The first thing to greet you in Somerset House’s M.C. Escher: The Exhibition is the deep crimson of the galleries — a colour that deepens the mystery already surrounding Escher. What we tend to remember most readily about him are, of course, those vertiginous images: staircases that arrive nowhere, waterfalls that fold back into themselves, …
Few artists make you question your own eyes even as you look. Walking into M.C. Escher: The Exhibition at the Somerset House, that feeling sets in almost from the first step. A Building Made for Escher Somerset House may be the most fitting space in London to host an Escher exhibition. Stairs greet you …
I still remember the summer of 2024, standing before Euan Uglow’s work for the first time at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert. The paintings were not loud, one could even say they were quiet. And yet that quietness held something irresistible. I remember moving closer, then stepping back, then closer again, until I realised a long time had …
At the China Pavilion of London Craft Week 2026, “craft” was not presented merely as a display of traditional techniques. Instead, the exhibition used garments, textiles, patterns, and materials to explore a deeper question: what constitutes “Chinese beauty,” and how that beauty has been continuously shaped and transmitted through everyday life. Under the title They …
I moved through the crowds of the London Book Fair with a black tote bag over my shoulder. It had been handed to me in passing as I walked past a publisher’s stand. The publisher’s name was printed on it. It hung lightly from my shoulder, like a temporary pass, like a small sense of …
On 26 March 2026, Castle Howard marked the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of Sir John Vanbrugh with the exhibition Staging the Baroque: Vanbrugh at Castle Howard. The exhibition, designed and curated by architect Roz Barr, chronicles the story of this exciting creation and explores Sir John Vanbrugh’s visionary use of scale, shadow and light …
Among London’s many museums, Sir John Soane’s Museum stands apart. It is neither a space designed for exhibition, nor a historical building retrospectively adapted. Rather, it is a lived environment, constructed by an architect’s own hand. Stepping inside, one quickly realises that what is on display here is not merely a collection of objects, but …
What is a samurai? The question sounds simple enough — and yet, as Joe Nickols, Project Curator of the British Museum’s exhibition Samurai, is quick to point out, it has no clean answer. “Samurai are many things to many people,” he says. “They can’t really be fixed down.” For Nickols, this resistance to definition is …
“She has long since taken up the fight.” — Marianne Pitzen, Director of Frauenmuseum Bonn 「她早已投入這場抗爭。」 —— 瑪麗安娜·皮岑，波恩女性博物館館長 In 1989, at the opening of the China Avant-Garde Exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, Xiao Lu fired a gun at her installation Dialogue. At that moment, she did not yet speak the language …
Constable’s Six Footers: When Landscape Gains Weight 康斯特博的六英尺：当风景被赋予重量 In British art history, there is a term that belongs almost exclusively to John Constable —— the “Six Footers”. The phrase refers to a group of monumental landscape paintings Constable produced in the early nineteenth century. “Six feet”, in practical terms, means a canvas roughly 1.8 to …
When “Defining the Future of Creative Content” was announced as the theme of the 2026 London Book Fair, a compelling vision of publishing’s future began to take shape during the fair’s hour-long online press briefing. Supported by comprehensive industry data, the presentation sketched an optimistic picture: rising book sales across genres, expanding global circulation, and …
Wayne McGregor:Infinite Bodies is a landmark exhibition by internationally acclaimed choreographer Wayne McGregor, presented at Somerset House as a highlight of the institution’s 25th anniversary programme. Conceived not as a retrospective but as a forward-looking inquiry, the exhibition positions choreography as a method for thinking through the body in an era shaped by algorithms, artificial …
Shoran Jiang on This Is Art, Art Education, and Cross-Cultural Creativity 姜嘯然談《這才是藝術》再版、藝術啓蒙與跨文化創作 Early autumn in London. The sky stretches wide and clear, not a cloud in sight. Leaves drift and twirl gently as they fall, like a painting slowly unrolling, each stroke tracing the quiet passage of time. On such a tranquil afternoon, we …
Turner & Constable — Rivals & Originals Tate Britain 27 November 2025 – 12 April 2026 One of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of British landscape painting is undoubtedly the near-simultaneous appearance of J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837). Born less than a year apart, the two artists opened …
It was an honour to visit the Goodwood Art Foundation, a not-for-profit initiative launching this May and grounded in three pillars: art, environment, and education. For many, the name Goodwood first brings to mind the annual motorsport spectacles — the Festival of Speed and the Goodwood Revival. Beyond that roar, the Goodwood Art Foundation signals …
From 5 to 11 September 2025, Dead to Rights *1 will screen across multiple UK cities. Centred on a modest photo studio, the film intertwines the brutality of Nanjing in 1937 with the testimony of images. For British audiences, this history does not belong to the familiar landscapes of the Second World War; it appears …
In the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, sound is both a medium of transmission and a way of being. Even when its source fades, the echo remains; when space becomes a resonating chamber and the body begins to vibrate with it, the individual and the world, past and present, are joined anew through the experience of …
Jonathan Miles is an artist, writer, curator, and educator based in London. He currently teaches at the Royal College of Art. His practice spans painting, fiction, and critical theory, often seeking dialogue between image and text to challenge fixed narratives and structures of meaning. Jonathan Miles is the kind of person you remember quietly. He …
Mocube BEIJING Duo exhibition by Jonathan Miles, Xu Chenxi Curated by Deng Ting 09 Aug – 14 Sep 2025 Opening: 4pm, 09 August 2025 In celebration of a decade since its founding, MOCUBE presents The Softening of All Edges, a thoughtful and visually poetic duo exhibition by Jonathan Miles and Xu Chenxi, on view from …
Yoshitomo Nara 10 Jun – 31 Aug 2025 Hayward Gallery, London Yoshitomo Nara’s children do not smile. They glare, pout, sulk – or stare straight back at you with unsettling clarity. These wide-eyed, child-like figures, so central to Nara’s practice, have long evoked a range of contradictory responses: tenderness, defiance, vulnerability, and strength. They …
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting 20 June – 7 September 2025 National Portrait Gallery, London I was thinking about the way that faces come to us, like messengers from the elsewhere. As messengers they come and go, flickering in the light afforded by the day. They appear then as arrested light, as if bearers …
In the world of Korean picture books, Rury Lee (이루리) is often hailed as an idol of the genre. A writer, translator, editor, and publisher, Rury co-founded the publishing house BookGoodCome with his wife, Lee Soon-Young. Together, they have devoted themselves to creating and publishing picture books that bring comfort and healing to readers. His …
Bluerider ART Mayfair London 20th March – 18th May 2025 Like a messenger from a dream, the machine drifts lightly through the folds of time and space—at once familiar and strange—radiating a quiet, mysterious beauty. Barcelona-based artist Riera i Aragó employs seemingly ordinary symbols—airplanes, propellers, submarines, and boats—to evoke humanity’s enduring desire to explore. …
當我們第一次看到許晨茜的作品時，彷彿置身於某種熟悉卻難以言喻的夢境。那些畫面似曾相識，如舊時記憶的微光，在腦海中浮現又迅速隱去。這種介於認知與誤識之間的朦朧感讓人不禁思考：這種熟悉感究竟從何而來？它是視覺經驗的殘影，抑或是藝術史深處的回聲？ When we first encounter Chenxi Xu’s work, it feels like stepping into a dream—one that is at once familiar and impossible to name. The images seem to flicker like distant echoes of memory, surfacing for a fleeting moment before dissolving into silence. In this space between knowing and forgetting, a quiet question lingers: Where …
A juxtaposition occurs by virtue of the turning of the opening page of the listed works of catalogue for the Oskar Reinhardt Collection at the Courtauld. As both collections were formed in a similar time frame, they find a seamless resonance across the spectrum of works exhibited. The first painting by Goya appears as …
12th February – 4th June 2025 The Courtauld Gallery This portrait of Henri Michaux (1925) by Claude Cahun, portrays him as his own double. It is an image that draws him into the orbit of Surrealist encounter with connotations of hauntology, de-centred subjectivity, and estranged otherness. Perhaps the double also serves to confirm a relationship …
The book on Yin Zhaoyang:Landscape into Shanhe is a compressive overview of a sustained and impressive practice which opens out a transpersonal account of a Chinese response to Western aesthetic modernity, as well as the Chinese Classical tradition.
19 November 2024 – 26 May 2025 Dulwich Picture Gallery The title and premise of the exhibition suggests a fashionable wish to present Tirzah Garwood (1908-51) as an artist in her own right, who succeeded in getting away from the artistic influence of Eric Ravilious, her former tutor for wood engraving at Eastbourne School …
In the 1950’s and 1960’s London in common speech was called ‘the smoke’. Beginning in late 1899 Claude Monet set up his easel on his hotel balcony and then proceeded to paint views of the River Thames with all its fog-like effects. The views that are depicted show the objects of attention immersed with clouds …
Is the elsewhere a discernible place, or a circulation of the potential arrival of place? Anyway, this might be a state that is outside of immediate visibility, but there is nevertheless, a sense of something being there. It might even be the shape of the ‘yet to come’ looking back or a gaze of the …
The English edition of “A Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountain” will soon be published by Unicorn Publishing Group, through the agency of China National Publications Import and Export (Group) Co., Ltd. The book is the winner of Chinese Mao Dun Literature Prize, the top honour of literature in China. The original edition of the …
“But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” –Friedrich Holderlin “The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation burst forth.” –Julia Kristeva 「在危險之處，救贖的力量也悄然孕育。」 ——弗里德里希·荷爾德林 「厭惡的時間是雙重的：既是遺忘與雷鳴交織之時，也是無限被遮蔽與啟示爆發的瞬間。」 ——朱莉亞·克里斯蒂娃 Dark, sombre, and stark, this is an exhibition that touches upon a grim tonal …
Michael Craig-Martin Main Galleries，Royal Academy of Arts 21 September – 10 December 2024 1) This is an exhibition purely consisting of relationships to objects, and then mostly of objects close at hand or familiar. Rather than being arrangements of objects which are of the genre of still life, they are instead assemblages that are detached …
A letter to a friend I was thinking of such things, how one thing becomes something else to create yet another sensation of place. This is the work of an artist seized by a passion to be in this world but also to discover the yet to be encountered. Thus, the artwork invariably presents …
Silk Roads British Museum 26 September 2024 – 23 February 2025 絲綢之路，從小學起就學過，知道它蜿蜒曲折，是中西方交流貿易的重要通道。但是絲綢之路到底延伸到哪裡？絲綢之路連接了哪些地方，又帶來了多大的影響？大英博物館特展《八方絲路：萬里共芳華》一一為觀眾呈現了出來。 The Silk Road is something we have learned about since primary school—its winding, meandering path, and its role as an important route for trade and cultural exchange between East and West. But where exactly does the Silk Road extend? What places does …
National Gallery Until 27 October 2024 “Images embrace us: they open up to us and close themselves to us in so far as they conjure up in us something that we could call an interior experience.” –Georges Didi Huberman 「圖像包圍著我們：它們向我們敞開，也對我們關閉，彷彿在我們內心喚起了一種可以稱為『內在體驗』的東西。」 ——喬治·迪迪·於貝爾曼 The exhibition, Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look, is organised around a …
Rong Bao, one of the most prominent emerging contemporary artists from China’s new generation, is a true ‘art hopper’ leaping between mediums with bold creativity. Her work spans sculpture, painting, video, and installation, where she transforms the everyday into something extraordinary. Bao reshapes familiar objects to expose the absurdities and contradictions hidden in daily life. …
Curious and explorative, the Mermer series delves into the everyday and mundane feeling so commonly experienced in our technological world, but enhanced by the pandemic: our direct facing and relationship with screens. While the total lack of colour and the black and white nature of the paintings emphasise the contrast between the projected light on …
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London 20 July – 26 August 2024 What is the inaugural impulse for the undertaking? A visual transcription of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies and with this a rapture of vision, or the torment that Monet experienced due to having cataracts which caused the loss or greatly diminished sight? By drawing together …
Anthony McCall：Solid Light Tate Modern 27 June 2024 – 27 April 2025 “I find that I am now asked a particular question that used not to come up: ‘Are you making sculpture or are you making films?’ The way that this question is phrased puzzled me for some time, for it seemed to me …
“Every single thing he owns makes up one great collection. In him this passion shows its true face, the stern Indian expression that lingers on, but with a dimmed and manic glow, in antiquarians, researchers, bibliomaniacs. Scarcely has he entered life than he is a hunter. He hunts the spirits whose trace he scents in …
Maarten Van Aken’s works exude a profound power, a force that gently urges you to pause and contemplate. As you gaze upon them, the world seems to halt, and time loses its pulse. These are tranquil moments, bathed in light and warmth, where stillness reigns supreme.
“Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.” –Gaston Bachelard 「即使是孩子生活中的一件小事，也是該孩子世界中的一件大事，因此也是一件世界事件。」——加斯頓·巴什拉 When Phillipe Aries wrote ‘Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life’(1960) it developed a notion that the concept of childhood was a modern development dating as late as …
18 Jun – 1 Sep 2024 Hayward Gallery, London They were all assembled there. Not purely a history but an assembly of the dead with a sense of voices being released. Voices from the deep. What the exhibition presents is the possibility of releasing these voices in a rich tapestry of becoming. We can see …
Text by Jonathan Miles “Everything we see could also be otherwise. Everything we can described at all could also be otherwise.” —-Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Heraclitus said that thinking was walking into the strange. This exhibition begins with walking in a dimly lit corridor. Each spectator holds a small torch with which to navigate the …
“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” —-Virginia Woolf Sometimes even a small exhibition can be employed to through light on fragments of an artist life and this exhibition draws together works collected as part Courtauld Gallery, offering a …
The British Museum, in assembling drawings and letters from the last thirty years of Michelangelo‘s life have provide insights into his aesthetic development over this duration. As a devout Catholic, he is presented to be increasingly pre-occupied with the state of his own soul and it is the medium of drawing that is most intimately …
Euan Uglow might be seen as the finest exemplar of the tradition of Euston Road painting but then this places a limit on how he might be considered twenty-four years after his death. In his later years his somewhat spartan method of painting, was infused by a sensual use of colour that connects radiance to …
Guy Brett always appeared to defy art world fashion. He was involved with the short-lived Signals Gallery (1964-1966) and with this the newsletter publication. This enterprise drew together many artists from Latin America, Asia and Europe and so it became subject to the different influences of these continents. It should be described as a …
A gallery is designed to pass through as if it might stand in for the imaginary staging of historical passage. They are invariably crowded places, so passage is often interrupted or straited rather than smooth and continuous. If it is sculpture, there is a circulation around it, as if to steal a better view or …
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