In recent years, Immersive exhibitions of beloved artists David Hockney and Van Gogh have gained enormous popularity. Utilizing VR and video projection, Immersive exhibitions fill huge spaces with light and sound to provide the viewer with the experience of stepping into the artwork. Since the original artwork isn’t on display, the immersive exhibition tours around the world without the burden of transporting the artwork.
“Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” a large-scale immersive exhibition of Van Gogh, has traveled to more than 35 cities around the world since 2017, recording more than five million visitors, and Singapore is its latest Destination. In Singapore’s Resorts World Sentosa hotel, projections of Van Gogh’s masterpieces, such as ‘The Starry Night’ and ‘Sunflowers,’ fill the 1,000-square-meter space, and a VR program allows visitors to virtually walk through the streets of Arles where the artist walked.
Van Gogh: The Immersive Experiece- Singapore
From March, 2023
M+, Asia’s leading international contemporary art center in Hong Kong, celebrated its first anniversary last November. To mark the occasion, M+ opened a major retrospective of polka-dot artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929).
Sponsored by The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), “Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now” is a large-scale exhibition that brings together works from Kusama’s earliest to most recent years. Encompassing painting, installation, sculpture, fashion, drawing, collage, video, and archives, the artist’s oeuvre and sources span a wide range of works and are organized around six themes: “Infinity, Accumulation, Radical Connectivity, Biocosmic, Death, and the Power of Life.”
The themes of life, death, and interconnectedness are central to the exhibition, and the core of Kusama’s aesthetic, including mirrors and polka dots, are presented in a variety of ways. The exhibition will be accompanied by a 400-page artist’s catalog.
Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959) is a leading Japanese contemporary artist widely recognized for his paintings of malevolent child characters. His cartoonishly simplified portraits of children, with their evil and sweet eyes, simple outlines, and subtle colors with multiple layers of paint, have attracted the attention of collectors and curators internationally.
Growing up in the war-torn countryside of northern Japan, Nara was influenced by Japanese anime, pop music, and European expressionism, and began drawing his signature child figures during his time in Germany in the 1990s.
Nara is currently exhibiting “Reach Out to The Moon, Even If We Can’t” at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. The exhibition is Nara’s first solo show in Australia and focuses on the period when Nara’s practice expanded into sculpture, in 2011 when the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster occurred. After the accident, the artist took his hand off the painting brush for a while and began to create sculptural works in which he could touch and shape the clay with his direct hands.
The Art Gallery of Western Australia
Yoshitomo Nara: “Reach Out to The Moon, Even If We Can’t”
February 26, 2023 – June 25, 2023