In the 1970s, Semmel’s subject of choice, sex, and her medium, painting, were both taboo for feminist artists. The former was too risky at a time when women were asking not to be objectified. The latter was too commodifiable, and too burdened by centuries of patriarchal convention and bourgeois trappings to be useful as a tool for the feminist struggle. But Semmel didn’t care.

“I loved painting. It’s as simple as that,” she said this past October, sitting on a couch in Alexander Gray Gallery, where an enchanting 4-foot-square self-portrait, In The Pink (2004), hovered above her. Looking back at age 91, she recalled her defiance. “To give it up because someone told me it was dead seemed stupid.”

It was a bout of serious illness, in 1957, that first emboldened Semmel to disregard the expectations of others. That year, she spent six months in the hospital with tuberculosis—a traumatic experience, especially given that she was a new mother. And yet, suddenly she found herself free from the daily pressures of family. She read a book a day, and reflected on what exactly she wanted to do with her life, with newfound urgency.

Before getting sick, she had gotten a certificate from Cooper Union (the New York art school did not yet grant degrees). After recovering, she was determined to go back to school and get her BFA, so she enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Soon after graduating, she followed her husband to Spain, where he’d just gotten a job as a civil engineer, but not long after their second child was born, they split. Divorce was not yet legal in Spain, and a woman was forbidden from renting her own apartment without a husband or father on the lease. She started to see and feel the ways her “personal dissatisfactions stemmed from political structures.”

It was then that Semmel decided to stop caring what society expected her to do as a woman, and with that, she started to feel freer as a painter too. While in Spain for the next eight years, she worked mostly in the Abstract Expressionist vein that many of the New York painters of her generation had been schooled in. But like so many feminist artists of the era who started out in abstraction—Carolee Schneemann, Maria Lassnig, Joan Brown, Judy Chicago—she soon grew frustrated, and felt sidelined within a genre that was supposed to be “universal” but in reality kept privileging white men. At first, she said, she didn’t want to be called a woman artist. But soon, she found that her “way to resist” would be to embrace her identity. “I decided to say ‘Yes, I am a woman. And yes, I paint like a woman.’”

BY THE TIME SEMMEL RETURNED to New York in 1970, she was working in figuration. Women were the protagonists of her paintings. She wanted her work to help “change the way women understood themselves and understood sexuality,” and she didn’t see how she could do that through abstraction. “I didn’t see how anyone could deal with those issues without painting the body,” she said. Still, abstraction had its role in her work. Her “Sex Paintings” (1971) offer glimpses of bodies engaged in erotic acts, the scenes teetering into abstraction: brightly colored blobby stains threaten to bleed together but remain discrete. There are glimpses of bodily contours, but most details are left to the imagination.

After the “Sex Paintings” came the series widely considered her most important, the “Erotic Series” (1972), paintings of models who would have sex in her studio. Intimacy-Autonomy belongs to that group of paintings, all of them sexual scenes rendered realistically and lovingly, but in unexpected colors, and with unusual compositions that betray Semmel’s background in abstraction.

Those paintings, which today are in high demand, couldn’t find a dealer to show them at the time. “Nobody would touch them,” Semmel said. It’s a surprising story, and yet, one all too familiar for women artists. Undeterred, she took matters into her own hands. Using her savings, she rented a storefront in SoHo and then came in every day to be her own gallery attendant. This meant she got to watch all the visitors’ reactions, whether it was the critic for the Village Voice, who loved them, or “working people coming in on their lunchbreak”—SoHo was still a factory district at the time. “People were shocked,” she told me. Still, she was uncompromising and determined. “I had something to say,” she said assuredly.

Semmel’s message was that “women needed to acknowledge their own sexuality, acknowledge their own desire, and not always deny it, not always be passive.” Historically, the nude was a genre that catered to male pleasure, and taught women acceptable ways to express their sexuality. Semmel wanted to center a woman’s pleasure.

Examples of erotic art by women a generation before Semmel are couched in enough metaphors to give them plausible deniability: Georgia O’Keeffe insisted her flowers were not vulvas. For years, Louise Bourgeois described herself as “inhibited,” saying any erotic connotations in her work were “unconscious.” But Semmel was painting in a New York that was home to Studio 54 and Times Square sex clubs, in a mediascape now saturated with pornography. Subtlety wouldn’t do. She distinguished her work from centerfolds by using unusual hues—greenish gray for the figures in Intimacy-Autonomy, chartreuse and tangerine for those in Indian Erotic (1973)—because “I was so afraid of being called a pornographer. I was insisting it was art.” Half a century later, her “Erotic Series” still feels unusually tender for sex scenes, testifying to the ongoing necessity of her message.

AFTER FINISHING THE “EROTIC SERIES” Semmel started painting herself. Starting in the 1980s, as she neared 50, the men in her canvas disappeared—though she insists these works are not self-portraits. Rather, she started using herself as a model because she “wanted to avoid the objectification issue.” She also “didn’t want to speak for other women. I was speaking from my own experience.”

To paint her own body, Semmel often works from photographs. For this reason, the bodies in these paintings are often seen from the vantage of the figure herself, head cut off. In Sunlight (1978) and in Spaced Out (2019), the view is looking down at a body the way the artist looks at herself. She takes care to make this perspective unmistakable. In her series “With Camera,” the image reflects the camera in a mirror, which means it’s also pointed at the viewer. In each case, she’s making sure you know you’re seeing the artist through her own eyes.

Semmel has been painting herself for decades now. She knows that all too often, images of women are taken to signify women in general, not a specific human being. Depicting the same woman again and again, she doesn’t let her viewers make that mistake. Her subject is a constant, but her style is ever-changing. “It was always about making painting interesting to me,” she said. She has continued to combine expressionism and realism, figuration and abstraction in infinite configurations.

As a colorist, Semmel is skilled enough to dispense with any signature palette: “I’m rather catholic with my color choices,” she explained. “I’ll try one [palette] for a while and work through it, and then I get bored.” Her latest show, “Against the Wall,” which was on view last fall at Alexander Gray in New York, was full of lemons and lavenders, hot pink and chartreuse. Meanwhile, paintings like The Unchosen and Transformations (both 2011) feature an iridescent palette dominated by icy blues. In lieu of reliable hues, then, her hallmark is a delicate balance of unlikely combinations.

Another hallmark of her paintings is her doubling of figures. When a few works from the “Erotic Series” sat around in her studio unsold for a couple decades, she eventually painted new, looser figures right on top of them for a series called “Overlays” (1992–96). Sometimes, she echoed the figures she had painted decades before. Sometimes, she layered newer ghostly ones over them. “I was never interested in depicting a narrative or telling a story,” she said of this doubling effect. “I wanted the image to feel like an icon, but an icon that isn’t static, that doesn’t stay still.”

WHAT SETS SEMMEL’S WORK APART from that of other feminist artists is the way her paintings are acts of world-building. When she started out, most of her peers—Hannah Wilke, Judy Chicago—were making work protesting patriarchy, work that makes clear what the artist is against, rather than what she s for. Semmel told me she wanted to make work that was “not pedantic to the audience,” that was “not a “journalistic diatribe. I wanted you to experience the art object, not to just have it talking at you.” 

Semmel’s version of feminist art is also striking for the way it makes you feel, not just think. This she often achieved by delicately balancing opposites: man and woman, intimacy and autonomy, and more often than not, reds and greens. These opposites feel neither in tension nor resolved: instead, they simply coexist.

But Semmel’s most crucial contribution to feminist art might be the way she finds strength in vulnerability—“Vulnerability cannot be denied, and should not be denied,” she stressed—and it is easiest to see that embrace of vulnerability in the arresting self-portraits she has painted as she has aged: the images of her graying hair and wrinkling body have been regularly praised as brave in the way they refuse a life in the shadows, into which so many aging women are thrust. (Look no further than the recent Sex and the City reboot for proof of our culture’s deep discomfort with aging women: the show made every effort to hide the protagonists’ wrinkles, sags, and grays even as it attempted to be “woke.”) Semmel said she “never thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to work on aging now.’ It’s just that my body changed.”

“If we’re lucky,” she added, “we get to age.”

Sometimes, however, these paintings garner praise that verges on objectification. In 2011 New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote of a show of Semmel’s: “With her unlined face and only slightly pendulous, full-figured body, she appears, at 78, a figure of remarkably undiminished erotic appeal.” This kind of response is exactly why feminist critics feared the nude was not a viable political strategy: in 1976 critic Lucy Lippard complainedthat the most iconic works of feminist body art still centered women who were conventionally attractive. But in Semmel’s work, pleasure is unspoiled by power.

Then there are the loyal Semmel fans who engaged with her work long before its recent leap to popularity alongside the current trend for figuration. In 1999 artist Robert Gober curated a group show at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York that featured two paintings from the “Erotic Series,” alongside work by seemingly unlike artists including Cady Noland and Anni Albers. At that time, Semmel’s work, like that of many other figurative painters, was far less visible than it is today. Looking back at that show, Gober said he thought Semmel’s paintings “were powerful and unique, canonical but oddly ignored” and that he felt “they should be seen by another generation and fresh eyes.” Quietly championing women and queer artists for decades now, Gober also included the paintings in his 2015 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, marking Semmel’s MoMA debut.

Figurative painting has since become the splashiest artistic movement of this century, especially those works representing and memorializing the experiences of long-marginalized groups. These days, Semmel’s work is seen as trailblazing by younger figurative painters like Jenna Gribbon, a New York artist who paints intimate scenes of herself and her wife. “Joan Semmel is a giant,” Gribbon told me just after meeting the artist for the first time, at the opening for a show—“Making Their Mark” at the Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg Foundation—that included them both. “Her work is very generous and very powerful. My work is obviously indebted to her.”

Over the past decade, figurative painting has become almost too popular, catnip for a speculative art market. I asked Semmel what it was like to watch the tide turn so dramatically: in her day, she was practically peerless. She reflected that “before the ’80s,” artists hardly imagined receiving “fame and money” from their work. But soon enough, “the incentive for people to enter the field changed.” As for Semmel, she did it “with or without acknowledgment. Making art is a compulsion.” 

And so, a mural Edades painted with Galo B. Ocampo and Carlos “Botong” Francisco—Mother Nature’s Bounty (1935)—opens “Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America” at the National Gallery Singapore. The show surveys shared formal and political sensibilities in art from the two tropical regions, all made in the 20th century. This trio painted the Philippine revolution, borrowing motifs from the Mexican muralists with whom they share a colonizer: Spain. Both groups painted scenes packed with workers, whose bodies are rendered sturdy and statuesque, forming all-over compositions.

This mural hangs near Pobre Pescador (Poor Fisherman), 1896, by Paul Gauguin—the notorious French painter of Tahitian scenes. Gauguin, “Tropical” argues, planted stereotypical images of the tropics in the minds of many—images of a peaceful paradise, endless summer, lazy natives, and free love. That last one, “free love,” is a grating contortion, coming from a man whose muse was his child bride. But instead of canceling Gauguin fully, “Tropical” positions his work as the problem so many tropical artists were working against. Eat Pray Love, the best-selling memoir Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about finding herself in Bali in the wake of a divorce, is included for similar reasons in a library of tropical literature presented as part of the show.

Many paintings here contend with the way pastoral imagery was entwined with various projects of colonialism, which used images of verdant land brimming with untapped resources as justifications for occupation. A group of these landscapes is hung on apparatuses designed by the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, an icon of tropical modernism who, for a museum she designed in São Paulo, placed paintings on clear vertical planks stuck in blocks of concrete. She wanted to arrange works not linearly, but in what she called “a marvelous entanglement.” On these devices, labels are placed behind the paintings rather than next to them, so walking about, you’re forced to delay categorizing the mixture of works into their respective regions. Instead, you’re left attending to their affinities—chief among them their jewel-toned palettes, with rusty oranges and royal blues extending from verdant emeralds.

Mostly, these works refute ideas of untouched lands full of lazy natives with scenes showing workers, bustling streetscapes, and active human beings. Vibrant street scenes by S. Sudjojono, a founder of Indonesian modernism, stand out: he insisted on the political power of painting, always reminding people that the medium was no master’s tool, since it began not in Europe, but rather Egypt.

The most provocative pastoral riff is by Semsar Siahaan, whose 9-foot version of Manet’s Olympia shows a nude blonde woman lounging in sunglasses and heels, sipping from a coconut decorated with flowers. In Siahaan’s rendition from 1987, dozens of locals surround her, flocking from the surrounding land to dote, point, or stare. A brown foot extends from under her bed, right next to her suitcase, as if the man who carried her luggage also offered himself as an ottoman. Another work by Siahaan is a suite of sculptures the Indonesian artist burned: they were first made by his teacher at the Bandung Art Academy, fusing traditional techniques with European ones. Siahaan protested this effort to “modernize” Indonesian art by setting the wooden works ablaze.

In addition to subversions of stereotypes, there’s a section dedicated to self-portraiture. Here and throughout, art historical icons are paired with under-recognized artists. An especially striking pairing includes a 1945 picture of Frida Kahlo in which the Mexican artist is embraced by a monkey: the pair of primates wears matching chartreuse hair ribbons. Kahlo’s painting is shown next to Patrick Ng Kah Onn’s 1958 self-portrait, wherein the Kuala Lumpur–born artist, a Chinese male, depicts himself as a Malay woman in a provocative meditation on identity, one rare for its time. The works rhyme visually, sharing browns and golds, and both artists stare straight-on, framed by their bushy eyebrows.

Another memorable moment of self-representation comes in the form of a filmed 1960s interview with Ni Pollok, an Indonesian dancer who was the muse—and later, wife—of the Belgian artist Adrien-Jean le Mayeur de Marpès, who painted idyllic Balinese scenes with her dancing in the center. We see not his canvases but an interview with Pollok who, in a scene that sums up the show, is asked whether she considers Bali a tropical paradise. “No,” she replies. “I was just born here.”

Akeem Smith gathered this footage as part of his experimental archive of all things dancehall-related. It includes a party that took place on September 10, 2001, then extended into the morning. About 20 minutes into his edit, the sun rises, and twin images of towers clouded in smoke flank the dancers. The attacks have begun, but news hasn’t yet reached the partyers.

The work, titled Social Cohesiveness (2020), is on view in an exhibition at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin. Here, for the first time in decades, footage of September 11 feels shocking again.

Smith’s work is part of an exhibition titled “Unbound: Performance as Rupture” that surveys performances, from the late 1960s to the present, that are meant for (or completed by) the camera rather than a live audience. There are no live performances, no dry documentation of works once staged before audiences. What we get instead is a grouping of works in which cameras serve as choreographic collaborators, or live pieces that are fully realized only after a visit to the editing suite.

Sanja Iveković’s Personal Cuts (1982) is on view next to Smith’s Social Cohesiveness, and uses a similar editing technique. Wearing black pantyhose over her head, Iveković cuts holes in the dark membrane, then intercuts that footage with scenes sampled from Yugoslav television. As with Smith’s work, the piece resonates for the way it oscillates between the personal and the political: subjects experience their own bodies and, simultaneously, larger sociopolitical contexts. Cutting from establishing shots to close-ups and back again, Smith and Iveković emphasize and obliterate the gulf between them.

It’s one of several intergenerational pairings on view here. Another strong one is the opener, which pairs Peter Campus’s iconic Three Transitions (1973) with Sondra Perry’s Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera I & II (2013). The former shows the artist painting his face chroma-key blue before a video camera, which causes it to disappear. Forty years later, Perry filmed two Black performers dancing frenetically in front of a white background. The blurring of the figures in this two-channel piece owes not only to the speed of their movement, but also to the use of an editing tool something like an AI eraser. The result explores the twinned hyper-surveillance and invisibility of Black people in white spaces, Perry’s gesture of opacity serving as counterpoint to Smith’s voyeuristic view.

These pairings of video art icons alongside a younger, more diverse generation of artists helps craft a lineage and a formal vocabulary. They also show how early experimental techniques are now being updated and wielded to new ends.

The youngest artist in the show is Panteha Abareshi, who in Unlearn the Body (2021) enlists assistive devices to contort their bandaged body: a walker becomes a pull-up bar; the padding of a crutch cradles their neck at an uncomfortable angle. Abareshi recorded it all on Super 8, then edited the footage in a manner that betrays the medium’s materiality: the artist has memorably likened the beautiful defunctness of analog media to the experience of being disabled. Mechanisms might work differently, or less efficiently; sometimes, there is elegance in the glitches that ensue. Near Abareshi’s work, a photograph shows Joan Jonas contorting elegantly in a hula hoop, her body illuminated by a TV monitor. Another print shows Valie Export bound around the base of a column, back arched.

All this reminded me of a helpful schema that artist Dara Birnbaum charted out in video art’s early days. She noticed that documentation of performances by the likes of Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Joan Jonas, tended to be done in black-and-white. Meanwhile, works engaged with critiquing mass media—several of Birnbaum’s own, as well as those by Antoni Muntadas and Dan Graham—tended to be in color. The artists in “Unbound,” break down this binary, since soon enough, it became impossible to understand oneself as wholly separate from mass media anyway.

That might sound like a somewhat loose theoretical idea, but the show in fact assembles a tight group of works. The line of thinking is much easier to follow than MoMA’s “Signals,” last year’s sprawling intergenerational video art exhibition. What’s more, “Unbound” hosts twenty something works in video, but paces them expertly so it all feels watchable—a curatorial feat I had previously thought impossible. Seating helps.

“Unbound” also includes performances so difficult to capture with a camera that the challenge becomes a creative prompt, as in Algerian artist Lydia Ourahmane’s In the Absence of Our Mothers (2018). The story behind that work begins in 2014, when Ourahmane bit into something soft and lost a troublesome tooth. The next year, she learned moving details about the life of her grandfather, who decided to pull out all his teeth in an act of self-mutilation that rendered him decidedly unfit to fight in World War II. Not long after, the artist met a man at a street market in Oran who tried to sell her a gold necklace, one he said his mother gave to him to sell to support the family. She bought it, then had it melted down into two teeth: one lives in her mouth, and the other on the wall next to a photograph of sorts—a dental X-ray the artist had taken. It’s a wild story, but here, the photograph becomes a kind of proof, all the while insisting this is more than a dental intervention: it’s a meaningful homage.

“Unbound,” then, is a show about the ways the personal and political intersect; about those places where bodies meet technology, but also ideology; and how the everyday rubs up against larger historical narratives. As we once again try to go about our daily lives while learning of relentless horrors through screens, this subject couldn’t be more timely.

Judy Chicago became the most famous feminist artist of her generation when, for her monumental Dinner Party (1974–79), she enlisted hundreds of women volunteers to contribute craftwork to her giant triangular table. On that table, Chicago set plates dedicated to notable women from history, from the goddess Ishtar to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. But in lieu of food, she served each woman a unique ceramic vulva, decorated as a tribute to her work.

This iconic installation toured 16 venues in 6 countries, with a message to women everywhere: you are never alone, even if you find yourself isolated in the domestic sphere. And in 2001, The Dinner Party became the centerpiece of the Brooklyn Museum’s feminist art center.

Though clearly popular, The Dinner Party, like much of Chicago’s work, has also received plenty of criticism—for both its TERF-y equation of womanhood with vulvas, and for its whiteness. In 1984 critic Hortense J. Spillers pointed out that Chicago had included only one Black woman, Sojourner Truth, and represented her unlike the others, with faces instead of a vulva. Spiller calls the result “symbolic castration.”

Even though Chicago enjoys the status of feminist icon, and of being a household name, her retrospective at the New Museum in New York, titled “Herstory,” hasn’t exactly been a buzzy blockbuster. That’s probably because Chicago is not quite the artist we need right now: in 2024 she is known for a version of feminism that is popular and palatable, but also pretty narrow.

While many are tempted to write off Chicago completely, I find myself a nervous witness to a trend afflicting a younger generation that seems to feel that history—say, that of second-wave feminism—is bad, since people were more racist, sexist, and imperialist back then. They’re not wrong, but the attitude misses the importance of learning from history and from elders like Chicago: you can grow from others’ mistakes, and you would be wise to honor the trailblazers who made sacrifices to carve imperfect but important paths for change.

The reason I got into art history in the first place was to learn about how ideas like gender both morphed and persisted across time and culture. And yet, I know that it would be too simplistic to give Chicago’s art a pass for being a mere product of its time. She had plenty of feminist contemporaries whose work did age well, including visionary artists like Adrian Piper and Hannah Wilke. Instead of dreaming big, Chicago looked to history—or herstory—for answers, and in the process, got stuck in reverse.

Still, we can learn from Judy Chicago. One lesson is that, yes, her work feels out of touch. But this, in some respects, is a good thing. Its datedness shows that society has progressed beyond some of the basic and exclusionary ideas that belonged to her and to many others. Which, of course, is not to say that her celebration of women did no damage to the feminists who didn’t see themselves represented. The New Museum seems to have tried balancing this out by giving the first floor over to trans artist Jade Kuriki-Olivo, aka Puppies Puppies, an impressive talent placed in an awkward position.

The greatest lessons Chicago has to offer come from her early works in abstraction, since they tell the story of the artist Chicago did not become. Before The Dinner Party,Judy Chicago made minimalist, geometric sculptures and op art paintings in shades of pastels and pink, imbuing then-dominant styles with feminine flair. The language of avant-garde abstraction, she inadvertently proved, was by no means universal. It was, instead, deeply entrenched in masculine norms, often privileging cool rationality over warm feelings, and favoring restrained colors over “pretty” ones.

Rainbow Pickett (1965), which opens “Herstory,” was included in the landmark Minimalist art exhibition “Primary Structures” in 1965 at the Jewish Museum in New York, where its color palette set it apart from the other offerings, most of them by men.But beyond that early recognition, Chicago recalls in her autobiography that she experienced a lot of misogyny and dismissal from critics, curators, and collectors. She also noticed that while there were plenty of other female students when she was in art school, few of those women went on to become professional artists.

Chicago started researching women who enjoyed creative careers throughout history, hoping to learn from them. Soon, she turned this research into the subject of her art. In 1970 she founded a women-only art program at Fresno State College—a radical move at a time before women could open their own bank accounts in the United States. With her students and artist Miriam Schapiro, she filled an entire California house with collaborative experiments in feminist art. The energy of this endeavor is palpable at the New Museum, even through the grainy documentation laid out in vitrines.

Her first major series after The Dinner Party, “Birth Project”(1980–85), still offered glimpses of her compositional command. Rather than paintings, these gorgeous abstractions of birth scenes were done in needlework with myriad collaborators: here again, Chicago movingly celebrated a technique that had been feminized by society, and thus dismissed. But her reductive way of celebrating women once again spoils the project. It’s sad to witness a powerhouse like Chicago resort to praising women on such unimaginative terms: as life-giving forces. We have so much else to offer, and there are so many other ways to be a woman—which childless Chicago surely knows, having herself said, “there was no way on this earth I could have had children and the career I’ve had.”

Sadly, the newer works aren’t much more imaginative. On one floor of the show, for an installation titled “The City of Ladies,” Chicago curated a selection of works by more than 80 creative women, among them Hildegard of Bingen, Frida Kahlo, and Zora Neale Hurston. These hang under a banner Chicago first made for a 2020 Dior runway show that asks what if women ruled the world? With that banner, she doubles down on her reductive approach with a literal one-liner. The slogan glosses over the differences among the many women in “The City of Ladies,” plenty of whom surely envision a feminist utopia that dispenses with rulers altogether.

In those early abstractions, Chicago is actually quite capable of making nuanced art, of sidestepping the reductive didacticism for which she became known. The abstractions Chicago painted on car hoods are by far her strongest works. Her colorful, symmetrical, geometric compositions feel like Rorschach tests: are those forms you’re seeing genitalia between spread legs? The gorgeous yet confusing paintings make you think about the body’s presence while also reflecting on your own gaze.

But Chicago experienced too much misogyny in the body shop, so she walked out, and in her frustration, opted for a language that was more urgent, less nuanced. I’m sympathetic to her reasons, yet disappointed in her results. I left the show with the overwhelming sense that it’s really too bad society wasn’t ready to make space for that Judy Chicago, who was quite a promising artist.

I care deeply about the nonhuman world, yet I hesitated at Rao’s suggestion that oil extraction, banned books, and ethnic cleansing belong together under the umbrella of “violence.” In a talk at the opening of her show, however, Rao convincingly insisted that the parallels are by no means metaphorical and, rather, relate to tragedies that are deeply intertwined. Armenian people, the artist said, “have only rocks and dust.” Then she pointed out how Euro-American countries offer aid to peoples rich with oil but seem less concerned with the plight of those without. Attesting to the entanglement of electric and geopolitical power, a 40-foot sculpture of an energy pylon shoots up the central cavity of the museum, as if extracting energy while it stands tall to transmit stories.

Rao, who represented Singapore in the 2022 Venice Biennale, has long devoted her practice to narratives both censored and untold, deftly weaving together seemingly disparate topics. The Rockbund commissioned a new feature-length film, These Petrified Paths, that centers on the preservation of manuscripts by forgotten Armenian feminist writers, as well as on the work of women librarians preserving those texts. The film advocates preserving Armenian culture alongside Armenian life. Surrounding the projection screen is a sinuous vitrine in which a black, oil-like liquid flows. Elsewhere, on the wall, a provocative footnote ties it all together by asking a question I’ve been chewing on ever since: “What is more short-sighted and fleeting than fossil-fuel reliance, and what has proved more enduring and persistent than the power of story and retelling?”

I was thinking of that footnote—which is really a sort of thesis—as I visited the Shanghai Biennial. There, I read a quote by one of the artists involved, a Filipino filmmaker named Kidlat Tahimik, who, in wall text next to his cinematic installation, states that “colonizers subjugate indigenous people by first destroying their mythologies,” then adds that “we become the stories we consume.” The Shanghai Biennial—like Rao’s exhibition, and other shows that opened as part of Shanghai’s art week in November—offers a chance to think about how we narrate the world around us through both art and science.

This year’s edition, titled “Cosmos Cinema,” concerns the enduring human impulse to explore outer space, literally and metaphorically. Curated by Russian American e-flux founder Anton Vidokle, the giant yet focused exhibition is born of ideas put forth by the Russian Cosmism movement spearheaded by philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who wrote in 1851 that science, philosophy, art, and social organization were all “equal partners in the common task” of the project of humanity. Artists and scientists alike have long looked to the stars to ask who we are and where we come from. (Carl Sagan memorably described this impulse as “life looks for life.”)

The most compelling works make plain how scientific facts are often narrated from specific points of view. Black Liberation Zodiac (2017–) by Johannesburg-based artist Nolan Oswald Dennis looks to the stars from the perspective of the Southern Hemisphere, where constellations appear different than they do in the North. On intricate astral maps papering the walls of a room, Dennis charts new Zodiac signs, mapping the stars not according to the familiar Eurasian myths but borrowing from the symbology (a panther, a fist) of Black liberation. Our understanding of the universe, Dennis shows, is not universal. Instead, it is a matter of perspective. It’s a reminder to think critically about where ideas come from, and to consider whom certain stories serve.

Sometimes when artists play scientist or ask us to question established truths, I get nervous about how they might play into our culture’s already eroding faith in facts. One such work that made me wonder was by Los Angeles– and Shanghai-based artist Alice Wang, who has on view a grid of glass tiles that form a starry sky as if in 8-bit. The label describes her medium as “leftover radiation from the Big Bang,” casting what is commonly referred to as a theory (that, billions of years ago, a giant explosion suddenly created the entire universe) as certifiable fact—and in an authorless, authoritative, institutional voice.

While art doesn’t always have to be factual, artists should fabulate with caution, as the danger in doing so can’t be overstated. Powerful narratives, as Rao and Tahimik remind us, get ingested whether or not they are true. Fact and fiction both impact the way we understand the world, and that understanding then spills back out. There is no better evidence of this than the Big Bang Theory itself—which originated not in the work of scientists but in that of the great storyteller Edgar Allen Poe, whose 1848 poem “Eureka” sketched out the idea 80 years before scientists started considering the physics behind how it might have worked. His powerful narrative took hold long before we had anything that might constitute evidence.

Truth and metaphor, or science and art, meet to different effect in Wang’s and Dennis’s hands. Both artists hew to the middle of the spectrum of factuality organizing art-science projects (though Dennis plays with order and reason for purposes that seem clear and useful). At one extreme of this spectrum, there are illustrative factual works that just look like exhibits at a science museum. These are typically harmless and well-intended—usually driven by that sense of the sublime that can come from learning something new about how the world works—but they are also often boring and didactic. One such work in the Biennial is an installation by Dutch artist Jonas Staal, who created a matrix of lightboxes displaying pictures of various creatures that were sent into space—a guinea pig, an insect, a dog. The boxes are marked with the creatures’ names, along with details concerning when and how they went up—and whether or not they survived the extreme conditions. It’s interesting information, but Staal didn’t do much to transform or make meaning from it, save for slapping on a slogan: exo-ecologies unite.

At the other end of the spectrum, artists might engage science but make work that is obviously absurdist. My favorite such spin in “Cosmos Cinema” is Shuang Li’s ÆTHER (Poor Objects), a frenetic nonnarrative video from 2021 in which shots of an eclipse are intercut with scenes showing a preening online influencer using a ring light. It’s a celestial phenomenon reduced to a domestic scale, wherein the sublime experience of the expansive universe gets flipped into simple narcissism.

Buttressing all this heady art were two bustling fairs brimming with abstract paintings. At West Bund, you got more established, international galleries, whereas the energy at Art 021 was younger and more local. At first, I felt relieved that maybe the figurative painting craze might finally take a breather, but it quickly became clear that most of the abstractions were pretty forgettable. Exceptions included some trippy textural works by Jiang Miao and disorienting assemblages by Wang Xin, as well as Zhong Wei’s canvases, with splatters so cartoony that they caricatured the grand emotion associated with Abstract Expressionism.

Maybe the move toward abstraction was born of figuration fatigue, but I also wondered whether it might simply be easier to get by the censors in China, where everything in fairs and exhibitions must be submitted for approval before it can be shown. Artists and exhibitors made it sound as if a lot of guesswork went into what did and didn’t get accepted, but everyone I talked to either had been censored or knew someone who was. Some artists spent years on projects they didn’t think were controversial, only to learn they couldn’t show the results. One artist had videos censored several times, and told me that if it happened once more, they feared they’d wind up on a kind of blacklist. So, they stopped making videos altogether and switched to sculpture. Because of this, many young people—based on my brief visit and supported by conversations while there—seem to have developed an aversion to the black-and-white herd mentality and moralist thinking so common in the United States, since that is the attitude of their own reactionary government.

As China rapidly urbanizes, much of the younger generation of Chinese artists and curators who were educated abroad are now coming back to lead the country’s booming art scene. Shanghai has far more museums, galleries, and art malls than I could see on my 144-hour visa. But punctuating all this growth, glamour, and globalization, one more art-science installation makes a quiet but powerful urban intervention. In the courtyard of the Rockbund, a collection of British colonial buildings that David Chipperfield recently converted into a luxury complex, sit potted plants arranged by Hong Kong–based artist Zheng Bo. They are species native to the region and under threat, many having been weeded out or replaced by construction. This has rippling effects, since they are the species most friendly to the bugs and birds in the local ecosystem. They are also a symbol—clearly, yet oh so subtly—for the effects of globalization on Shanghai: a quiet protest that questions which traditions, and which beings, will be given a chance to thrive.

“Which orifice am I looking at?” is a question you’ll likely find yourself asking as you explore Tishan Hsu’s latest show at Vienna Secession. It’s a curious query to mull as you’re unable to look away from labial-looking mouths and anus-appearing belly buttons, all recurring throughout the exhibition’s dozen sculptures and wall works.

A most intriguing orifice can be seen in a photograph that Hsu affixed to the end of an abstract, lumpy, supine sculpture, right between two leglike mounds that appear to be spread apart. There, a black hole punctures through a distended mound of flesh. The print, with its black edges and rounded corners, might be mistaken for an iPad—even a moving image. For a moment, you may expect full-on body horror in the form of a video of a prolapsed anus. (Nearby, Hsu shows an actual video work in which bodily bits lurk behind a meshy surface, moving so slowly that you’re primed to question whether the things on-screen are moving or still.) Step closer to this mysterious orifice and you’ll see an innocent picture of an ear that—shot from an unusual angle, its attendant head blurred out—Hsu has rendered utterly uncanny.

Hsu wants viewers to attend to the changing ways that technology encourages us to relate—or not—to our own bodies. He shows us how we can now see ourselves from more angles than ever before, and yet this often breeds alienation instead of intimacy.

This exhibition in Austria debuts new works by a septuagenarian artist who’s been exploring ever-weirder relationships between bodies and technology since the 1980s. He worked largely under the radar until a 2020 traveling survey at SculptureCenter in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. His next stop was the 2022 Venice Biennale; amid all this, he retired from teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. Now, he’s debuting new works that are his best yet.

Hsu’s art is sleek and clean, but leakage seeps beneath the surface. In his new work, he’s nailed the push-pull in ways that both mesmerize and disgust. Though his works are regularly described as sci-fi, you’ll be hard pressed to declare them either dystopic or utopic. Instead, Hsu evokes the twinned ways that technology both estranges and enlivens our bodies. It’s work clearly born of an era in which cyborgian devices—pacemakers, nebulizers, insulin pumps—are enabling longer lives. How miraculous, and how bizarre.

Hsu’s works are the quintessence of abjection, which, per the philosopher Julia Kristeva, refers to that which has been cast off, or to that which does not respect boundaries. In her 1980 book Powers of Horror, Kristeva memorably describes how long hair is often beautiful when attached to a woman’s head, but then disgusting once disembodied. Hsu’s abject forms include orifices isolated from bodies, and edges that seep subtly, quietly threatening to contaminate the pristine white cube in which they’re set. Some fleshy frames ooze beyond their rectangular confines—gently, as if viscous. Other paintings with neon-hued backs are mounted inches from the wall, their florescence bouncing behind.

Hsu’s isn’t art that tells you what to think but, instead, leaves you with an unsettling feeling that you can’t quite resolve, that can make you look at something ordinary like you’ve never seen it before. Something you thought you knew—like an ear.

Soon enough, he started sculpting with beeswax instead of using it to make molds. And shortly thereafter, he began collaborating with bees directly. He built steel and wooden armatures, then covered them in beeswax, which naturally attracts honey bees. The insects then deposited wax and honeycombs of their own, building up the surfaces and forms. He had bees sent to him in the city, and told me that “before 9/11, you could ship 20 pounds of live bees by US Mail.” He called the finished works “apisculpture.”

Before he could even finish his MFA, the apisculptures made a splash. Works he showed in a 1985 group exhibition at Grace Borgenicht Gallery received a glowing review from legendary critic Gary Indiana, a write-up in People Magazine, and then, in 1987, had the honor of landing snapshots in a rare New Yorker issue to include photographs. The second apisculpture he ever made, at age 26, titled Mr. Zivic (1986), was promptly acquired by the Hirschhorn Museum. Gallerygoers were perhaps somewhat overexcited; a visitor took a bite out of a sculpture at that 1985 opening, hungry for honeycomb.

Now this was the hyper-commercialized and sensationalist art world of the 1980s. There was little room for work so subtle and sincere. “The gallery system … was like a treadmill,” Puett recalled. His dealer helped him figure out how to make the works more archival, more market friendly: once the bees were done sculpting, he started freezing and sterilizing the wax forms, then showing them in glass cases, where no one would mistake them for snacks. Suddenly, they were collectible. But still, Puett was showing and lecturing alongside peers like Jeff Koons and Anish Kapoor, who made big shiny sculptures that gobbled up the art world’s attention.

When Puett’s dealer pushed him to work on the larger scale popular among his peers, he had to explain that that isn’t how bees work. A swarm of 100,000 bees is the size of a mini fridge, he told me. “That’s a lot of bees. That’s a lot of energy. Those little brains are, collectively, doing a lot of work.” Even if you get “a swarm the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, they won’t necessarily make something bigger or better.” He was also pressured to make the works more attractive—“they really do look like pieces of chicken,” he admitted—and to cast them in bronze. But this ran against the spirit of the project. Bees were his collaborators, not tools. “They might just swarm out and go somewhere else,” he said, and that’s their choice. Besides, these weren’t sculptures for the human eye alone. “They’re not meant to be beautiful.”

All the attention had seemed encouraging at first: Puett hoped that it might benefit the bees, and finally correct their reputation as vicious stingers. (This was before they’d been declared endangered, before they became a species to save.) Honeybees, he said, “are nice, fuzzy little animals” who sting far less frequently than people think. They are also the only insect that humans have domesticated, besides silkworms. He hoped too that his work might encourage urbanites to reconnect with nature. His apisculptures often took the shape of human figures because he wanted to create an image of the hive overtaking the individual, nature overtaking humans.

But then Puett learned that all the while, his art dealer had been getting “someone to fly over his whole [residential] compound and spray insecticide every spring … even as he was promoting a bee artist!” And with that, he left the commercial art world, participating only in the occasional museum project. In 1995 he gave up on New York, leaving his $400 per month waterfront Williamsburg loft for full-time beekeeping in Hawaii. He now operates one of the largest certified organic honey farms in the United States, caring for 2,000 colonies.

UNTIL VERY RECENTLY, interspecies artistic collaborations have been few and far between. If such collaborations made headlines, it was for the shock factor, and more often than not, constituted outright animal abuse. The most notorious examples have enlisted not insects, but furry friends. In 1974 Joseph Beuys locked himself in a room with a coyote for three days for a performance that became iconic, titled I Like America and America Likes Me. Three years later, Tom Otterness shot and killed a shelter dog for a film before reinventing himself as a whimsical sculptor whose plump bronze figures now bumble about New York’s 14th Street subway station. Then, in 2007, Otterness apologized and called Shot Dog Film “indefensible.” The 2003 video Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu shows dogs harnessed on treadmills, trying to run toward one another; it was removed from a 2017 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum after protests led by animal rights activists. And Eduardo Kac claimed, in 2000, to have had a rabbit named Alba genetically engineered using extracted green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish to make her glow. Alba was never seen publicly, so some are skeptical. Still, Kac was accused of “playing God.”

These works aren’t so much collaborations as efforts to enlist animals as artistic materials or playthings, as symbols serving human-centered narratives. But as the climate crisis lays bare the devastating consequences of this anthropocentric approach to nonhuman life forms, artists like Jenna Sutela, Beatriz Cortez, and Candice Lin choose methods more like Puett’s and other eco artists’: they invite other species in as contributors or collaborators who might add their own perspectives. They are working with other species in order to ask how we might ethically and responsibly collaborate and cohabitate.

Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis tends to get the credit for helping artists and thinkers understand just how urgent interspecies collaboration really is. She argued against Darwin’s theory of evolution—which hinges on the survival of the fittest—and showed that instead, life-forms have coevolved interdependently. We humans, for example, don’t make our own food the way photosynthesizing plants do. We rely on and enable the thriving of other species; we don’t just compete and conquer. Margulis was dubbed the “patron saint” of a recent exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, “Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere,” by cocurator Caroline A. Jones. In the catalogue, Jones asked: “If we are dependent on other living entities to survive, how should we acknowledge and honor that affiliation? How shall we live with responsibility and reciprocity in mind?”

“Symbionts” is one of several recent landmark exhibitions ushering in this new era of interspecies art. It joins blockbuster shows by interspecies artists like Tomás Saraceno and Pierre Huyghe. Anicka Yi’s breakthrough exhibition in New York at the Kitchen in 2015 involved bottled fragrances that the bio art icon made from swabs taken from 100 women in the art world. Yi merged bacterial cultures with high culture. And for the grand finale of the most recent Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, kudzu and sugarcane slowly enrobed sculptural figures in an installation by Precious Okoyomon that grew throughout the course of the show.

HUMANS HAVE BEEN OBLIVIOUSLY shaping the evolution of other species for millennia. Aurochs, the progenitor of modern cattle, are extinct, ironically due to diseases introduced by domestic livestock (not to mention hunting). Domestic felines learned to meow in order to catch the ear of human caretakers. And though lantern flies are labeled an “invasive species,” it is humans who, by cargo boat, brought them to the United States, where they now threaten trees and crops. Interspecies relationships enable life at all scales: each human carries around 10–100 trillion microbial (nonhuman) cells; they are our symbionts. Margulis and other scientists have argued that multicellular beings (such as humans) exist today thanks to ancient symbiotic relations among single-celled organisms that, by merging, created new species. This process is called “endosymbiosis.”

Which is to say that we are constantly collaborating with other species, whether we realize it or not. Interspecies relationships are scientific fact, but, being relationships, they are cultural and social too. That is why we need artists to help us navigate and model these emotional and relational terrains fraught with imbalance.

Among these artistic models, Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s stand out. Her work draws attention to the ways other organisms inhabit our everyday life. Growing up, Jordan “was always with animals,” she told me on Zoom. Now based in Berlin, she was adopted from Korea and raised in the German countryside, where she “didn’t like people so much, especially in the area I grew up in … they were really racist, and I was the only Asian person besides my brother.” Kids called her “rice-eater” and “slits.” So she hung out with the family dog and the chickens, and even befriended an injured wild crow. At 27, she enrolled in Berlin Kunsthochschule, where she studied under the climate artist Olafur Eliasson.

Before art school, Jordan, whose Korean name means “goddess of the sea,” worked as a rescue diver. Underwater, she grew fascinated by the sea cucumber—a scavenger that isn’t considered very intelligent, but is, in a sense, immortal. This is true in that there is no evidence that sea cucumbers die of old age, but only from accidents or disease. They have come to form symbiotic relationships with certain fish, who hide from predators in the sea cucumber’s anus. (Usually, the fish knocks before entering.)

Jordan was inspired by this kind of symbiotic relationship when she started her project “Disembodiment” in 2012. But instead of a fish, she chose to open her own anus to another species with whom she felt a kind of kinship: the potato. The crop, like the artist, thrives in, but is not native to, Germany. Spanish conquistadors brought the Incan crop to Europe, and during a 1774 famine, Prussian King Friedrich II introduced the root vegetable to the Germans; now, it is a dietary staple. Wanting to deepen their relationship based on shared experiences, Jordan made an animation that shows a potato growing in her butt. This followed a 2011 collaboration called Compassion, for which she grew potatoes that she watered not with H₂O, but with her own blood.

In 2021 Jordan was invited to do a project at the reopening of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. Like many others, she had serious reservations about the museum, which houses looted objects from around the world in an Imperialist palace, so she proposed a site-specific version of “Disembodiment” with a budget she said was “like three times higher” than the one allotted. She figured they’d turn it down, and was surprised when they agreed to the version she titled Culo de Papa, or ass of papa—in Spanish, papa can mean “father” or “potato.” She scanned and 3D-printed 33 copies of her own butt, then turned them into potato planters displayed outside the Humboldt Forum. She chose 33 because it is the most butt-shaped number.

The Humboldt Forum is housed in a palace once home to a number of Prussian kings, including King Friedrich II, aka the “Potato King” or “Frederick the Great.” Jordan’s project was a cheeky retort to the colonial histories of both the crop and the institution. At the end of the procession of potatoes was a kiosk that distributed postcards detailing the potato’s colonial history. “Visitors were shocked, and they started to scream at me!” she told me on Zoom. “They were like, how dare you! Don’t you know where you are?”

Jordan’s projects cleverly respond to a tendency in art and academic circles to privilege those creatures we consider worthy based on qualities valued in humans, like intelligence and productivity. Tuomas A. Laitinen, for instance, collaborates with puzzle-solving octopi, and Agnieszka Kurant made a series of sculptures with mound-building termites, in a gesture meant to highlight their collective intelligence—and to ask how we humans might learn from their cooperative model. Jordan, by contrast, takes care to honor species like sea cucumbers and potatoes that are regularly dismissed as banal, but are nevertheless worthy of care and attention.

Jordan, whose debut US museum show opens at The Bass in Miami December 4, is inspired, like many interspecies artists, by writer Donna Haraway. In 2019 Jordan made a video installation titled after Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble (2016). The artist’s version tells the speculative story of a five-generation, symbiogenetic relationship between monarch butterflies and humankind. Jordan’s communing with other species is echoed in Haraway’s influential 2007 book When Species Meet, where the author critiques philosophical, theoretical, and overly intellectualized accounts of interspecies relations that forgo everyday acts of care. She notes that in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari offer a theory of “becoming animal,” then add that “anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool,” as if interspecies care were too sentimental to be serious. She also pokes fun at Jacques Derrida, who once wrote a philosophical essay about his fear of being naked in front of his cat.

In an art world where interspecies collaborations get framed as intellectual or scientific endeavors, Jordan’s humble care for ordinary species stands apart. Her work is that of someone who has spent time with other creatures in everyday ways, like Puett with his bees. As it happens, Puett has decided to return to the art world. He has a new dealer—Jack Shainman Gallery—and plans to show new work next year at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, as part of the sprawling, multimillion-dollar Getty-funded initiative called Pacific Standard Time, with the theme “Art & Science Collide.” He’ll show 3D-printed armatures, and visitors will be able to watch the bees work throughout the show’s run, as they fabricate sculptures depicting humans carving sticks and making clay pots. “You know,” he said, “humanity before the algorithm.” 

There was the man who rudely broke up with her by email. She had this document analyzed by 107 women, including linguists, clairvoyants, and even a female parrot, then turned their annotations into an installation titled after its final line: Take Care of Yourself (2007). There’s the man, Monsieur Henri B., whom she followed to Venice for Suite Vénitienne (1980). And there’s Paul Auster, the male author who based a character off her for his novel Leviathan. Calle responded by interpreting his metaphors and hyperboles as literal instructions, adopting, for instance, a monochromatic diet (orange on Monday, red on Tuesday, and so on) turning it all into a work of her own.

Recently, the French artist was asked to take on art history’s least invisible man—Picasso—when the Musée Picasso in Paris approached her for a show. Tourists from across the globe flock to that museum, seeking masterpieces by the famed Spanish painter; this year marks half a century since his death. Calle decided to keep just ten of his works on view, but most are occluded. For her, the weight of his presence was intense enough without having to show her work alongside his. With the exhibition, she figures Picasso as a ghost who haunts the work of many artists.

The weight of Picasso’s legacy made Calle reflect on what, exactly, she will one day leave behind. And so, she moved everything out of her apartment and into the museum, asking an auction house to inventory all her belongings. She’s not calling it a retrospective, but in the museum’s galleries, viewers get a career-spanning survey of the ideas she spent her life generating.

In several cases, she refashioned old works for a new setting. Her site-specific 1991 intervention commemorating masterpieces stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is here reconfigured in a series called “The Phantom Picassos.” Five of his major paintings are covered with large curtains, then embroidered with descriptions Calle collected from museum staff memories while the works were away on loan. She also dedicated a floor to projects she never finished, and arranged works from her personal collection (by the likes of Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, and Christian Boltanski) to approximate the dimensions of Picasso’s Guernica (1937).

With this show, as in all Calle works, absence is present—Picasso is in the basement, but his spirit is felt on all floors. Below, the artist talks about how her practice can veer into obsession.

With all of your stuff gone from your apartment, where are you living?

Right now, I’m in the Hotel Grand Amour, but I change every month. [The auction house] Drouot made my inventory; I didn’t decide which objects they’d take. I got the idea after going to a sale of furniture owned by a friend of mine. It included a table I’d eaten at for 50 years, and I realized I could not buy it for myself. Suddenly, it had lost its soul and become just another object. I felt similarly when I saw my objects installed—it was as if they were no longer mine.

I have a few months to decide whether they will come back to my house; currently, they are not for sale. For the show, I made several catalogues: one is the inventory, and another is the ghost of that inventory—a book that tells the stories behind the objects. Picasso once said that he wanted to show the paintings that are behind his paintings, and I wanted to do the same with my objects.

You’re often respond to terms laid out for you by someone else—often, a man—but always with a wink and a nod. Here, you’re borrowing cues from Picasso, but you’ve also pushed Picasso out of his own museum, and made space for Sophie Calle. Can you talk about that decision?

I pushed him out because I was afraid of him! He’s too much for me. I could not imagine my work hanging next to Picasso’s.

At first, I refused the museum’s invitation. But after I visited the Musée during Covid, when his paintings were wrapped and hidden to protect them from dust light, I realized, although I cannot face Picasso, maybe I can face his ghost. Soon, I couldn’t think about anything else. I made three floors of new work in two years!

I wanted to play with him and with his museum, so I looked through his quotes and his objects for things that connected with me. I titled the show “À toi de faire, ma mignonne,” which basically means “Okay, darling, baby, you want my museum? Take it, show me what you can do.” Or more simply, “it’s your turn, now show me.” It’s the most complex show I have ever made.

I think it’s funny that he is in the basement and I occupy this museum, but I cannot pretend that my initial purpose was feminist. I didn’t put Picasso’s work downstairs because I wanted to cancel him. I did it because I could not be next to him.

What was it about Picasso that made you consider your own legacy?

I had seen a vitrine that contained Picasso’s hair and nails. He kept everything! I am also a little obsessive like that; I keep a lot of things. But Picasso was terribly afraid to write a will because he said that writing a will attracts death. I am also afraid of death. But I stave it off instead by writing 500 wills. When you write so many, they start to become a joke.

Your projects always involve risk, and turning Picasso into an occasion to think about death and legacy seems like one way you made him riskier.

The other risk is that some people could not stand the fact that I’m putting Picasso in the basement. I was told that many Americans would be upset when they saw works by me instead of Picasso. So, I added a consolation room, where visitors can have a personal confrontation with a real Picasso. There are five works behind curtains and three self-portraits. The 10th piece is a goat sculpture [La Chèvre, 1950] that I wrapped in paper. Six are hidden, four are visible. I could see how saying “I’m putting Picasso in the basement and taking his place” could be badly received.

Do you like Picasso’s art?

Yes, I do. I wouldn’t have shown here if I disliked it. I don’t go to dinner at an enemy’s house.

After the 2007 Venice Biennale, and after the artist Daniel Buren said your shows look like books on the wall, you began to move away from your signature, deadpan photo and text combinations, and you started incorporating more objects and experiences. This show has hardly any photographs. How has your thinking about photography evolved?

I never really thought of myself as a photographer; I always needed text. At the same time, I was never a true writer; I always needed the image. But beyond that, I don’t notice these things much, because I’m not an art critic. I don’t look at my own work and analyze it with that kind of distance.

Tell me about the unrealized projects you’re showing on the third floor.

I was following the direction Picasso showed me. He kept everything; I showed everything.

I started wondering, what’s going to happen to my belongings when I die? My parents are dead. I have no children. Then, looking at all the objects from my house, I asked: what’s missing? What was missing was my studio and all the things I didn’t finish. I have tons of drawers and boxes with pieces of ideas, but I realized, if I die tomorrow, this will all disappear. No one else could understand those pieces of paper, those fragments of thought, those abandoned failures.

So, I started opening all my drawers and notes. I was cleaning my house, but also my thoughts. I’m showing 42 abandoned projects. For each, I wrote down the idea, then stamped it with the reason why I didn’t do it: too stupid, too time-consuming. Some projects still have hope; those are in a different room. Some projects I could not do for reasons I can’t control, like censorship or somebody dying. Now all those unfinished projects are, in a way, finished. If I disappear tomorrow, they have a life.

Can you describe some of the projects?

After Paul Auster wrote Leviathan using my character, I thought I would ask a writer to write a book, and then I’d take the book as a script for my life. It would be the reverse: Paul Auster took my life and transformed me into a character in a novel, but I wanted to take the character in the novel and make it my life. But all the writers I asked said no.

Another is a project I started with Wim Wenders. He asked me to wear these camera glasses and say everything I thought to the camera every day. But I realized, I would lose many friends if I did this. This one was self-censorship.

Another idea was to say yes to everything for one month, but I realized that my life was quickly becoming a complete nightmare. I stopped because I didn’t want to spoil my life completely.

In the past, you’ve been vulnerable about sharing romantic failures. But this time, you’re including some, shall we say, professional “failures.” I’m wondering if that feels different.

Often, failures in my personal life wind up helping my professional life. Plenty of the projects I made out of relationships were much more interesting than the relationship itself!

I don’t make these projects for therapeutic reasons. But anybody who is left in love will suffer less if she has a job than if she is stuck alone in her house. Some professional failures were sadder than personal ones and vice versa. When everything is going well, you don’t need to examine it. You just leave it alone. If I am happy with the man I love and with my friends, I don’t need to take distance and describe it. I don’t try to analyze my happiness.

Looking back on all your past work and thinking about your legacy, did you see anything different that you hadn’t noticed before?

I don’t know yet. I only know what I feel. After I showed Take Care of Yourself at the Venice Biennale, I thought that I would never do anything as exciting again. But I was wrong: I had that feeling again for “À toi de faire, ma mignonne.” It really became an obsession.

You commissioned an obituary for yourself, but then decided not to show it. Can you tell us about that, or at least about how it felt to read it?

I decided not to show it, but not because of what it said. It was a very professional obituary; the information was super banal and factual. The problem was how I felt when I read the verbs in the past tense: “she used to,” “she liked.” Suddenly, it all felt too real. I don’t know how I expected to feel, but I didn’t suspect that I’d refuse it. After all, it was my game.

You would be forgiven for overlooking the works’ brushlessness—Liu conceals and controls his experimental methods—and you could appreciate the simple elegance of his compositions and his mesmerizing color combinations all the same. But the magic is enhanced when you come to appreciate how he directs the swirling ink he uses when marbling—a technique that involves adding droplets of pigment to a vat of water, then dragging the paper across its surface. Whereas most artists turn to marbling to invite an element of chance, Liu approaches it as a challenge to prove his control.

Firmly committed to his brushless bit, Liu developed his own kind of cotton paper that leaves visible, linear fibers. When you see a white line in a composition of his, you can bet that he first stained the entire page and then removed a cotton strand, revealing fresh, unstained paper beneath. In fact, once you focus on the brushlessness, you might find yourself looking at each of Liu’s impressive paintings and asking: how’d he do that without a brush?

Liu is dedicated to painting nature, and his moon paintings—colorful orbs hovering majestically in commanding compositions—count among his finest works. He first started painting the moon and other celestial bodies after watching the 1969 Apollo landing and experiencing a decidedly modern strand of the sublime that landscape painters have tried to evoke for centuries. He returned to the lunar motif again in the 2000s, with works whose crinkled, then flattened paper came to represent the moon’s craggy surface.

But all this is more than just a cool trick: Liu rewards curious, meticulous viewers of both his work and the world. One benefits from looking at his work as he looks at the moon, for wondering: how does this work? He shows how the moon can be more magical when you know some of the math behind the mystery—when you appreciate, for instance, that the moon is both 400 times smaller than the sun and 400 times closer to the Earth. When his painting Midnight Sun III (1970) shows the trajectory of a fiery astronomical presence moving across a dark sky, it isn’t didactic and it doesn’t demystify; it invites more marveling.

Liu’s celestial paintings merge geometric abstraction with a glimpse into the infinite, expansive cosmos. In this way, the works speak across time and culture. But they also respond to and update traditions specific to Chinese ink painting. In the 1970s, Liu established a modern ink art curriculum during his tenure as chair of the fine arts department of Chinese University Hong Kong. Art historians such as Wu Hung credit Liu’s work as a teacher—in addition to a 1983 exhibition of his art that eventually toured 18 Chinese cities—with showing a generation of artists how to modernize Chinese ink painting. And when, in the 2000s, contemporary Chinese art had its global explosion, experiments in ink were central to the narrative—as seen in major shows like “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2013.

Gazing at the moon can sometimes make the world and its attendant problems feel small. But looking at Liu’s lunar works—none of which I’d known before seeing his impressive retrospective in Singapore—I was instead reminded that the world is big and brimming with artists oceans away whose work I have yet to encounter.