More than a century ago, Pablo Picasso smashed the Sacre-Coeur Basilica in Paris into a web of tangled lines on his canvas, deconstructing reality with the brushstrokes of a master cubist.
At a Hong Kong exhibition opening Saturday, that painting will be shown alongside a more literal form of destruction — a “gunpowder drawing” by Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang — as part of a cross-cultural exchange.
“Interest in (Picasso’s) life and work hasn’t subsided at all, including in Asia” in the half-century since his death, said Doryun Chong, artistic director and chief curator at the M+ museum.
The show will pair more than 60 masterpieces loaned from the Picasso Museum in Paris with around 130 works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists.
Highlights include “Portrait of a Man” from Picasso’s Blue Period, a 1937 horse head sketch for “Guernica” and “Massacre in Korea”, a 1951 expressionist anti-war painting.
“Exhibitions on Picasso tend to be very monographic,” said Chong, who co-curated the event.
“We felt that it’s more productive for understanding Picasso… that we create these unexpected juxtapositions and dialogues.”
Cecile Debray, president of the Picasso Museum in Paris, hailed the approach as being “decentred from the Western point of view”.
The last major Picasso showcase in Hong Kong, a more straightforward affair, took place in 2012 and drew huge crowds.
In the intervening decade, Picasso’s reputation has been dented by the #MeToo movement as critics decried his abusive treatment of wives and girlfriends.
“We are of course very open and honest about the rather disturbing aspects of his biography, but we also shouldn’t let that determine the meanings of his whole career,” Chong said.
Hong Kong officials have touted the four-month exhibition as part of “Art March”, hoping that high-brow events at museums, fairs and auction houses can boost the city’s international appeal.
Since opening in late 2021, M+ has seen more than eight million visitors — a bright spot for Hong Kong’s loss-making West Kowloon Cultural District.
Chong said the museum connects visual culture between Asia and the world, citing the example of how Picasso is placed next to self-taught local painter Luis Chan.
Chan, who drew ample inspiration from the Spanish master, was “of the older generation when formal training in art was not possible in Hong Kong”.
“Still he felt connected to the centre of the art world at the time in Paris, and the very important figure in that context (that is) Picasso.”
