Asia Pacific Art Exhibitions

Spring 2026

This season, the Asia-Pacific art landscape is asserting itself on its own terms. From Sydney to Seoul, from Beijing to Hong Kong, the most compelling shows right now are not simply responding to Western discourse but reframing it, challenging it, or bypassing it altogether.

This selection prioritises depth over spectacle. It traces a quiet but insistent argument: about what Korean art looks like when given full institutional weight, as seen in Kim Yun Shin‘s long-overdue retrospective at Hoam Museum and Lee Bul‘s sweeping survey at M+; about what happens when European artists bring their most rigorous thinking to Asian contexts, from Carsten Höller‘s perceptual experiments at UCCA Beijing to Julius von Bismarck‘s volatile installations at ACCA Melbourne; and about what a biennial can still mean when it commits to reimagining history rather than merely reflecting it, as the 25th Biennale of Sydney sets out to prove. Alongside these, Spectrosynthesis Seoul asks urgent questions about queer visibility and identity in a region where those conversations carry real stakes. These are the exhibitions setting the terms of the conversation this spring. Start here.