Installation view: “Nothing Still About Still Lifes” at the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China. Courtesy of the Deji Art Museum
Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Late last year, I had the privilege of being a guest of Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design, the most important fair on the Chinese mainland. It was the first edition in the futuristic and newly constructed West Bund Convention Center, and alongside strong sales—Perrotin reported 40 percent of its high-end booth sold out on day one—there was an array of excellent and sophisticated art, particularly in its curated xiàn chǎng section, the equivalent of the Untitled section at Art Basel in Switzerland. But I spent the days prior to the fair at a venue no less tony with art no less impressive: the Deji Plaza luxury shopping mall in Nanjing, atop which sits the Deji Art Museum.
Deji was a revelation on several levels. As with the West Bund fair, sales at the shopping mall were nothing to sneeze at: $3.5 billion in 2025, which, according to the Economist, may make it the highest-grossing mall in the world. The museum on the top floor was open until midnight, an idea more museums should embrace because it remained popular throughout the night. Its best-loved exhibition, “Nothing Still About Still Lifes,” reopened in October and is one of those great shows that showcases the surprising depths that can be explored through artworks on a single subject: flowers.
Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Edvard Munch, Henri Rousseau, Andy Warhol, Yayoi Kusama, David Hockney and Anselm Kiefer are all on display, paired with works by numerous Chinese luminaries. The boldfaced names featured in this show from Deji’s extensive and distinguished collection might make it sound straightforward and even dull, but the exhibition is not. Almost everything on display is experimental in some way, an unexpected offering from the artist or an unusual take on this ancient subject. This is announced in the very first room dominated by a monumental Jeff Koons sculpture, Pink Ballerina (2009-2021), composed of delicate lace-like white marble and fresh-cut roses—real ones in deep red. Like the pink of its title, the piece’s intense florality exists mostly in the mind of the viewer.
The blockbusters on display are incredible and expensive, to the point that going through the show can feel like going to a really good preview at an auction house. I found myself especially attracted to the stranger works that display the depths of the collection. The false-looking painterly vegetal mass surrounding yellow buds in Corbeille de Fleurs would have led me to think the work was made in the 2010s or maybe the 1980s, but in fact it was made in 1925 and by Georges Braque of all people.
Not that the blockbusters aren’t just as fun. Renoir’s Fleurs dans un Vase (1878) is displayed alongside the original Majolica vase depicted in the painting. The exhibition rewards deep looking and offers threads to be followed. That first room with the Koons includes two works by Picasso, both titled Vase de Fleurs from 1901 and 1904, that demonstrate, with economy, the transition from his Blue to his Rose period. The threads between West and East are no less satisfying to explore. Wu Dayu’s Untitled 128 (c. 1980) merges the bursts of color found in European modernism and the distinctly Chinese philosophical ideas of inner energy and resonance. Sanyu’s Vase of Flowers in Blue (1956) is meanwhile sui generis. The vase is a sketch compared to the intense details of the flowers, and the background is so rich that it could be an astounding abstract painting without anything else in it.
But each work in this show is a gem. Shanghai’s West Bund Art & Design for 2026 is sure to be as well attended as this past edition, and if you’re in the region, a day trip to Nanjing to see this show at Deji would be time well spent.
Alicja Kwade’s Pars pro Toto (2020) in the museum’s courtyard. Courtesy of Dib Bangkok. Photographer Auntika Ounjittichai, 2025
IT WAS HARD TO GET HERE reads a painted vinyl and plywood bench created by Finnegan Shannon and situated past the entryway of Dib Bangkok. It provides an abbreviated backstory behind a new museum that opened in the Thai capital in late December—the first of its kind in the city and the country. Stability is something the Thai art scene has lacked, and the museum’s launch marks a significant structural shift. “For the general arts scene here, the ecosystem is fast developing,” Miwako Tezuka, director of the museum, told Observer. “What we need is constancy.”
Located in a converted industrial warehouse designed by WHY Architecture (the same firm behind the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), the museum takes its name from the Thai word “dib,” meaning “raw” or “natural, authentic state.” The institution’s holdings are comprised of the private art collection of Thai businessman Petch Osathanugrah, amassed over the course of three decades before his death in 2023. It comprises around 1,000 works by some 200 artists, more or less equally divided between Asian and non-Asian origins. “There was no institution presenting a space that allows local artists and global artists to have equal ground [in] conversation,” Tezuka added, contextualizing the importance of the museum.
The debut exhibition, “(In)visible Presence” (on view through August 3, 2026), is a meditation on memory curated by Ariana Chaivaranon. “It’s so important for local artists to see how they’re in dialogue with something that’s so much bigger than the nation or what’s going on right now in Thailand,” she told Observer. “These artists are all deeply intertwined with an international conversation. And yet, so often in Thailand, we only have a conversation internally, which is partly because of the collections that have been on display.” The mise-en-scène at Dib Bangkok reflects that these practices developed in different geographical regions, but Chaivaranon insisted that “visitors can actually see that they have been in dialogue for decades.”
She further emphasized how crucial the experiential aspect of museum-going is as a cornerstone of art education, and how Dib Bangkok is filling an absence in the city’s scene. In previous decades, “for many of these [Thai] artists, they were getting their knowledge of international work from slides, from books, from magazines, and they didn’t have a chance to see international art of their time. Dib is offering a site where the artists can now see these works in person. When you see it in person… it takes on a whole new dimension that is inaccessible through just digital media, even.” She cited as a key example the Anselm Kiefer work on view, Die verlorene Buchstabe, an installation unfurling from a Heidelberg letterpress sprouting tall resin sunflowers. “The sunflowers gently move with the air, right? That’s something you couldn’t get online—and something that I’m really excited for young artists now to be able to come here and be inspired by.”
Montien Boonma, Lotus Sound piece (1999-2000). Remade from a smaller 1992 version. Courtesy of Dib Bangkok. Photographer Auntika Ounjittichai, 2025
Dib Bangkok’s 11 indoor galleries are spaced over three levels. The ground floor hosts Marco Fusinato’s work Constellations, a site-specific commission in which visitors are invited to whack a white wall with a Brooklyn Whopper Model CS38 Cold Steel baseball bat, whose sound is amplified at 120 decibels: a symbolic blow to the pristine museum space. This is followed by works from Jean-Luc Moulène and Ugo Rondinone; nearby, in the cone-shaped Chapel gallery, is Incubate, Subodh Gupta’s 2010 installation of stainless steel lunch tins (dabbas) overhung by chandeliers. (Recent sexual assault allegations did not prevent him from being featured.) Jannis Kounellis’s 1998 untitled work, comprised of four steel panels, I-beams and rolled second-hand garments—impecunious items he first used because he could not afford to buy new canvases—works well in conversation with Thai artists shown later in the exhibition, who also funneled principles of Arte Povera in their work: frugality, material simplicity.
On the second level, visitors encounter an iron bed by Rebecca Horn, Jinjoon Lee’s two-channel video installation and 22 folios on music paper by Louise Bourgeois. These pieces are paired with work by Thai artists, including gelatin silver prints by Surat Osathanugrah—father of the collector—which feature a modest depiction of day-to-day Thai life. Also on view are Navin Rawanchaikul’s tiers of photos of elders encased in salvaged medicine bottles (1994) and Somboon Hormtientong’s 1995 installation of wrapped vihara columns laid flat amongst libation vessels and glassware. These artists sanctify the rites that shape Thai lifestyles but refresh the perspective on tradition.
Under skylights on the top floor, the work of Montien Boonma is the star (he’s arguably the star of the whole museum). The Thai artist studied in Europe in the 1980s, and his sensitive, thoughtful work fosters a crossover between Arte Povera ideas and Thai spirituality. Lotus Sound piece (1999-2000, remade from a smaller 1992 version) stacks 500 terra-cotta bells around a gilded lotus flower, celebrating negative space, as does Arokayasala: Temple of the Mind (1996), with its herbal medicine drawers encircling aluminum lungs coated in aromatic herbal pastes. His 1998-99 installation Zodiac Houses models, at a modest scale, six existing German structures on stilts: visitors can take off their shoes, mount the platform and stand under their hollow structures, scented with cinnabar.
Outdoor works create a compelling complement to the galleries. Alicja Kwade’s Pars pro Toto (2020), an installation of 11 monumental stone globes ranging from 70-250 cm in diameter, speckle the courtyard like an outsized game of boules or errant marbles; Pinaree Sanpitak’s Breast Stupa Topiary (2013), a series of stainless-steel forms, dots the upper terrace. As is his signature, James Turrell’s 1988 Straight Up installation frames the sky above; the museum hosts dedicated sunrise and sunset programs for visitors. Sho Shibuya’s 85-meter-long print on vinyl, MEMORY, was specially commissioned by the museum, hugely enlarging the Sunrise from a Small Window series, in which the artist painted the sensuous colors of daybreak over the front page of the New York Times.
There is an emphasis on interactive and participatory works, so visitors can play. Surasi Kusolwong’s installation featuring an overturned and ceiling-suspended 1965 Volkswagen Beetle functions like a cradle in which visitors can sit and watch a video; the installation also includes TAO BIN vending machines, from which one can buy sour cream Pringles, salted cocktail nuts, Pepsi or Nescafé. “There are some works that are fragile, very sensitive, but we don’t want to make our exhibition precious,” Tezuka noted. The museum very much isn’t “a top-down institution where everything is didactically explained. … We want to make sure that we offer [visitors] the opportunity to educate themselves, to have their own creative agency and be their own active viewers.”
The first few shows will showcase the collection, and some galleries will rotate out more frequently than others (the display of Montien Boonma works will remain on the longest because these works haven’t previously been seen in context with each other). As for the way the collection will grow in the future, Chaivaranon confirmed that the institution is “continuing to acquire work, and I would say our strategy has a few different aspects, but one is to be quite deep. It’s not just one work from the big names.” Tezuka added that the “curatorial team is continuing to do the collection research to identify which are the gaps in the collection, whether that be cultural representation or different mediums that artists globally are using or experimenting with… How can we strategically fill in those gaps, while at the same time creating opportunities for newly discovered artists to present their works?”
Beyond the museum walls, Tezuka spoke about a “collective energy” brewing in the city’s art scene, citing the publicly funded art space BACC, the experimental programming at Bangkok Kunsthalle and the art destination of the Khao Yai Art Forest several hours outside the city. On the horizon, there will be deCentral, a space focusing on regional creative voices, and the Bangkok Biennale, which began in 2018, will return in fall 2026. According to Tezuka, “every organization is approaching art from a completely different way, bringing different perspectives.” The scene is most definitely one to watch.
Rebecca Horn, The Lover’s Bed, 1990. Courtesy of Dib Bangkok. Photographer Auntika Ounjittichai, 2025
The Truck Trio as shown in “Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience.” Courtesy Gagosian
Earlier this month, Gagosian debuted a stunning show featuring the work of Walter de Maria at its Le Bourget gallery in Paris. “Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience” was curated by Donna De Salvo and featured at its heart The Truck Trilogy, a trio of vintage Chevrolet pickup trucks outfitted with De Maria’s signature stainless-steel rods. The work was conceived in 2011 and completed in 2017, four years after De Maria’s death at the age of 77.
This was the same year that the gallery launched its “Building a Legacy Program,” which marshals the gallery’s extensive resources to ensure that artists remain in the minds of the public in the future, whether they are young, old, or deceased, through educational efforts and ambitious shows like “The Singular Experience.” The program has been spearheaded by Kara Vander Weg, a managing director at the gallery, whom we caught up with to hear more about its origins and processes.
How did the idea for the Building a Legacy Program originate in 2017, and what gaps in artist or estate planning was it meant to address?
KVW: The catalyst was Walter De Maria, an artist who had been close to the gallery since the 1980s, dying in 2013 without a will. The lack of preparation threw his estate into turmoil but, fortunately, the gallery was able to help address a number of immediate practical needs, including preserving and documenting his archives. Nuanced decisions had to be made about his intentions and his work, including how it was displayed. Walter was incredibly precise and exacting, and to go from his presence, a resource that was always there, to nothing was a profound shock, particularly for Elizabeth Childress, who had managed his studio for decades.
Through our work with the Richard Avedon Foundation, which began in 2011, we learned a lot about the challenges and questions they faced when Dick had died suddenly several decades earlier. It has been instructive to learn about their organization, which is impressive, and implemented processes for decision-making as the artist would have wished.
Through our work with artists and with their subsequent estates and foundations—which is inevitable when working together over many years—we have seen that balancing an artist’s legacy with ongoing operational concerns can be incredibly challenging. As much as the gallery, as an entity outside of the family or studio, can be helpful, we want to be. For all artists, it is ideal to have some plans for legacy decisions in place. And as the value of art has grown, it has become even more important to have detailed wishes outlined, particularly when it comes to decisions like posthumous work, as well as planning for the resources necessary to carry an artist’s legacy forward.
A symposium felt like the right way to address some of these delicate topics and provide a space for knowledge sharing between our artists and others. Peer-to-peer support can be an exceptionally helpful resource, and many of the connections that have been made through the symposia continue to be fruitful for the artists and estates.
The team behind Gagosian Quarterly also saw an opportunity to address many of the questions on people’s minds through thoughtful content in the magazine. We launched an ongoing series featuring conversations with experts in the field of artists’ estates and legacy stewardship who offer insights that hopefully prove useful to artists, their staff, foundations and estates, scholars, and others.
In working with estates like Walter De Maria’s or Nam June Paik’s, what have been the most revealing challenges in realizing an artist’s intentions after death?
KVW: Honoring an artist’s wishes and intentions is always the biggest challenge.
With Walter, we’ve had to make decisions about how to install his work at a level he would have permitted. Fortunately, both Larry [Gagosian] and I worked closely with him and have those experiences to draw on. We also owe a great debt to Elizabeth Childress for her constant counsel. For example, Walter was always incredibly precise about the surface on which his floor sculptures rested; it had to be completely unmarked. For an exhibition at our 21st Street gallery while he was still alive, I remember we had to bring in a trompe l’oeil painter to touch up marks on the concrete floor before he would agree to go ahead with the show. And for the current exhibition at Le Bourget, we had to find solutions to address the floor beneath 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows. These might seem like small things, but we know how critical they were to Walter.
He was also very resistant to putting out too much information about his work, because he wanted viewers to have a focused, unmediated experience of it. The downside is that, as a result, people haven’t really come to understand the thinking behind his practice. That’s why, for the Le Bourget exhibition, curator Donna De Salvo has included a number of drawings, some of which have never been seen before, something that would never have happened during his lifetime. Our hope is that this will offer the wider public a way into Walter’s thinking: his precision, a bit of his humor, and the connections between his early work and the later pieces for which he became known. These are things we believe are important, not only for his legacy, but also for the scholarship around his work.
The circumstances of our work on behalf of Nam June Paik are very different, and my colleague Nick Simunovic is best placed to talk about it. [Writer’s note: They wanted Nick to jump in here so I said why not.]
NS: In the case of Nam June Paik, we partnered with the Estate, who had a clear sense of the artist’s wishes, and we worked tirelessly over a decade to realize a number of important goals.
When we began working with the Estate in 2015, they were keen to work with a major gallery as a way to shine a spotlight on Nam June’s work, particularly given that the last exhibition sanctioned by the artist was 20 years prior. Larry [Gagosian] had noted that he felt that the artist was a bit lost in the market, and that was a view shared by the family. There was also a realization that there were gaps in the holdings of American museums.
We laid out a multi-tiered plan that began with that first show in Hong Kong in 2015 and culminated with a major survey in New York planned for 2020. The opening was delayed by the COVID pandemic but eventually opened in 2022.
We brought in noted curator John G. Hanhardt, who also organized the retrospectives of the artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1982), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2011), in addition to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2000). We were able to strategize and execute against the artist’s wishes because we had clear direction from the Estate, including Nam June’s nephew Ken Hakuta, and input from partners like John Hanhardt and Estate curator Jon Huffman.
As a result of those efforts, works by the artist from that 2022 exhibition were placed with major museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, and the Bass Museum of Art, filling a crucial gap in the artist’s canon and legacy.
How do you balance market considerations with curatorial or scholarly fidelity when guiding legacy work inside a commercial gallery?
KVW: The two are interconnected and I don’t think that is a bad thing, work needs to be placed with owners to ensure the highest level of scholarly fidelity. And good curatorial work can help to bolster an artist’s market.
The monograph Gagosian published for Walter De Maria is a great example. Little scholarly work had been done on his life, and through our work preserving the archive, we had an opportunity and the ability to take on the project. We had access to rarely seen archival material from his studio and the result is the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s entire oeuvre that explores both his creative career and his personal life.
It was a massive undertaking that was many years in the making, but the publication will support both future sales and exhibitions of his work. It has already served as the catalogue for the Menil Collection’s 2022-23 exhibition, Walter De Maria: Boxes for Meaningless Work.
The recent symposium in London gathered artists, curators, and foundation directors. What insights or points of friction surfaced about the future of legacy stewardship?
KVW: It was our third symposium on the topic of legacy planning, and there was a fascinating session during which I spoke with Mary Dean, Ed Ruscha’s studio director; Waltraud Forelli, Anselm Kiefer’s studio director and board member of the Eschaton–Anselm Kiefer Foundation; and Vladimir Yavachev, director of operations for the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation. A key takeaway from our conversation was the critical importance of hiring an archivist, ideally while an artist is alive.
Waltraud rightly pointed out that in addition to helping from an organizational perspective, hiring an archivist brought a realization that they couldn’t do everything alone. They needed to plan for a younger generation to continue their work and to take the time now to transfer that knowledge. For Vladimir, who has catalogue raisonné preparations underway, an archivist is particularly important given the volume of material that Christo and Jeanne-Claude retained.
Mary Dean emphasized another important point, the value of openness, even when addressing a sensitive topic like planning for a future one won’t be part of. For Ed, this is a living, evolving process that he actively engages in through the thoughtful placement of his works and archival material with institutional partners. For instance, the Getty Museum is currently in the process of receiving his street photograph archive. All of his films and artistbook archives are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. He has also made significant donations: Ed was born in Omaha, Nebraska, so the Joslyn Art Museum has a substantial collection of his work, and he has donated work to the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Oklahoma City.
Younger artists such as Titus Kaphar are building institutions during their lifetimes. How is the conversation about legacy changing for living artists?
KVW: There is a generation of artists today who are interested in philanthropic endeavors beyond their own artistic practices. Providing space and resources for the creation of foundations and community projects is a big priority and perhaps is an indication of legacy planning taking shape much earlier in artists’ careers.
There is a tradition of artists stepping up and supporting other artists, one example is Theaster Gates, who has devoted the past 15 years to his Rebuild Foundation. It’s a mantle that artists including Ellen Gallagher and Titus Kaphar are taking up with projects like the Nina Simone House and NXTHVN, respectively.
But this process isn’t new, there is a history of artist support with someone like Robert Rauschenberg, who during his lifetime formed an entity to help other artists, as did Roy Lichtenstein.
For galleries, support of an artist needs to evolve to include these priorities, which could be advice around the organization of studio resources or the make-up of a Board of Directors.
With “The Singular Experience” now open in Paris, featuring De Maria’s Truck Trilogy and 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows, what does this presentation demonstrate about Gagosian’s collaboration with the De Maria Estate? What are the lessons there for other artists planning their estate?
KVW: The relationship with Walter has always been very personal, his friendship and working relationship with Larry [Gagosian] stretches back more than 35 years, and it has anchored our long commitment to him and his work.
The approach is methodical and takes time, but the exhibition at Le Bourget is a product of that commitment. It’s his second show in the space and one that we had actually begun discussing before he died in 2013.
Showing Truck Trilogy outside of the United States for the first time is incredibly exciting. It was his last sculpture, conceived in 2011 and completed posthumously in 2017 according to his specific directions, so it touches on a lot of what we have talked about. It’s also wonderful to be showing 13, 14, 15 Meter Rows at the same time as his inclusion in the exhibition “Minimal,” curated by Dia Art Foundation’s director Jessica Morgan at the Bourse de Commerce, Paris. And it’s all taking place in the same month as Walter would have turned 90.
But the exhibitions are just one piece in a broader program that aims to cement and extend his legacy, from placing a group of early sculpture and drawings with The Menil Collection (a family that were early champions of the artist) and working with Dia Art Foundation to help conserve The Lightning Field to working tirelessly to publish his monograph. And the work continues as we try to find a home for his archive.
For artists working today, it can be hard to have the patience to play the long game, but that thought and planning is key. It can also be useful to talk with other artists and studios who are focused on this work. One of the benefits from the symposium was the exchange of ideas and the conversations that happened outside the sessions.
Looking across the gallery’s roster, what qualities distinguish the artists who are most intentional about shaping their own legacies while still alive? What do they have in common?
KVW: They have a clear sense of purpose regarding the direction of their work and its legacy. They like control, either maintaining it themselves or wisely bringing in the right studio leadership. They’ve built strong museum connections and have access to resources in terms of staff and space. It’s a reminder of the symbiotic relationship between the market and legacy, artists need resources to actively plan for the future.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter—few things are more fundamental to how we mark the passage of time. A perennial subject of both casual conversation and art-making, this cycle takes center stage in the exhibition “Kim Chong Hak: Painter of Seoraksan” at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. On the surface, it appears as a simple journey through the calendar, yet beneath lies something more—the fusion of Korean Dansaekhwa painting and American abstract expressionism. By using a familiar narrative while filtering it through a hybrid style rooted in lived experience, Hak demonstrates that meaning lies less in what you say than in how you say it.
Hak was born in Korea, where he grew up and began his artistic career. Coming of age in the 1960s meant grappling with identity and nationhood in a post-war landscape, struggles that shaped the movement known as Dansaekhwa. This abstract, non-objective practice, though not wholly representative of Hak’s influences, dominated Korean painting at the time and provides crucial context for his development.
Dansaekhwa, often translated as “monochrome painting,” is defined by physical engagement with material, deceptive simplicity, and destabilizing contrasts. Its influence emerges most clearly in Hak’s winter works. Untitled (Winter) (2017) depicts a forest stripped of its foliage, the ground blanketed in snow. Only bare trunks and branches remain, save for two birds perched on a branch in the foreground. At first glance, the canvas seems nearly all white, but closer inspection reveals a spectrum of grays—from ash to slate—layered into the surface. Thick slabs of paint have been built up and sculpted with a brush, giving the scene a dense materiality. Step back again and the landscape no longer appears void but alive with presence. What seems at first a quiet winter scene becomes instead a meditation on Dansaekhwa’s influence on Hak’s style.
In 1977, Hak moved to New York, where he encountered neo-expressionists such as Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer, along with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Characterized by intuitive mark-making and non-objective compositions that cover the canvas edge to edge—so-called “all-over paintings”—this movement was embodied by figures like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Its impact is clearest in Hak’s summer paintings. Green Shades and Fragrant Plants (1998) presents a bed of flowers—sunflowers, peonies, lilies—all bursting upward from an emerald ground to fill the surface without pause. While recognizably a summer scene with its dense greenery and saturated hues, the lack of horizon or pictorial depth flattens the canvas into a single, enveloping plane. As with Untitled (Winter), the true subject is not the image itself but Hak’s painterly practice.
What is most striking is how approachable these works remain. The collision of Dansaekhwa’s rigor with Abstract Expressionism’s abandon might have produced chaotic, unruly canvases. Instead, Hak distills these competing forces into the simple frame of the seasons. Though the stylistic influences are distinct, they never overwhelm; balance and clarity prevail. The exhibition offers a dual entry point: first, the comforting familiarity of seasonal change, and second, the conceptual interplay of styles. One may view it as a lyrical stroll through the year, but these works resist categorization. They are not conventional landscapes but something far more compelling.
