M+, Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong, proudly announces Picasso for Asia: A Conversation, a groundbreaking Special Exhibition featuring more than sixty masterpieces from the late 1890s to the early 1970s by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) alongside works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists selected from the M+ Collections. Co-curated by M+ and Musée national Picasso-Paris (MnPP), the exhibition will be co-presented with the French May Arts Festival. Picasso for Asia: A Conversation will be held at M+ from 15 March to 13 July 2025. This exhibition is a significant milestone, as it marks the first instance in which masterpieces from the Musée national Picasso-Paris are being shown together with works from a museum collection in Asia. It will showcase Picasso’s enduring influence and relevance by putting the master artist’s works in dialogue with Asian contemporary artworks.

Picasso for Asia: A Conversation is co-curated by Doryun Chong, Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator, M+, and François Dareau, Research Fellow, Musée national Picasso-Paris, supported by Hester Chan, Curator, Collections, M+. The exhibition adopts a new, unique perspective to interpret Picasso’s legacy, exploring complex relationships between origin and reception, invention and adaptation, and West and non-West. More than sixty masterpieces by Picasso will be on loan from MnPP, which holds the largest and most significant repository of Picasso’s works in the world. These will be in dialogue with around eighty works from the M+ Collections by more than twenty Asian and Asian-diasporic artists from the early twentieth century to the present.

The exhibition will be the first significant presentation of Picasso’s works in Hong Kong in more than a decade and an unprecedented cross-cultural and intergenerational dialogue between the twentieth-century European master and contemporary Asian artists. Major works on view will include The Acrobat (L’Acrobate) (1930), Figures by the Sea (Figures au bord de la mer) (1931), Large Still Life with Pedestal Table (Grande nature morte au guéridon) (1931), Portrait of Dora Maar (Portrait de Dora Maar) (1937), and Massacre in Korea (Massacre en Corée) (1951) from the permanent collection of Musée national Picasso-Paris. Works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists from the M+ Collections, including Luis Chan, Gu Dexin, Madokoro (Akutagawa) Saori, Isamu Noguchi, and Tanaami Keiichi, will be on display together with Picasso’s oeuvre.

Suhanya Raffel, Museum Director, M+, says, ‘We are extremely proud to join hands with the Musée national Picasso-Paris to present a major exhibition based on the principle of shared dialogues. By considering Pablo Picasso’s extraordinary work over the period of his life, this exhibition is built around a premise that museums working together can build new ways of seeing. Celebrating the practices of Asian artists by bringing Picasso’s works into this conversation manifests M+’s unique role in creating multilayered dialogues around modern and contemporary art on a global level.’

Cécile Debray, President, Musée national Picasso-Paris, says, ‘Born of an innovative and inclusive partnership with M+ based on a genuine exchange of knowledge, skills, and expertise, Picasso for Asia: A Conversation is a groundbreaking exhibition, proposing a new methodology and a bold narrative. Pablo Picasso may be the most famous artist in the history of modern art, but offering a circular look at his art, examined through the prism of a contemporary Asian perspective that decentres from the Western point of view, is an unprecedented proposal. It is a wonderful way to continue our work of expanding Picasso’s audience and questioning his reception and artistic legacy.’

Doryun Chong, Deputy Director, Curatorial, and Chief Curator, M+, and exhibition co-curator, says, ‘Picasso for Asia: A Conversation asks a series of fundamental questions. Why is Picasso still the world’s most famous artist? Why are publics around the world drawn to and fascinated by his art more than fifty years after his death? What is the source of the enduring influence and legacy of his life and art? The exhibition will answer these questions that have far-reaching ramifications for understanding the history of modern and contemporary art and visual culture on a global scale, which is the core mission of M+.’

More exhibition details and ticketing arrangements will be announced in due course.

About Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 Málaga in the region of Andalusia on the southern coast of the Mediterranean. Celebrated for his unrivalled creative output and inexhaustible visual lexicon, the Spanish artist’s career spanned seven decades, from the turn of the twentieth century until his death in 1973. He left his mark on the history of twentieth-century Western avant-garde art, driving radical movements such as cubism, the reinvention of classicism, surrealism, and the expressive revival of painting at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. While he was first and foremost a painter, he was also accomplished in his sculpture as well as drawings, printmaking, and ceramics. Picasso settled in 1904 in France, where he lived and worked until his death, though he never naturalised. He was celebrated as the most renowned and paradigmatic modern artist during his lifetime, with his fame and influence reaching far corners of the globe.

About M+

M+ is a museum dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting visual art, design and architecture, moving image, and Hong Kong visual culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, it is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary visual culture in the world, with a bold ambition to establish ourselves as one of the world’s leading cultural institutions. M+ is a new kind of museum that reflects our unique time and place, a museum that builds on Hong Kong’s historic balance of the local and the international to define a distinctive and innovative voice for Asia’s twenty-first century.

About the West Kowloon Cultural District

The West Kowloon Cultural District is one of the largest and most ambitious cultural projects in the world. Its vision is to create a vibrant new cultural quarter for Hong Kong on forty hectares of reclaimed land located alongside Victoria Harbour. With a varied mix of theatres, performance spaces, and museums, the West Kowloon Cultural District will produce and host world-class exhibitions, performances, and cultural events, providing twenty-three hectares of public open space, including a two-kilometre waterfront promenade.

About Musée national Picasso-Paris

Inaugurated in 1985, the museum is located in the heart of Paris, in the Hôtel Salé. The Musée national Picasso-Paris collection comprises more than 5,000 works, and over 200,000 archive items. It is the largest collection of Picasso’s works in the world, and the only one to cover all of Picasso’s paintings, sculptures, engravings, and drawings, as well as the artist’s creative process through sketches, studies, sketchbooks, series of engravings, photographs, illustrated books, films, and documents. This exceptional collection is the result of three successive donations to the French State by the heirs of Pablo Picasso in 1979, by the heirs of Jacqueline Picasso in 1990, and then by Maya Widmaier-Picasso in 2021. Its mission is to act as a reference point for research into the life and work of Picasso and the artists with whom he was associated.