Louise Bourgeois: I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful., a retrospective exhibition of the French-born American artist Louise Bourgeois is currently on view at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan. Marking the largest retrospective of the artist's work in Japan in 27 years, the exhibition presents more than 100 works in a variety of media, spanning from sculpture, painting, drawing, fabric, to installation, highlighting the artist's entire oeuvre.

The exhibition is organized into three chapters. The first chapter, “Do Not Abandon Me,” presents works that address the ambivalence and complexity of motherhood, including the sculpture Nature Study (1984), and explores the theme of abandonment anxiety that has both haunted the artist throughout her life and served as an artistic inspiration throughout her practice. The second chapter, “I Have Been to Hell and Back,” deals with the negative emotions that have dominated Bourgeois’ life: anxiety, guilt, suicidal impulses, murderous hostility, fear of intimacy and dependency, and fear of rejection. In particular, the installation The Destruction of the Father (1974), exhibited in this chapter, captures the fantasy of revenge against a domineering father. Finally, the last chapter, “Repairs in the Sky,” examines how Bourgeois’s art restored the precarious balance between the conscious and unconscious, maternal and paternal, past and present in a balanced perspective. The installation Clouds and Caverns (1982–1989) offers a glimpse into the complexity of human anxiety and inner emotions.

The exhibition exemplifies how the artist sublimated her childhood experiences into art, showcasing paintings and videos that have never been shown in Japan, including the iconic sculpture Maman (1999). The exhibition runs through January 19, 2025.

Korean contemporary artists Kyungah Ham and Haegue Yang are currently participating in the group exhibition Forms of the Shadow at the Secession and the Korean Cultural Centre in Vienna, Austria. Curated by Sunjung Kim, Artistic Director of the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, the exhibition features 18 artists (individuals and collectives), exploring the "shadows" cast over contemporary life, including the pandemic, climate crisis, and geopolitical tensions that can be witnessed globally. The exhibition reflects on the human existence in the 21st century and captures a portrait of our time.

As part of the Vienna Secession movement that emerged in the late 19th century, the institution was inaugurated by artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, championing the progressive art since its founding in 1897. Operated by artists, the Secession embraces the motto “To each era its art. To art its freedom,” and has been actively engaging with cultural and social issues, as well as contemporary societal and political matters, fostering discourse through art. This exhibition aligns with the institution's art-historical and historical contexts, emphasizing the complexities of the era contemporary people face while highlighting hopeful solidarity, showing that despite these complexities, we are all interconnected.

Kyungah Ham presents her large-scale embroidery painting series What You See Is Not What You See/Chandeliers for Five Cities (2014–16), featuring an image of a grand chandelier. The sparkling lights of the chandelier are obscured by its swinging movements, suggesting paradoxical relationships surrounding the imperfections of great power or ideology, and the ongoing conflicts that prevail. The delicate stitches, each one a pixel, encapsulate the hidden presence of North Korean embroidery artisans, symbolizing the suffering of those living through the history of separation.
Haegue Yang, on the other hand, showcases her blind installation Fatal Love (2008/2018), which abstractly captures the tragic ending of Petra Kelly, the founder of the German Green Party and environmental activist, and her partner Gert Bastian, a former NATO military commander. Through Kelly’s narrative, the artist interweaves personal, historical, and political circumstances, suggesting the complexities of human existence through multiple layers of context surrounding a single individual.

In light of the two World Wars and the Cold War of the 20th century, as well as the ongoing war in Ukraine that continues to raise concerns about further escalation, and the pressure from the rise of far-right movements in Austria, the exhibition illuminates a global sense of community that spans past and present, East and West. The exhibition runs until November 17.

Contemporary artist Ahn Kyuchul’s solo exhibition Ahn Kyuchul: Questions — Landscape without Horizon is currently on view at Space ISU in Seoul. The exhibition presents a diverse group of works in various media, including installation, sculpture, painting, and text, that explores fixed ideas and conventions that have persisted in our society today. For the past four decades, the artist has been raising questions about life and the world that surrounds us, taking his detailed observations of everyday life and objects as a point of departure. The exhibition introduces eight new works that reflect these questions he has been pursuing concerning visual art.

The exhibition invites viewers to step into a “landscape without horizon,” encouraging them to consider their own answers to the questions that the artist poses. New works featured in the show include Spiral Wall, which draws viewers in like a black hole, yet its endless rotation prevents them from reaching its center; Dot Practices, which showcases the artist’s intense effort to emulate a minimalist masterpiece with a single dot; Line Practices, that captures the artist’s experimentations to find various ways to draw lines without a ruler; On the Way to Art, that serves as a signpost for seekers of true art; Tilted Seascapes, which suggests a way to adjust three tilted sea painting, and Seven Boxes, in which each box holds the key to another box that doesn't fit, and the whole cannot be understood without opening them all. These works reconstruct the landscape of our time in which the “horizon” has been lost. The exhibition is on view until January 3, 2025.

Michael Joo is participating in the group exhibition Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice currently on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, USA. The exhibition features over 100 artworks by 25 international artists, exploring the climate crisis and other human-caused disasters that humanity faces all together.

For the exhibition, Michael Joo collaborated with digital artists Danil Krivoruchko and Snark.art to create a collection of NFTs modelled after the crystalline structure of coral reefs. The algorithms and 3D printing technology utilized for the works have since been put to practical use by researchers at the University of Hawai’i for the research on the development of fish species that inhabit the coral reef. This process illustrates how art and science can be interwoven together in order to address and solve the current environmental issues.

The exhibition spotlights transdisciplinary practices that encompass diverse media, including painting, photography, multimedia, augmented reality (AR), and even living organisms to address the climate crisis, challenge anthropocentric thinking, and present a worldview that moves beyond hierarchical structures to envision all elements of nature as a whole rather than as materials for use and exploitation by humankind. The exhibition continues through January 5, 2025.

Alexander Calder’s solo exhibition Calder. Sculpting Time is currently on view at the Museo d'arte della Svizzera italiana (MASI Lugano) in Switzerland. Featuring more than thirty of Calder's iconic works created between 1931 and 1960, the exhibition marks the artist's first major solo show in a Swiss public institution in nearly fifty years.

The exhibition highlights the sculptural language that the artist developed with unprecedented innovation in the 1930s and 40s. From the early abstract sculptures to mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles of various sizes, the exhibition presents a wide range of works that highlight key developments. The installed works are made from a variety of materials, including wood and wire. An early abstract works Croisière (1931) consists of a thin wire and two small spheres that carve out a sense of form through movement alone without any mass. In addition, Eucalyptus (1940), which has been a constant feature of the artist's major exhibitions, is shown interacting with its environment. The exhibition also features a diverse group of works that invite viewers to experience vibrations in unexpected moments, such as Arc of Petals (1941) and Red Lily Pads (1956), which respond to subtle changes in air and light.

The exhibition offers a glimpse of how Calder expanded sculpture beyond its visual and temporal dimensions by adding movement to the once static medium. The exhibition runs through October 6.

The exhibition Spaces by the Berlin-based Nordic artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset is currently on view at the Amorepacific Museum of Art. Commemorating the 30th anniversary of their collaboration, the exhibition is their most extensive presentation in Asia to date.

Elmgreen & Dragset transform five exhibition spaces of the museum into realistic representations of everyday environments, including a Nordic-style house, a large swimming pool devoid of water, a fine dining restaurant titled The Cloud, a kitchen where molecular gastronomy research and culinary practices converge, and a space resembling an atelier. Scattered throughout these installations are fragments of daily life and human figures that blur the boundaries between reality and the virtual. Notable elements, such as the message “See you never!” written on the entrance mirror at the house, children playing alone by the pool immersed in themselves, a figure slumped over on the couch at the restaurant entrance while drinking a glass of whiskey, and a diner engaged in a Facetime call with a recently broken-up friend, embody discontinuous narratives that encourage active participation from the viewers.

By dismantling the concept of the white cube and incorporating architectural elements, the artist duo traverses between public and private spaces, wittily yet grotesquely illustrating the boundaries between reality and fiction, presence and absence, and the subjectivity and otherness of the act of seeing. Furthermore, through reflections in mirrors and the portrayal of individuals absorbed in their own worlds, the exhibition invites viewers to confront and contemplate the complexities of contemporary existence. The exhibition continues through February 23, 2025.

Anish Kapoor, an internationally acclaimed British sculptor, has been awarded the prestigious 2025 Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize by the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany.

The Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize was established in 1966 to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881–1919), the first German sculptor who significantly influenced modernism in the twentieth century. Lehmbruck gradually broke away from neoclassicism, fusing elements of the Romantic and Gothic styles to develop his unique sculptural language. As a seminal figure in the development of modernism, he was a successor to the prominent French sculptors Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and Aristide Maillol (1861–1944), and he profoundly impacted later generations of sculptors, including Joseph Beuys.

The Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize is a distinguished award granted specifically to sculptors who have made significant contributions to the development of the genre. An international jury, composed of directors from leading European institutions and members of the board of trustees of the Lehmbruck Museum and the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Foundation, selects the recipient every five years through a rigorous process. Previous winners include Nam June Paik (2001), Richard Serra (1991), and Joseph Beuys (1986).

The jury described Anish Kapoor as “one of the most important and innovative artists of his generation,” highlighting that his works “open up new dimensions of human perception.” The jury praised Kapoor's practice in using a wide range of materials—including pigments, wax, PVC, silicone, stone, and steel—to create works that unite opposing elements: “hard and soft, factual and illusionistic, simple and complex.” The jury expressed its anticipation that Kapoor’s work, which “expands the concept of possibility and challenges our senses,” will “transcends the limits of what is supposedly feasible, [establishing] correspondences with the architecture of the Lehmbruck Museum.”

In response to receiving this esteemed award, Anish Kapoor stated, “I am honored to receive the prestigious Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize,” and he plans to hold an exhibition at the museum along with a publication commemorating the award.