139 Previews: Enlightened Designs

IM PEI, A Bankers’ Club in Hong Kong, fourth-year student project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1938–39. Courtesy MIT Museum, Cambridge.

IM Pei
Life is Architecture
M+, Hong Kong
Jun 29–Jan 5, 2025

“Life is Architecture” is the first full-scale retrospective exhibition of celebrated Guangzhou-born architect IM Pei (1917–2019). The exhibition features more than 300 drawings, photographs, films, architectural models, and other archival materials of Pei, many shown for the first time. Presenting his life and career through six themes—including his transcultural foundations, early career in real-estate development, frequent collaborations with artists, and interest in reviving historical archetypes—M+ explores Pei’s seven-decade career across a global geography. M+ also commissioned new photographs of 11 buildings by Pei, and architectural students will present constructed models of Pei’s significant but unrealized projects.

**KEIICHI TANAAMI**, *Law of the Forest*, 2024, pigmented ink, acrylic silk screen medium, crashed glass, glitter acrylic paint, acrylic paint on canvas, 250 × 200 cm. Courtesy the artist and Nanzuka, Tokyo.

Keiichi Tanaami
Adventures in Memory
National Art Center, Tokyo
Aug 7–Nov 11

A leading figure in Japan’s underground art scene, Keiichi Tanaami is known for his magazine and advertisement design as well as forays into 1960s-era pop art. His career as a designer began in the mid-1970s, and he became the first art director of the Japanese edition of Playboy magazine. Covering Tanaami’s creative journey of more than 60 years, “Adventures in Memory” presents his numerous genre-defying multimedia artworks, films, and graphics, spanning the Andy Warhol-inspired ORDER MADE!! series (1965) to his own commissioned fashion-brand creations, as well as the first showing of his dream diaries recorded since the 1970s.

**EUGENE JUNG**, *Two-panel Observatory*, 2022, broken plexiglass, lacquer spray, steel structure, 180 × 190 × 90 cm. Photo by Sang Tae Kim. Courtesy the artist and Museumhead.

Busan Biennale 2024
Seeing in the Dark
Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan
Aug 17–Oct 20

Curators Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte propose to explore life amid today’s “darkness” in the Busan Biennale 2024—and what “enlightenment” could mean beyond the physical world. Titled “Seeing in the Dark,” the exhibition draws on the Buddhist concept of the monastery as a place far from society, as well as on alternative, anarchist perspectives offered by the late anthropologist David Graeber in his writings about “pirate utopias” predating European modernity. Hailing from 35 countries, 70-plus artists’ works are presented at the museum, a former car showroom, and the ship-shaped Choryang House, along with talks and a collaborative Pirate Carnival.