The Dallas Museum of Art jointly acquired All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins in 2017 with the Rachofsky Collection, which is also based in Dallas. Like other entries in the series, viewers are invited to step inside a small mirrored room filled with Kusama’s whimsical, often polka-dotted sculptures, in this case, her signature yellow and black pumpkins. The effect is a kaleidoscopic sea of sculptures stretching into oblivion—very selfie-friendly. 

All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins is “key to understanding [Kusama’s] practice,” Gavin Delahunty, a contemporary-art curator at the museum, said in a statement in 2017.

Due to its popularity, the installation comes with a recommendation of one to four visitors at a time, though that didn’t prevent property damage during its stint at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. In a headline-grabbing 2017 incident, a visitor tripped on one of the hand-painted acrylic gourds, shattering it in the process, while trying to take a photo. The Washington Post reported at the time that the museum instructed for no security to be in the narrow room with visitors, who are allowed 30 seconds inside of viewing. 

A Hirshhorn spokesperson told the Post that the cost of replacing a pumpkin was “negligible,” and the site-specific nature of the installation allows for seemingly endless reconfigurations, all of which are executed in consultation with Kusama.

The 95-year-old Japanese artist is one of the most profitable contemporary artists of today. She grossed $80.9 million at auction last year, beating out David Hockney for the spot of top-selling contemporary artist of 2023 (her most expensive piece sold was the painting A Flower (2014), which fetched nearly $10 million at Christie’s Hong Kong). 

Museums are similarly shelling out to add a Kusama to their collection. In June, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced that it had acquired the “Infinity Room” Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love (2023). The installation, consisting of large transparent acrylic dots suspended like a constellation, will remain on view through January of 2025.

As of this June, SFMOMA reported that its Kusama show, “Infinite Love,” had been seen by 170,000 people.

The pieces returned to Nepal on December 4 include a large pair of gilt bronze Bhairava masks, dating to the 16th century, that are collectively valued at $900,000.

According to the Manhattan DA’s office, “the masks depict the god as Shiva, one of the Hindu trinity which also includes Brahma and Vishnu. They were used for ritual worship during the annual Indra Jātrā festival in Nepal. Both masks were stolen in the mid-1990s as part of a series of break-in robberies from the home of the family whose relatives created the masks. They were then smuggled to Hong Kong, sold at auction in New York, and subsequently entered the collections of the Rubin Museum of Art and the Dallas Museum of Art until they were recovered earlier this year by the Office.”

The items were matched using family photographs submitted to an anonymous whistleblower known online as Lost Arts of Nepal. “As far as I know, the first such match in Nepal,” Erin Thompson, a professor specializing in art crime at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told ARTnews. Thompson submitted the tip from Lost Arts to the DA’s office in September 2022.

As part of the investigation, the DA’s office retrieved the police report filed by the family at the time of the thefts, and had it translated by a Nepali lawyer.

According to Thompson, the Bhairava masks are also not for people, but pots for beer, which would then be served to worshipers during the Indra Jātrā festival.

One of the other items repatriated to Nepal, a 10-armed Durga statue, was seized as part of the office’s investigation into convicted art trafficker Subhash Kapoor. According to the Manhattan DA’s office, the statue was allegedly smuggled out of Nepal “by the Zeeshan and Zahid Butt trafficking network, which was run by Kapoor’s alleged co-conspirators. The statue was then purchased from the Butts in Bangkok by Kapoor and subsequently trafficked into New York in the early 2000s, before it was recovered from a Kapoor-owned storage unit.”

The four items were returned to Nepal during a ceremony with Nepal’s acting New York Consul General Bishnu Prasad Gautam and U.S. Homeland Security Investigations Deputy Special Agent in Charge Christopher Lau on Monday.

“The return of these illegally exported four masterpieces is a significant step in reclaiming Nepal’s cultural heritage and preserving its historical treasures,” Gautam said in a press statement. “This has deeply contributed to Nepal’s national efforts of recovery and reinstatement of lost cultural properties. The cooperation and collaboration between Nepal and the Manhattan District Attorney in this field, like in others, are deeply commendable and inspirations for the international community in the fight against illicit trafficking of cultural artifacts.”

On December 4, the Rubin Museum issued a press statement acknowledging that it had placed the mask under review “with its collections team as well as independent researchers” after seeing the social media posts, then removed it from public view and posted public signage in the galleries about this process.

The statement also acknowledged that the Manhattan DA’s office showed the museum “corroborating evidence the mask was stolen from a site in Dolakha in March 1994.” It reviewed the documentation, deaccessioned the mask, and voluntarily agreed to turn it over to the authorities.

The institution said it acquired the mask in 2005, with “no evidence of theft or unlawful removal from Nepal at the time of acquisition until evidence was provided by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office,” citing previous transactions on the art market, including a public auction at Sotheby’s in 1996.

“While we have treasured this exceptional mask and enjoyed sharing it with visitors in our galleries since 2005 as well as through several scholarly publications, the evidence presented is clear, as is our decision to return the work to Nepal,” Rubin Museum executive director Jorrit Britschgi said in a press statement. “We’re deeply sorry for the loss its removal has caused community members in Dolakha. We hope the work can return to its former location, yet also understand that the return will not remedy the wrongs that were done.”

The museum also announced it had committed additional resources through the appointment of Linda Colet as its new head of collections management and provenance research.

Provenance research in museums and private collections often focuses on scholarly books or photography archives to determine whether or not an object was stolen. For Thompson, the successful use of family photographs as proof of the Bhairava masks’ origins also demonstrates how repatriations are handled by foreign antiquities collections.

“I think that there should be a push toward museums and collectors to really think about returning things before that proof comes up, and not waiting until that happens,” Thompson said.

The Headlines

MULTITASKING. Art historian and curator Iwona Blazwick—who stepped down as director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London last year, after some two decades at the helm—is staying busy. Last summer, she was named chair of the Royal Commission for AlUla’s Public Art Expert Panel in Saudi Arabia. Now, Artforum reports, she has been tapped to curate the next Istanbul Biennial, which is slated to run September 14–November 17 next year. That biennial appointment is one of the most high-profile posts on the international art circuit and has previously been held by Elmgreen & Dragset (in 2017), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2015), and Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann (2011). Blazwick’s plans for Istanbul have not yet been announced. Watch this space.

MODERNIST ARCHITECT MYRON GOLDFINGER, who made his name designing inventive residences in the New York area, died on July 20 at the age of 90, the New York Times reports. He made “homes by amassing basic shapes—half-circles, blocks, triangles—into dramatic sculptural statements that seem both modern and ancient,” Clay Risen writes. His “houses are omnipresent in the New York metropolitan region yet little known to the architecture or art communities at large,” art dealer Mitchell Algus wrote in ARTnews last year. Goldfinger was a student of Louis Kahn and decided to specialize in homes to avoid having to be part of a huge studio; his wife, June, handled their interior design. Algus wrote, “In a profession where publicity had become essential in building reputations and getting commissions, Goldfinger let his work speak for itself.”

The Digest

Beating out heavyweights like David Chipperfield and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the Spanish architecture firm Nieto Sobejano was selected by the Dallas Museum of Art for an expansion estimated to cost up to $175 million. It will be the studio’s first project in the United States. [The Dallas Morning News]

Indian American artist Anil Revri, who began making abstract paintings informed by landscapes and went on to create beguilingly intricate geometric works that were inspired by texts from different religions, died at 67. [ArtReview]

Coal miners in Serbia discovered an ancient Roman ship that archaeologists are now working to preserve. It is believed to date to the third or fourth century, though its exact age has not yet been determined. [Reuters]

Some people have all the luck. An aristocratic British couple appearing on the television show Millionaire Hoarders found a John Constable painting tucked away in their 16th-century Scottish castle. It has been estimated at more than $2 million; they plan to sell it to help cover maintenance on the place. [Artnet News and Daily Mail]

No, a French auction house is not selling artifacts from a nearly 1,000-year-old Ukrainian Orthodox monastery. Reports of the nonexistent sale have been circulating on social media with an image of billboard advertisement that Reuters determined had been doctored. [Reuters]

KAWS has struck again. The artist is staging the latest iteration of his “KAWS:HOLIDAY” project at the Prambanan temple compound in Indonesia, displaying a pale-pink “Accomplice” balloon that measures about 150 feet long. Naturally, limited-edition collectibles will soon be available. [Hypebeast]

The Kicker

A KIND OF MAGIC. Handwritten lyrics, clothes, furniture, art (Picasso, Chagall), and more that belonged to Queen singer Freddie Mercury go on view at Sotheby’s in London today in advance of an auction next month, the Associated Press reports. A handwritten draft of “Bohemian Rhapsody” has a high estimate of £1.2 million (about $1.53 million), but there are also more affordable items, like chopsticks, for which bidding will begin under £100. In total, more than 1,400 lots are on offer. A Sotheby’s exec told the AP that Mercury once wrote: “I like to be surrounded by splendid things. I want to lead a Victorian life, surrounded by exquisite clutter.” Words of a true collector. [The Associated Press]

The Headlines

GROW OR GO. The Dallas Museum of Art has selected six finalists for an expansion project that comes with a budget of $150 million to $175 million, the Dallas Morning News reports. The lucky firms are David Chipperfield, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Johnston Marklee, Michael Maltzan Architecture, Weiss/Manfredi, and Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos. The paper’s architecture critic, Mark Lamster, writes that the selection committee “has leaned in to the tried and true—with one notable exception.” That would be the Madrid-based Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos, which has worked largely in Europe, but has still handled a number of cultural projects, like the National Sculpture Museum in Valladolid, Spain. The winner will be named in August.

A DOUBLEHEADER. In Hong Kong, the artist JR has made a sprawling installation to mark the end of the city’s mask mandate, pasting black-and-white photos of some 450 volunteers to the floor and a wall at the Harbour City shopping center, the South China Morning Post reports. Not everyone is a fan of his efforts: Some online commenters have compared it to a memorial for a mass tragedy and noted that black signifies death in China. Meanwhile, out in Water Mill, New York, the indefatigable artist is getting ready to install an enormous photographic work on the facade of the Parrish Art Museum, the New York Times reports. It will show almost 40 running children, and JR told the paper that he was “really trying to capture that moment of lightness and innocence of all children before the weight of the world falls on them.”

The Digest

Jane Davis Doggett, a pioneer in environmental graphic design (aka wayfinding), has died at 93. Doggett worked on airports, malls, and other public spaces, helping people get to where they wanted to go. She saw her job “as communicating to people the choices offered for their individual selections,” she once said. [The New York Times]

The 2024 Preis der Nationalgalerie, a prestigious award in Germany for artists 40 and under, has for the first time gone to four artists: Pan Daijing, Daniel Lie, Hanne Lippard, and James Richards. Next year, they will each present a new work at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof. [ArtReview]

Good news, pet lovers. Greece’s Culture Ministry said it will now allow people to bring their pets to more than 120 archaeological sites. Some rules apply: Owners are required to pick up pet droppings, for one, and very crowded places will still be off-limits, like the Acropolis in Athens. [The Associated Press]

Artist Erwin Wurm kindly offered travel picks for Vienna, where he resides. They range from a toothsome-sounding Japanese-European resto to a “fancy Italian place,” where he loves the parmigiana and the scaloppine al limone. Wurm will have a retrospective at the Albertina Modern in the city next year. [Financial Times]

A retrospective of the legendary artist Tom of Finland (aka Touko Laaksonen) goes on view today at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, and it includes his homoerotic drawings, as well as clothing, letters, and more. “Tom is one of our national heroes,” the museum’s director, Leevi Haapala, said. [The Associated Press]

RM Sotheby’s is planning a new show and auction of classic cars in Miami that will debut next March. RM Group’s CEO, Rob Myers, said they his team wants to give the event “a different lifestyle twist, you know, not just walking around the show field, standing in line and paying $10 for a hot dog.” [Bloomberg]

The Kicker

MARK YOUR CALENDARS. In June, painter Christopher Wool is scheduled to reveal a gargantuan mosaic—almost 40 feet across!—in the lobby of Two Manhattan West, an office building about a block from New York’s Madison Square Garden. It’s a commission from the site’s developer, Brookfield Properies, which is also having Charles Ray make a sculpture for out front. Wool toldBloomberg’s James Tarmy that he informed reps from the firm that “if we take the scaffolding down but the piece doesn’t look good, you’re going to put the scaffold back up.” (Music to a patron’s ears!) From a rendering, at least, the artwork looks very handsome. [Bloomberg]

Sharma had been on the DMA’s board since 2017, and is currently a member of the acquisitions committee. In addition to her philanthropic endeavors at UNICEF’s North Texas chapter, the Texas Women’s Foundation, the Lamplighter School, and other institutions, she serves as an architectural adviser to her family’s business.

With an endowment of around $270 million, the DMA is one of the country’s biggest museums.

Many institutions of its caliber have made steps to diversify their boards following upheaval in the wake of the George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

The Art Institute of Chicago and the Walker Art Center were among those to name their first-ever Black board chairs in the year afterward. Denise Gardner, who currently chairs the Art Institute, is the first Black woman to lead a U.S. museum board.

These efforts have come as U.S. institutions have sought to attract a younger, more diverse set of patrons.

The DMA was among the many museums to experience tension and scrutiny between 2020 and 2021. Dallas Weekly reported in 2021 that a staff-led committee had begun calling for the museum to diversify its leadership positions.

On Wednesday, the Dallas Museum also said it had added to its board several new trustees. These include CBRE Group vice chairman Jeffrey S. Ellerman; Mary Kay chief marketing officer Sheryl Adkins-Green; Venugopal Menon, former vice president of technology at Texas Instruments; and Jun Il Kwun, founder and managing director of the Actium Group.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Brian Hernandez, 21, shattered the museum’s glass entrance with a metal chair. Once inside, he began targeting the collection. Among the casualties of his vandalism was a 6th-century BCE Greek amphora, a ceramic vessel used to store liquids, and a Greek box dated from 450 BCE.

Police said Hernandez also destroyed a delicate bowl from ancient Greece decorated with vignettes of Heracles fighting the Nemean lion. A ceramic Caddo bottle depicting an alligator worth $10,000 was pulled from its displayed case and shattered on the museum floor. A dozen smaller objects also suffered minor damage.

“While we are devastated by this incident, we are grateful that no one was harmed. The safety of our staff and visitors, along with the care and protection of the art in our stewardship, are our utmost priorities,” the museum said in a statement.

Hernandez reportedly called 911 on himself while inside the museum before being apprehended by DMA security. He confessed to police and is currently detained at the Dallas County Jail on a charge of criminal mischief. In addition to the collection pieces, he is also accused of causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage to museum property including display cases and furniture.

The Dallas Morning News reported that a DMA security guard told police that Hernandez said “he got mad at his girl so he broke in and started destroying property.”

The Headlines

ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, a 21-year-old man was arrested for allegedly breaking into the Dallas Museum of Art and seriously damaging at least four pieces on display, including a Greek amphora from the 6th century B.C.E., the Dallas Morning News reports. Initial reports had placed the value of the damaged works at $5 million, but the museum’s director, Agustín Arteaga , said that the actual figure may be “a fraction” of that. The man was charged with criminal mischief of $300,000 or more, which carries a possible sentence of five years to life in prison, according to the Guardian. Dallas police said that the suspect told the guard who apprehended him that “he got mad at his girl so he broke in and started destroying property.”

CHINA DISPATCH. The exact date has not been announced, but Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam said that the Hong Kong Palace Museum will be inaugurated this summer amid celebrations tied to the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China, the South China Morning Post reports. Over in Shanghai, an intense Covid lockdown has ended, but cultural venues institutions remain shuttered, and there has been no word about when they will be allowed to reopen, the Art Newspaper reports. A rep for UCCA Edge, branch of the Beijing-based museum in the city, said that it will soon be able to install shows, which will ease reopening when that is allowed.

The Digest

Paul Gunther, a revered expert in arts administration who held posts at the Municipal Art Society, the New-York Historical Society, and the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, has died at the age of 65. [The New York Times]

The Dulwich Picture Gallery in London has quietly stopped billing its director as the “Sackler Director.” The move comes as many museums have removed the Sackler name from projects supported by the family, some of whose members have been accused of fueling the opioid crisis through the sale of OxyContin via their company Purdue Pharma. [The Art Newspaper]

Rich Aste, who has been at the helm of the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, for almost six years, said that he will step down in January to become an executive coach at the University of California, Irvine, and start his own practice in that field. [San Antonio]

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has acquired its first painting by the pioneering African American painter Archibald Motley, who was the subject of an acclaimed touring survey in the mid-2010s. Tongues (Holy Rollers), 1929, is now on view on MoMA’s fifth floor. [MoMA Magazine]

ANOTHER STRONG DAY FOR INTERVIEWS WITH ARTISTS: Judith Baca is in the New York Times, Wangechi Mutu is in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Christopher Wool—making his second Breakfast appearance this week—is in the Guardian.

The Kicker

GOOD ARTISTS COPY. An artist in the Czech Republic who was hired to create a reproduction of a 19th-century painting as part of a refurbishment of Prague’s famed Orloj clock, is being accused of deviating from the original, by Josef Mánes, the Guardian reports. The reproduction was unveiled in 2018, but a recent complaint alleges that the painter, Stanislav Jirčík , altered the clothing of figures and may even have inserted the faces of his friends. Jirčík has not commented. Adam Scheinherr, a local politician, told the paper, “I want to have a serious discussion with him and ask him about the quality of the painting, what was his inspiration, did he study Josef Manes.” [The Guardian]

Such elaborations on long-held assumptions about the primacy and superiority of (white) American and European abstract art within global modernism are repeated throughout “Slip Zone,” which assembles works not only from Gutai but also from Mono-ha in Japan, Dansaekhwa in Korea, and Neoconcretism in Brazil. The artists behind these movements emerged from distinct cultural contexts whose traditions and concerns suffused their work and, in turn, contributed to an international conversation about the untapped possibilities of material, form, and abstraction. Instead of presenting postwar modernism as a Euro-American export to other parts of the world, “Slip Zone” highlights the remarkably heterogeneous artistic cross-pollination that occurred during this period, both globally and across racial divides within the United States.

Works by canonical American artists such as Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, and Mark Rothko are indeed included in “Slip Zone,” but their presentation provides passing context more than it enshrines their positions, effectively showing how various artists contributed to distinctly modernist visual styles from vastly different reference points and backgrounds. An uncharacteristically bright Rothko painting, for example, accompanies a Frankenthaler work dominated by similar vermilion hues, visually echoed on the gallery floor in an early latex pour by Lynda Benglis titled Odalisque (Hey, Hey Frankenthaler), 1969. The psychedelic swirls of Benglis’s pour are themselves refracted nearby in Gutai artist Shozo Shimamoto’s 1965 oil painting Untitled – Whirlpool, which implies the influence of traditional Japanese paper marbling techniques such as suminagashi in its amoeba-like rings of overlapping color.

Jack Whitten: Slip Zone, 1971, acrylic on canvas, 39 inches square.

Arrayed with daubed lines of blue pigment rhythmically fading like a stamp losing ink, Korean artist Lee Ufan’s 1978 painting From Point combines repetitious Minimalist techniques with traditional Japanese materials such as nikawa, an animal-skin glue used in silk painting. Ufan’s prioritizing of fundamental material properties as much as Western notions of artistic expression is more dramatically demonstrated in his sculpture Relatum (1968/1969/2011), in which the artist dropped a stone on a plate of glass and left it for display on the broken surface, charged with a frisson of violence amid stillness. Such philosophical explorations of physicality and process-based attempts at “not making” were a hallmark of Mono-ha (or “School of Things”), a movement led by Ufan and Japanese artist Nobuo Sekine.

As part of its ambitious reevaluation of histories of modernism marred by imposed hierarchies and segregation, “Slip Zone” also highlights the under-acknowledged contributions of Black American artists working within various forms of postwar abstraction, including Color Field painting and Minimalism. The exhibition takes its title from a 1971 painting by Jack Whitten with a striated, textured surface that the artist created using implements such as combs and rakes. Suspended on the tallest wall in the exhibition’s central gallery, Leaf (1970)—one of Sam Gilliam’s signature unstretched canvases—majestically expands its painted folds, lending the space a reverent, chapel-like quality. Elsewhere, the triumphant, large-scale paintings Marcia H Travels by Frank Bowling and Intarsia by Ed Clark (both 1970) face each other across a gallery, each emitting its own distinctive, delicate aura through bleeding layers of color—Bowling’s soft and veil-like, Clark’s hard-lined and horizontal. Between them, the alluring cast polyester sculpture Untitled (Parabolic Lens), 1978, by California Light and Space artist Fred Eversley, serves as an energetic prism, alive with soft blue luminosity.

Few artists exemplify the truly intercultural legacy of postwar abstraction as well as Senga Nengudi, who spent a year studying Gutai at Waseda University in Tokyo before returning to the United States to participate in the Black avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Using vinyl bags of vividly colored water to explore weight and fluid motion, Nengudi’s early work Water Composition I (1969–70/2019) reveals the direct influence of Gutai artist Sadamasa Motonaga’s 1956 installation Work (Water), in which vinyl sheets filled with dyed water were suspended between trees. Nengudi’s construction also anticipates the formal concerns of her later, best-known works in the “R.S.V.P.” series (1975–77), involving pantyhose tied together, pinned to walls, and weighted with sand. By drawing compelling and precise connections such as these, “Slip Zone” insists on a revised history of abstraction that acknowledges and celebrates the dynamic, multidirectional cultural exchanges to which these artworks attest.

He left some 1,000 paintings and ink drawings, most of which are now fiercely fought for by collectors. In the years since his death, art institutions have looked to examine his visual impact. In 2019, New York–based gallery Karma, which gave Wong his first solo show the year prior, staged a posthumous solo exhibition, and last year, New York’s Cheim & Read also mounted an exhibition of Wong’s unseen ink drawings. The Art Gallery of Ontario is currently exhibiting some 40 paintings from Wong’s “Blue Series.”

The next show dedicated to Wong will be the most comprehensive yet. On October 16, “Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances” will open at the Dallas Museum of Art, marking the first U.S. museum retrospective of the artist. More than 60 works will be on view, tracing the arc of his six-year career.

The exhibition will also feature a special conservation study of several of Wong’s paintings, including The West, which was acquired by the DMA in 2017. (The DMA was the only U.S. museum to acquire a painting by Wong during his lifetime.) Wong was a prolific painter, and frequently reused canvases, executing new images on top of earlier ones.

Matthew Wong, The West, 2017, oil on canvas.

The show’s curator Vivian Li has organized the show in two parts: the first addressing his practice between 2013 and 2016, while he was living in Hong Kong and working from a studio in China. The second half focuses on his move to Canada, a brief but illustrious period.

The show will also be an exploration of Wong, both the painter and the person: a young Chinese Canadian, a son, a poet, a voracious scholar; someone who was depressive and neurodivergent. His biography, Li said, is too often overshadowed by his tragic death and market star.

“It’s the same, recycled biography that is circulated so it’s been a great journey learning about him,” Li said in an interview. “After you die everyone writes about you, but he had his own strong voice. He had strong opinion and ideas, he was a great thinker.”

Li worked closely with Wong’s mother, Monita, and his estate to assemble the materials. Notably it includes his early forays into photography, which Wong once described in an interview as the “first thing I remember doing out of my own creative volition.” He later turned to ink drawing and painting, picking up tips from online discussions among artists.

The show’s title takes its name from one of Wong’s most striking paintings, The Realm of Appearances, in which a fiery forest scene is tempered by the cool blue horizon. Like many of his painting, the piece has inspired comparisons to Pointillism, the saturated colors of Édouard Vuillard, and the dazzling patterning of Yayoi Kusama.

“Wong was totally cognizant of his influences,” Li said. “He had a photographic memory and was constantly going to the library, studying the masters. He was a polymath.”

The paintings, however, remain immediately obviously his own.

“He always tried to see himself in the world, while leaving the canvas open for others to enter into,” Li said. “I think that’s the appeal. That openness, that honesty. Everyone loves these paintings, but when they learn about the journey to create them, they’ll be asking new questions.”