What to See Around the World This Winter

Gi Huo and Cha Yeonså | DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, South Korea | 22 October – 13 December

What can we make of the legacies we did not choose, yet continue to live with? This question underlies ‘sent in spun found’, a two-person exhibition featuring New York-based Gi (Ginny) Huo and Seoul-based Cha Yeonså at DOOSAN Gallery in Seoul. Through installation, drawing and video, the artists work through what has been handed down – Huo, from a family history of migration and religious faith, and Cha from the material remnants of a deceased father – to consider how the inheritances that befall us might generate forms of care, resistance and renewal. – Jiwon Yu

‘Horizon in Their Hands’ | Ithra Museum, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia | 18 September – 14 February 

The underrepresentation of female artists, especially in earlier decades, is hardly news. Yet each exhibition that strives to shed light on women’s artistic careers and rebalance the scales uncovers stories that fascinate. At Dhahran’s King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra), the group show ‘Horizon in Their Hands: Women Artists from the Arab World (1960s–1980s)’ delves into the rich output of 50 female artists across the MENA region. 

Created in collaboration with the UAE-based Barjeel Art Foundation and curated by Rémi Homs, the exhibition presents more than 70 artworks that often straddle the fine line between art and handcraft, a tension that defined many female practices in the 20th century. Several pieces have never before been publicly exhibited, including Mounirah Mosly’s The Young Woman (2010), where printed textile fragments are embedded into a painting of a woman in traditional garb carrying a breadbasket. The work transforms Saudi material culture into a palimpsest of local reference and memory. – Maghie Ghali

Juliette Minchin | Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, Istanbul, Turkey | 19 September – 18 January 

Wax hangs like fresh yuba in the subterranean Byzantine cistern of an Istanbul hammam. Shaped to suggest shrugged-off garments, it is displayed in patinated steel niches, as in works like Niche 1 (all works 2025), or draped over limestone ledges and pedestals. Commissioned in the 16th century by the notorious Ottoman corsair Hayreddin Barbarossa and designed by court architect Sinan, the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam complex fell into disrepair before its 2023 renovation and reopening. Upstairs, the experience remains much the same as it always was: a shedding of layers, warming up on heated marble, an enthusiastic sloughing of skin, a foam massage and decompression. Downstairs, however, this purifying journey is paralleled in the almost alchemical transformations of wax, tin and paper that make up Juliette Minchin’s exhibition ‘Where the River Burns’. – Rahel Aima

2025 Taipei Biennial | Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan | 1 November – 29 March 

A man in silhouette reclines on the beach, glancing out at the ocean, which glistens with white hexagonal pearls – the kind of blurry vision you might see as you wipe seawater from your eyes and readjust to the healing sunlight. There is undoubtedly a nostalgic sense of longing in Cheng Sang-Syi’s monochrome photograph Impression from the Seashore (1960): a pining for a simpler past, perhaps, or a moment of summer respite. 

It is one of 15 historical images from the collection of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum that punctuate the latest iteration of the Taipei Biennial, the title of which is referenced in the text accompanying Cheng’s picture, as if inspired by it: ‘Whispers on the Horizon’. It is the conceit of curators and Hamburger Bahnhof co-directors Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, whose starting points included three objects, all infused with yearning – a word that surfaces again and again during my visit. These lodestars comprise a puppet from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film The Puppetmaster (1993), a diary from Chen Yingzhen’s short story ‘My Kid Brother Kangxiong’ (1960) and a bicycle from Wu Ming-yi’s novel The Stolen Bicycle (2017). – Sean Burns

2025 Okayama Art Summit | Various venues in Okayama, Japan | 26 September – 24 November 

The fourth iteration of the Okayama Art Summit, ‘The Parks of Aomame’, draws its title from the dimension-crossing hitwoman in Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84 (2009–10). Just as the character Aomame traverses multiple realities, the exhibition, which is led by French artistic director Philippe Parreno and set in civic, commercial and office spaces across the city, explores the idea of parallel worlds. As the imagined realms proposed by a – primarily Western – cohort of artists, musicians, scientists and others meet the real-world circumstances of the city, the vision of fantasy that emerges is at times strange, at times beautiful and often off-putting. – Emilia Wang 

^{Main image: Gi (Ginny) Huo, on the way to La’ ie (detail), 2025, digital colour print on self-adhesive film, single channel video, 16mm film with cinematography and edit by Saif Al-Sobaihi, 7.3 × 2.4 m. Courtesy: DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul; photograph: Euirock Lee}