lange and the Australian modernist Olive Cotton.

There will be more than 300 works on display, from prints to postcards. All are from the holdings of the NGV, which in 1967 became the first Australian museum to have a specialist curatorial photography department. It is now one of the most significant in the world, with more than 15,000 images covering almost 200 years of the medium.

Many of the photographs going on display in November are recent acquisitions, while more than 100 will be on show in the gallery for the first time. Spanning portraiture, landscape, fashion and documentary work, they are set against a backdrop of the major social, political and cultural events of their time — including the suffrage struggles and the rise of the women’s liberation movement. The result is a show that reveals how these artists used cameras to capture, reflect and challenge the world around them.

From 20 November, Hong Kong Palace Museum is offering the rare chance to admire some 250 treasures from the ancient Egyptian civilisation — the largest show of its kind ever staged in China. Artefacts are coming from seven major museums, including the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Luxor Museum of Ancient Egyptian Art and the National Museum of Suez. These will be shown alongside a selection of significant recent discoveries from excavations at the vast necropolis of Saqqara in Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt. There, archaeologists have unearthed the most complete remains of mummification workshops to date, and the largest known cemetery of mummified animals.

Some of the objects making the journey to Hong Kong — many for the first time — include a 2.8-metre-high stone statue of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun; a turquoise blue faience glazed statue of a hippopotamus that was excavated from a royal scribe’s tomb; and a sacred mummified cat.

A selection of ancient Chinese objects will also be on display in order to illustrate how these two great cultures evolved simultaneously on opposite sides of the world.

Main image, clockwise from top left: Barbara Morgan (1900-1992), Martha Graham: Letter to the world, 1940, at the National Gallery of Victoria. © The Estate of Barbara Morgan. Gladys Reynell (1881-1956), Pensiveness, circa 1913, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. © Estate of Gladys Reynell. Lee Bul (b. 1964), Cyborg W6, 2001, at the Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul. © Lee Bul. Courtesy the artist and Leeum Museum of Art. Mariko Mori (b. 1967), Miko no Inori, 1996, at The National Art Center, Tokyo. © Mariko Mori. Courtesy of the Artist. Lucie Rie (1902-1995), Bronze Glazed Vase, circa 1980, at the National Crafts Museum, Kanazawa, Japan. Inouchi Collection. Photo: Rui Shinano