May 18–Sep 1

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Seoul, South Korea

“The Untiring Endeavorer” at MMCA Seoul is a sprawling retrospective of Korean abstract artist Park Seo-Bo, showcasing some 160 works and archival materials from the 1950s to present. The exhibition takes a chronological approach to Park’s career, from his beginnings as a pioneer of the Korean Art Informel movement—associated with the gestural style of European modernists—to his shift in the 1970s toward a distinctly Korean abstract visual language in the form of Dansaekhwa. A highlight of the retrospective is a close examination of the development of Park’s seminal “Écriture” series (1970s– ), spanning his early white, pencil-marked canvases to more recent works utilizing hanji paper in richer hues.

May 24–Sep 1

Tate St Ives, United Kingdom

Lebanese artist Huguette Caland’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, at Tate St Ives, brings together a selection of paintings and drawings from the 1970s and ’80s that speak to her ongoing negotiation of abstraction and figuration. Caland is particularly renowned for her suggestive, vibrantly colored, large-scale canvases in which the female physique is rendered as abstract forms, at times reminiscent of the dramatic contours of hilly landscapes. A number of these paintings, including Bribes de corps (1973) and Madame (Mrs) (1980), will be on display, alongside Caland’s finely detailed illustrations of friends and acquaintances, as well as caftans she created in collaboration with the fashion designer Pierre Cardin.

Jun 2–Jan 5, 2020

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), United States

LACMA’s upcoming group exhibition, “The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China,” will showcase works by Chinese artists produced over the past four decades, exploring media-based experiments as a creative mode in itself. Curated by Wu Hung, director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, with Orianna Cacchione, curator of global contemporary art at Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, the exhibition views the association of materiality with the artist’s mode of expression as a “unique trend” in recent art history. “The Allure of Matter” is accompanied by an academic publication written by the curators and will travel to the Smart Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, after its Los Angeles run.

Jun 5–Aug 26

Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

Cao Fei’s solo exhibition, “HX,” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, marks the international debut of the artist’s latest research-based project. The show will feature video works, a feature-length film, installations, photographs, and items from the artist’s archive, all centered on the impact of rapid industrialization and urban sprawl on Beijing’s Hongxia neighborhood, where Cao’s studio is based. Merging local history with fictional accounts of the area’s past, present, and future, “HX” is the culmination of the artist’s four-year investigation into Chinese modernity through the microcosm of a morphing district. 

Jun 21–Oct 27

National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra, Australia

Spanning generations and a breadth of artistic approaches, “Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia” will bring both classic and newly commissioned works by 20 established and emerging Indonesian artists to the NGA in Canberra. Including painting, sculpture, photography, moving image, performance, and textiles, the major exhibition will showcase the diverse ways that Indonesian artists have tackled key issues within their changing country, from gender and sexuality to politics and environmentalism. Highlights include the Australian premiere of Melati Suryodarmo’s iconic durational performance Transaction of Hollows (2016), in which the artist repeatedly shoots arrows into white gallery walls, as well as new paintings by Zico Albaiquni.

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