Ocula

Basketball star Karl-Anthony Towns and his wife, model and entrepreneur Jordyn Woods, are set to become the latest celebrities to dip their toes into the auction world by curating a sale with Sotheby’s New York next month. Spanning a range of genres and media, the pair’s selection comprises 10 works by artists such as John Chamberlain, Andy Warhol, and Helen Frankenthaler.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has broken ground on its new modern and contemporary art wing. The 11,700 square metre (126,000 square foot) Oscar L Tang and HM Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing, scheduled to open to the public in 2030, will house the museum’s collection of 20th- and 21st-century art and will feature improvements in accessibility, infrastructure and sustainability.

Visitors entering the Grand Palais at Art Basel Paris in 2024 found themselves confronted with a retro Hong Kong dining experience, out of keeping with the rest of the fair. The spectacle was organised by the Hong Kong Tourism Board and centred on a live replica of a cha chaan teng, or casual diner, serving real food including pineapple buns, egg tarts, and Hong Kong-style milk tea.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington DC has appointed Ching-Ling Wang as its inaugural Nancy Chang Lee Curator of Chinese Art. Wang will join the museum in November, after a decade as curator of Chinese art at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Wang’s research spans Chinese literati painting and Buddhist imagery, with a particular focus on exchanges between China, East Asia and Europe.

War continues to ravage Ukraine, debates surrounding UK immigration have turned ever-more violent and a far-right party has claimed victory in a German state for the first time since the Second World War. But, in Ireland, a new exhibition is offering some respite, focusing not on conflict, but on the state of peace.

Minne Kersten’s installations remind me of the kind of dreams in which you’re trespassing in a strange house which you know, on some level, belongs to you. The life-sized rooms that the Dutch artist builds and then films (an attic, a bedroom, a cabin) exist, as she puts it, in “a certain haunted universe”, evacuated of human presence.

A new permanent structure conceived by multidisciplinary artist Gerhard Richter will open in Doha on 20 November. Doha Pavilion, described as “a freestanding work of art and architecture”, will be home to a collection of Richter’s paintings and sculpture. The pavilion—the construction costs of which have not been publicly disclosed—is located in MIA Park in Doha, the public space outside the Museum of Islamic Art.

Following Frieze Seoul and Kiaf, east Asia’s September fair circuit moves from Korea to Japan, where Tokyo Gendai today opens its fourth edition at Pacifico Yokohama to the public. It does so with a clear proposition: works on paper can offer both a route into collecting and a field for material experimentation.

A Hong Kong evening auction headlined by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Yayoi Kusama and a single-owner sale estimated to be worth more than £120 million are among the highlights of Christie’s newly-announced autumn sales. Around 200 artworks amassed by Peter Simon, founder of the Monsoon and Accessorize fashion chains and estimated at between £87 million and £127 million, will be sold across three auctions in London between 14 and 20 October, alongside Frieze week.

When the British Museum unveils the Bayeux Tapestry to the public tomorrow (10 September), the historic object is set to become London’s biggest tourist attraction. The 70-metre-long textile depicts the Norman conquest of England and the events leading up to the defeat of Anglo-Saxon King Harold Godwinson at the hands of William the Conqueror in 1066.