The best exhibitions and openings of 2024: Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Middle East

By the time of his death aged 79 in 1637, the Japanese artisan Hon’ami Kōetsu had risen from the rank of sword-polisher and appraiser to become one of the principal craftsmen and tastemakers in Kyoto. A skilled potter, calligrapher and lacquerware-maker, Kōetsu also led a community of artisan Buddhist monks who, promoted by an elite cohort of patrons, spearheaded a classical painting revival now known as the Rinpa School.

This broad sweep of talents is what the Tokyo National Museum refers to as an ‘artistic cosmos’ in the title of its show dedicated to Kōetsu’s career. The exhibition promises to juxtapose ‘new art-historical research with insights into the religious beliefs of the time’ in order to gain a better understanding of his prolific output. A highlight will be the museum’s own gold lacquer writing box, which has been declared one of the country’s national treasures.

A descendant of the indigenous Kokatha and Nukunu people of South Australia, Yhonnie Scarce is an artist whose work probes the history of colonialism and the marginalisation of Aboriginal Australians. Following the success of her 2022 shows at Ikon in Birmingham in the UK and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, her new solo exhibition opens at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in February.

Sprawling across three spaces, a series of monumental installations composed from glass — a material central to Scarce’s practice — ceramics and archival photographs draw attention to uranium mining and nuclear tests performed on tribal land. The 2017 work Death Zephyr, for example, consisting of a huge chandelier made from hundreds of blown-glass droplets, evokes the radioactive clouds that swept across South Australia following British weapons tests in the 1950s.

The show’s curator, Clothilde Bullen, who is also the museum’s head of indigenous programmes, stresses that while the exhibition is emotionally wrenching, there is also lightness and a reverence for the places it memorialises. ‘It is possible to appreciate the beauty of the works, and to be challenged by the stories behind them,’ she says.

From February, the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Hampi in India — once the capital of the vast Vijayanagara Empire, which governed parts of southern India from the 14th to the early 17th century — will be home to a new contemporary art foundation.

Set across 18 acres, the site will include a series of galleries, artists’ studios and residential apartments, as well as gardens and a café.

It’s the vision of founder Sangita Jindal, a prominent Indian businesswoman, collector, patron and philanthropist. The inaugural show is called Right Foot First and showcases pieces from the Jindal Collection. Expect works by international names such as Andy Warhol, Ai Weiwei and Annie Morris, alongside contemporary Indian artists including Manish Nai and Shilpa Gupta. Following this will be a curatorial residency cycle that will mount shows of both important loans and new commissions.

Arab Design Now surveys the work of more than 70 design talents from across the Middle East and North Africa. The largest show of its kind ever mounted, it’s being curated by Rana Beiruti, co-founder of Amman Design Week, and will pay special attention to how contemporary design can be balanced with the region’s aesthetic heritage and traditions. A section will also focus on sustainable design.

The exhibition is the anchor of Design Doha, a new biennial in Qatar to be launched on 24 February. Satellite shows coinciding with the inaugural edition focus on Arabic poster art and the evolution of modern Qatari architecture, among other themes. The entire project was established under the leadership of Qatar Museums chairperson, Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the sister of Qatar’s ruling emir. It’s being run by artistic director Glenn Adamson — the curator, writer and historian who until 2016 was the director of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design.

South Korea’s Leeum Museum of Art, which is operated by the Samsung Foundation of Culture, turns 20 in 2024. To kick off a year of celebrations, it is hosting its largest exhibition to date, dedicated to Philippe Parrreno.

Parreno is a multimedia artist best known for his collaborative film and installation work, and some of his most notable pieces include the football documentary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006), made with Douglas Gordon, and No Ghost Just a Shell (1999-2002), a project inspired by Japanese cyberpunk manga, made with Pierre Huyghe. He also collaborated with the composers Nicolas Becker and Cengiz Hartlap and the ventriloquist Nina Conti on Anywhen (2016), a work that saw fish-shaped balloons floating around Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

The Leeum Museum boldly claims that the artist’s forthcoming major solo show — his first at a Korean institution — will be ‘a synaesthetic exhibition of meticulously choreographed scenography combining data sequencing, DMX and artificial intelligence that will expand perceptions on how to view and experience art’.

Since opening in 2017, Marrakech’s Musée Yves Saint Laurent has held several exhibitions concerned with lesser-known stories from the art world. Among them have been shows examining Cy Twombly’s fascination with Berber culture and Christo’s preoccupation with fashion in the 1960s.

This March, a new show continues this tradition by focusing on cacti — a subject Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé became passionate about after purchasing the city’s nearby Majorelle Gardens. Today, thanks to their restoration efforts, the gardens are home to more than 60 varieties of the succulent plant.

The exhibition, which is co-curated by Marc Jeanson, a botanist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and Centre Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon, complements this living collection by looking at how the plants have inspired artists. It will include works by David Hockney, Martin Creed, Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Brassaï and more, alongside loans of particularly rare and fascinating plant specimens.

Presented in collaboration with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Noir & Blanc is the first photography exhibition to be held at Hong Kong’s M+ museum since its launch in 2021. The show explores the enduring appeal of black-and-white photography between 1915 and today, and is divided into three themes: ‘Aiming for Contrast’, ‘Light and Shadow’ and ‘Colour Chart’.

Some 220 of the works on show will be from the French institution’s vast holdings, and represent greats of the medium such as Man Ray, Diane Arbus, William Klein, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and Mario Giacomelli. These will be presented in dialogue with about 30 photographs from M+’s own holdings, which feature names little known outside Asia, including Yau Leung, Chang Chao-Tang, Ho Fan, Lang Jingshan and Ishimoto Yasuhiro.

Another collaborative effort with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s forthcoming Fables from East and West: From Kalila wa Dimna to the Fables of La Fontaine.

The exhibition traces the origins of animal-centred allegorical narratives, which are thought to have originated as an oral tradition in the first millennium B.C. in India and Greece — in the latter, most famously, as tales attributed to the storyteller Aesop. They then became widely known throughout the Arab world via the work of the 8th-century writer and translator Ibn al-Muqaffa’.

The show includes a variety of illustrated manuscripts, rare books and paintings that trace the genre’s evolution. Highlights include a folio from a 14th-century Arabic manuscript of the book of fables Kalila wa Dimna, depicting a meeting between a hare and an elephant, both displaying human-like inquisitiveness; and a print of Gustave Doré’s 1868 illustration for Jean de La Fontaine’s The Bear and the Gardener.

With a career now spanning half a century, Hiroshi Sugimoto has become one of the world’s most revered living photographers. His transfixing black-and-white gelatin prints — which he still develops in his own dark room — have won him solo shows at the Met and the Palace of Versailles, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor and an auction record of nearly $2 million.

UCCA’s flagship Beijing site is hosting Sugimoto’s first major institutional show in China this March. It’s an updated version of the 2023 exhibition held at London’s Hayward Gallery and features key works from the artist’s major series ‘Seascapes’, ‘Lightning Fields’ and ‘Theatres’.

Alongside these well-known images will be a newly created series of calligraphic works, as well as a nod to some of Sugimoto’s architectural and sculptural projects, such as Appropriate Proportion (2002), which saw him refurbish a Shinto shrine on the Japanese island of Naoshima.

Memoria: Tales of Another History was first shown at Frac MECA in Bordeaux in 2021, before travelling to the Musée des Cultures Contemporaines Adama Toungara in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, then the Musée National du Cameroun in Yaoundé. Its next stop is Fondation H in Madagascar’s capital, Antananarivo.

The touring show is organised by Nadine Hounkpatin and Céline Seror, curators and co-founders of the contemporary African art magazine The Art Momentum. For each iteration, the show has been adapted to its location — this latest version includes the work of 23 artists, five of whom are based in Madagascar, while four more are from the Malagasy diaspora. The other 14 artists come from Algeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Gabon, Ghana, Namibia, Senegal, South Africa, Zimbabwe and France. And though diverse in media and style, works in the show are united by the fact that they all address undisclosed and forgotten histories, memories and voices.

The upcoming exhibition will be accompanied by a series of residencies at Fondation H taking place throughout 2024, as well as performances, talks, workshops and lectures — all part of the centre’s commitment to fostering a local art scene in a city with no art school or contemporary art museum.

This spring, Singapore’s National Gallery is turning over its temporary exhibition space to a show celebrating one of the country’s most significant modern artists: Cheong Soo Pieng.

Born in Amoy, China, in 1917, Cheong arrived in Singapore in 1946 and spent 20 years lecturing at the city’s Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. The school eventually gave its name to the modernist art movement he pioneered, which combined elements of classical Chinese painting with compositional techniques drawn from Western still-life and figurative works and Cubism.

The forthcoming show will provide a comprehensive survey of Cheong’s career, highlighting his unwavering commitment to innovation through works spanning his early pieces as a young tutor to those made in the years leading up to his death, aged 66, in 1983.

The American multimedia artist Theaster Gates has strong links to Japan. He first visited in 1999 for a ceramics residency under master potters. More recently, he coined the term ‘Afro-Mingei’ to describe his idea for a hybrid movement that combines the values of the Japanese Folk Art movement, which looks for beauty in utilitarian objects, with Black ideas of beauty and aesthetics.

Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum is hosting the country’s first comprehensive survey of Gates’s work this April. It promises to showcase a variety of his output, ranging from ceramics to fashion, music, architecture and performance, and aims to replicate the success of his recent exhibitions in New York at the New Museum (2022-23), and in London at the Serpentine Pavilion (2022) and Whitechapel Gallery (2021).

Main image, clockwise from top left: Theaster Gates, Doric Temple, 2022, which will be on show at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Liu Heung Shing, China After Mao — Skating in Dalian, 1981, at M+, Hong Kong; Bernard Boutet de Monvel, Vanniers devant les cactus, at Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Marrakech; Yhonnie Scarce, Fallout Babies, 2016, at The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Naqsh Collective, bridal chest, 2023, at M7, Doha