Taiwanese American artist Lee Mingwei (b. 1964) first saw Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1980, the year before the painting was returned to Spain after more than 40 years. Lee was just 16 years old at the time, and the 7.8-meter-wide portrayal of wartime suffering was utterly distinct from the art he had grown up with: traditional Chinese paintings on silk of flowers, birds, and buildings. He said Guernica’s scale and political content ‘completely changed my idea of what an artwork could be.’

Lee’s installation Guernica in Sand (2006–ongoing) is one of the highlights of ‘Picasso for Asia: A Conversation’ (March 15–July 13, 2025), a blockbuster exhibition at M+. It takes 6 tons of sand and 860 hours of labor to recreate Picasso’s most famous work. As the artist puts the finishing touches on the sand drawing, audiences are invited to walk on it, blurring the image. After 5 hours, Lee and others will use brooms to sweep the sand towards the middle, erasing whatever remains. The sand is then used to create a new image that differs each time. With Guernica in Sand, Lee once said, ‘my goal was to draw attention to the creative power of transformation rather than to the pain caused by clinging to things as they are.’

The creative power of transformation is central to the exhibition at M+, which brings together more than 60 works by Picasso (1881–1973) on loan from the Musée national Picasso-Paris with around 80 works by Asian and Asian-diasporic artists from the M+ collections, which engage with his oeuvre in myriad ways. ‘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 decenters from the Western point of view, is an unprecedented proposal,’ says Cécile Debray, the president of the Musée Picasso. The exhibition opens less than 2 weeks before Art Basel in Hong Kong (March 28­–30, 2025), and several galleries have elected to bring related works to the fair.

Works stretching back to the very beginning of Picasso’s career are on show at M+, including Portrait of a Man (1902–03), a somber, realist portrait, painted in his early 20s, that gives little indication of the vibrant gestural work favored in his later years. Works showing at Art Basel in Hong Kong help further elucidate the artist’s evolution, including an early etching, Le Repas Frugal (1904), presented by Galleria d’Arte Maggiore G.A.M., and Buste d’homme (1964), a portrait painted in mostly unmixed colors with few brushstrokes, leaving much of the canvas exposed, presented by Almine Rech.

Among the major Picasso works showing at M+ are the all-limbs-no-torso figure painting The Acrobat (1930); Blind Minotaur Guided through a Starry Night by Marie-Thérèse with a Pigeon (1934–35); and the vibrant, sad-eyed Portrait of Dora Maar (1937). Picasso famously had a 9-year relationship with Maar – a talented photographer and artist – while continuing to see Marie-Thérèse Walter, mother of his daughter Maya. (Altogether, Picasso had four children with three women.)

Works by Asian artists responding to Picasso in the M+ exhibition include Isamu Noguchi’s brushed bronze sculpture Strange Bird (1945/1971), Wifredo Lam’s Woman with a Bird (1949), and Keiichi Tanaami’s Pleasure of Picasso–Mother and Child No. 118 (2020/21), a flattened, cartoonish portrait. Additional works from Tanaami’s ‘Pleasure of Picasso–Mother and Child’ series will show with Nanzuka at Art Basel in Hong Kong.

One of the most intriguing local artists to take inspiration from Picasso is Luis Chan, who was born in Panama in 1905 and would become one of Hong Kong’s most avant-garde painters. His works Cubist Sea Shore (1959) and Joy of Life (1969) feature in the M+ show. Picasso is a clear influence in the former work, while the latter shares a kinship with Henri Matisse and Gustav Klimt. In the 1960s, Chan developed a method of using zinc plates to transfer ink onto paper, which offered traces of sometimes fantastical forms – identified through pareidolia, our innate tendency to find faces and figures in abstract forms – that he would then flesh out. His acrylic-on-paper painting The Story of Pigeon (1969), for instance, features a two-headed, green-faced woman, a Cubist-looking female bust, and disembodied heads. It will show at Art Basel in Hong Kong with Hanart TZ Gallery.

While artists in Asia (and around the world) were watching Picasso, the Spanish artist also looked back towards Asia. Massacre in Korea (1951), which also features at M+, depicts naked North Korean women and children attacked by robotic-looking men in armor wielding guns and swords. Motivated by the Sinchon Massacre in 1950, the oil-on-plywood work is described as ‘the Guernica of the Cold War’ by the Museu Picasso in Barcelona.

In British artist Simon Fujiwara’s version, Who vs Who vs Who? (A Picture of a Massacre) (2024), also included in the exhibition, his character Who the Bær joins an attack, aided by a drone, suggesting contemporary conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. One of the victims points to a picture of Guernica, as if reminding her assailants of the horrors of war.

At the fair, Esther Schipper will present Fujiwara’s wonderful button-nosed and mushroom-eyed riffs on Picasso’s ‘Weeping Women’ series. Rendered in acrylic, charcoal, and pastel, Fujiwara’s works were created just last year, a testament to Picasso’s enduring importance to audiences and utility to artists.

Understanding Picasso’s power and longevity is integral to the M+ exhibition. The show ‘asks a series of fundamental questions,’ says Doryun Chong, the artistic director at M+ and co-curator of the exhibition with François Dareau, a research fellow at the Musée Picasso. ‘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 50 years after his death? What is the source of the enduring influence and legacy of his life and art?’

These questions are complex, and the answers are Cubist in nature, requiring the combination of different perspectives: social, political, economic, and personal. Picasso was, notably, as prolific as he was visually inventive, creating some 50,000 works of art for us to analyze and enjoy. The Hong Kong spotlight on his momentous oeuvre – both at M+ and at Art Basel – will be a perfect opportunity to appraise his work like never before.