Fashion

Rei Kawakubo / Comme de Garçons “The Art of the In-Between”

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 4 to September 4 2017

This show was a total departure from the Met’s usual costume exhibits. it felt less like a fashion retrospective and more like a trip to a high-concept laboratory on another planet.

She show was a shock to the system. No chronological timelines and, most strikingly, no glass barriers and zero wall text to explain what I was looking at. Instead, the space was a stark, fluorescent-lit landscape of white geometric “pods” (circles, squares, and cylinders) that housed Kawakubo’s radical silhouettes. The clothes themselves are defiant; they ignore the human body entirely, adding “lumps and bumps” in places nature never intended (the 1997 Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body collection is even more jarring in person). Because there were no labels to lean on, I found myself looking at the volume of the red nylon and the architecture of the shredded lace rather than thinking about “fashion.” The “In-Between” refers to the space between clothes and art, subject and object. Kawakubo designs for ideas that just happen to be worn by people.

2026 Retrospective Note:

Looking back, this 2017 show was the moment the “Met Gala” era truly collided with high-concept avant-garde art. It remains one of the few times a living designer has been given that kind of space at the Met, and it’s clear why.

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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Painting

David Hockney: A Retrospective

Centre Pompidou, Paris. 21 June to 23 October 2017

The David Hockney retrospective in 2017 was a global event, but seeing it at the Pompidou—with its industrial “inside-out” architecture contrasting against Hockney’s saturated, sun-drenched canvases—was a singular experience. It was a celebration of his 80th birthday and an example of how an artist can stay relentlessly modern.

The Pools and the Portraits

The show is massive… over 160 works… and seeing the “canonical” Hockney pieces in person is a reminder of why they became icons in the first place. A Bigger Splash (1967) is much more technical than you’d think; the way he painted the water spray with tiny, deliberate brushes makes the “instant” moment feel like it took a lifetime to capture.

But it’s the double portraits that stopped me. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is haunting in person. There is a specific kind of stillness in those 1970s paintings, a domestic tension that is both incredibly chic and also unnerving.

The Technophile

The most surprising part of the show is the final rooms. Most artists “slow down” or get traditional as they hit their 70s and 80s. Hockney did the opposite. Seeing a wall of iPad drawings, luminous, neon-bright landscapes of Yorkshire, proves he is more obsessed with the now than artists half his age.

He’s spent sixty years asking the same question: How do we actually see the world? Whether he’s using a Polaroid camera, a fax machine, or a tablet, the answer is always the same: with total, unadulterated joy.

2026 Retrospective Note:

Reading this back, I realize that 2017 was a pivot point. We thought that was the “final” retrospective, but Hockney just kept going. He spent the pandemic in Normandy painting the arrival of spring on his iPad, and those works have since become their own chapter in art history.

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists

M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 20 September 2025 to 8 January 2026

From the M+ Museum in West Kowloon, this blockbuster exhibition, Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now, was a massive, shimmering statement that basically told the Hong Kong art scene that women have been building entire worlds for decades. The show takes over several key spaces in the museum, including the West Gallery, Focus Gallery, Atrium, and the Main Hall. Because many of the installations were “environments” (like the Feather Room and Spectral Passage), the show had specific “House Rules” most notably that visitors had to remove their shoes and wear socks to enter the actual artworks.

The Concept: Art You Can Live In

The brilliance of Dream Rooms was perhaps in the scale, but also in the reclaiming of history. For years, “environmental art” (large-scale installations) was seen as a masculine pursuit: heavy materials, industrial grit, “man against nature.” This show proves that women were also the true pioneers of immersive spaces, often using “soft” or ephemeral materials to create even more powerful psychological impact.

The Standouts:

  • Chiharu Shiota’s Infinite Memory: Walking into the Focus Gallery felt like entering a collective dream. Shiota’s signature red thread webs were so dense they felt like architecture. It was a massive, pulsating nervous system that made you feel slightly trapped.
  • Aleksandra Kasuba’s Spectral Passage: This was the show-stopper for anyone who loves color theory. A series of interconnected nylon tunnels that felt like walking through a rainbow. Paired with Gustav Holst’s The Planets, it turned the museum into a futuristic transit hub for the soul.
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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Tomás Saraceno: Radio Alchemist

Tanya Bonakdar, New York. April 14 to June 9 2018

I just walked out of the Bonakdar space and I feel like I need to recalibrate my inner ear. Walking into a Saraceno show is less like visiting a gallery and more like stepping into a high-tech observatory run by spiders.

The “Hybrid Webs”

The downstairs gallery is dark, dominated by these haunting, backlit vitrines. Inside them aren’t sculptures in the traditional sense, but “Hybrid Webs.” The result is this ghostly, architectural lace that looks like a 3D map of the early universe. It’s fragile, terrifying, and beautiful. There’s something deeply humbling about realizing that a tiny invertebrate has a better grasp of structural engineering than most humans.

2026 Retrospective Note:

Looking back at this entry eight years later, Saraceno feels even more prophetic. In 2018, his talk of “interspecies collaboration” felt like a poetic metaphor. Today, as we navigate the complexities of ecological collapse and AI-driven systems, his idea that we need to listen to the “vibrations” of other forms of life feels less like art and more like a survival manual.

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