The Top 10 Exhibitions to See Around the World This May

From the vivid colours of Rio de Janeiro to Zoomer life, via the 93-year-old New Yorker at the height of her artistic powers, Ocula’s global team of editors rounds up the events not to be missed in May.

Jungjin Lee, Unseen/Thing (until 23 May) at PKM Gallery, Seoul

Jungjin Lee’s exhibition brings together two pre-existing bodies of work: Unseen (2024), a series of large landscapes taken in Iceland, and Thing (2003–2007), portraits of household objects including spoons, pots, a crooked nail and a filing cabinet. The photographic subjects, so different in scale, are similarly rendered as intensely textile and intimate forms. Isolated and in black and white, they gain an imposing presence. Lee trained as a ceramicist before becoming a photographer and, after relocating to the US in 1988, developed a process which involves brushing photosensitive emulsion on to hanji, a traditional Korean paper made from the inner bark of mulberry trees. As a result, both the Icelandic sea and a striped seashell acquire an almost miraculous degree of textural detail, all the more remarkable for its being expressed only in shades of grey. These works of quiet power demonstrate photography’s essentially material nature, as well as the stormy cragginess of the organic world. The computer screen can only partially do them justice. —Nell Whittaker

Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Gregory, Genuine Fake Premium Economy (1 May–5 July) at the ICA, London

Genuine Premium Fake Economy is a millennial-themed exhibition, but it is not necessarily for millennials. Through the work of three artists born in the mid-1980s—who became adults in the wake of the 2008 financial crash—it looks at the texture of life for a generation shaped by precarity. Jasmine Gregory, who works in moving image and painting, has made still life oil paintings of advertising campaigns by brands such as Patek Philippe, exaggerating the whiteness of the models’ teeth, crisp shirts and cheesy family scenes, exposing a grotesque fixation on dynasty. Buck Ellis examines whiteness and working culture through his photographs; here, he is showing a pile of headed office paper and cream business cards. Jenna Bliss’s multimedia oeuvre of video, lightbox and photography resembles an Adam Curtis documentary with its schizophrenic splicing of archive video exploring the art world and systemic power imbalances. Genuine Fake Premium Economy is a warning to both older and younger generations. An alternative title, lifted from one work of Bliss’s, could have been Dear Zoomer. —Lydia Eliza Trail

Joan Semmel, Continuities (until 27 June) at Xavier Hufkens Rivoli, Brussels

At 93, American painter Joan Semmel is just hitting the peak of her powers. A Bronx native, Semmel spent the 1960s living in Spain. When she returned to New York City in 1970 she found what has arguably been her lifelong mission as a painter. “I had returned from Spain looking for the ‘sexual revolution’ and instead found sexual commercialisation that mostly showed female bodies for sale. I wanted to find an erotic visual language that would speak to women. I was convinced that the repression of women began in the sexual arena, and this would need to be addressed at the source.” In 1971, Semmel became well-known for her Sex Paintings series, depicting couples with alien skin tones of tangerine, cobalt blue and fuchsia engaged in un-vanilla sex acts. During the 1980s, Semmel turned her attention to her own body, and Continuities, a single exhibition shown across Xavier Hufkens (Tivoli) and Alexander Gray Associates (NYC), presents an artist still ravenous to define the female form as a locus of self-determined erotic force. —Aimee Walleston

Wynnie Mynerva, Volveré y seré millones (1 May–27 June) at Société, Berlin

 The title of Wynnie Mynerva’s exhibition, opening as part of Berlin Gallery Weekend, translates as “I will return and I will be millions”, the last words attributed to the Andean revolutionary Túpac Katari who fought against Spanish colonial rule. Mynerva, who is Peruvian, has used the show to look at the afterlife of colonial violence, alongside the Andean legend of Inkarri, the last Inca, whose dismembered body regenerates after burial, seeding future uprisings. These narratives open up ideas around bodily resistance, transformation and continuity, intersecting with the artist’s own experience as a non-binary person. Across visceral paintings, video and installation, bodies appear in states of rupture and recomposition. A massive clay wall, embedded with organic matter and terracotta shards, anchors the exhibition: a living surface where decay and regeneration are shown as being inseparable. —Shanyu Zhong

Li Li Ren, The World Forgetting, by the World Forgot (until 18 July) at Office (Magician Space), Shenzhen

Beijing-based gallery Magician Space has popped up in Shenzhen, the Chinese city bordering Hong Kong, to show an exhibition of work by London-based artist Li Li Ren. Life-sized skeletal forms are scattered throughout the space, giving it a sense of theatricality: in the Memento series (2024–), casts of pelvises cling to the walls, their hollow cavities cradling glass orbs. In Tārā Arising From Compassionate Tears (2024), a bronze spine-like form stands up of its own accord, appearing like a human-sized seahorse. Ren’s works evoke a bodily ecology that is usually felt rather than seen: strange, internal waves of pain and flux. Tucked into the interstices of these sculptures are rubber seeds, discovered by Ren after her grandmother passed away, which gather as tender residues. —Zian Chen

Lucia Laguna, Apenas meus cabelos são brancos... [Only my hair is white...], (14 May–27 June) at Galerie Lelong, New York City

In Rio de Janeiro, the parks are filled with inquisitive, tufted-eared marmosets, and the walkways of Copacabana look like one endless undulating squiggle. You ascend (via a rickety trolley car) vertically through the jungle to the summit of Corcovado, to simultaneously gaze up at the Christ the Redeemer statue and then down, vertiginously, at Guanabara Bay below. It is in this hyper-real setting that Brazilian painter Lucia Laguna has been working for the past 15 years. New paintings from two ongoing bodies of work, Pequenos formatos [Small formats] and Paisagem [Landscape], showcase the artist’s signature geometric forms and bursts of botanical colour, but you can see a change produced by the move she made three years ago from Rio’s northern suburbs (where she lived for 40 years) to an apartment in the Laranjeiras neighbourhood. According to the gallery, “As her views changed and her studio space became more condensed, her proximity to her canvases and to her neighbours triggered compositional shifts.” In this new body of work, her semi-abstracted landscapes are obscured and framed by the closeness of the windows, doors and tiles of a city apartment. —Aimee Walleston

Intellectual Structures: Trigger, Judgment and Decision (until 6 June) at Each Modern, Taipei

For her Wu Se Tu project, which opened last year, Chinese artist Liang Yuanwei used sheets of carbon paper in five basic colours, circular cut-outs and combs to create a mural across the ceilings and walls of a Soviet-era diplomatic compound apartment. The 1970s architecture she was painting evoked a moment when such compounds signalled a certain elegance and outward-looking imagination in Beijing. The latest work from that series now appears in Taipei alongside five artists of different generations from mainland China: DAZHI, Ding Hongdan, Jing Ao, Wenjue and Xu Qu. Across painting, installation and assemblage, the exhibition explores processes of making, layering, rearranging and revising. —Shanyu Zhong

Poet Tang Chang’s Institute of Modern Art (1 May 2026–30 April 2027) at Tang Chang Private Museum, Nakhon Pathom and SAKSI: A Passing Thing (8 May–18 July) at Art Centre, Silpakorn University, Bangkok

Across Bangkok and its outskirts, two posthumous exhibitions explore the artistic practices of two outsider artists. In Nakhon Pathom, an hour outside the capital, an exhibition of Thai-Chinese artist Tang Chang opens the eponymous Tang Chang Private Museum. Chang refused market circulation during his lifetime, sustaining his practice through portrait commissions and small trade. In 1985, he transformed his Thonburi home into Poet Tang Chang’s Institute of Modern Art, exhibiting his own work alongside that of students and family. The inaugural exhibition for this family-run museum traces his evolving practice from early charcoal drawings to late works made in hospital, giving his Chinese calligraphy and expressive, Buddhist-inflected paintings a form of institutional recognition.

The group show SAKSI: A Passing Thing centres on Malaysian artist Roslisham Ismail, aka Ise, (1972–2019), whose apartment-based Parking Project operated as a hybrid studio and space for transregional collaboration. The exhibition revisits his site-responsive interventions, in particular his close collaboration with Bangkok collective Mafia Table. The key work is Ise’s Operation Bangkok (2014), which saw him fill an apartment with items he had collected around Bangkok, to form a kind of diary of his experience of the city. —Zian Chen

Cao Fei, Testimonies to the Near Future (30 May–11 October 2026) at Kunstmuseum Basel

The renowned Chinese artist Cao Fei has created not just the artworks for her huge retrospective at Basel’s Kunstmuseum, but also the design of the exhibition. Working with Beijing-based collective Small Production, Fei has transformed all four floors of the Gegenwart building into a simulation of a city, allowing her installations, videos and VR simulations to be experienced in a setting that feels at once naturalistic and surreal. On show are the standout works from her almost-30-year career spent examining the impact of China’s emergence as a technology superpower on the lives of its people, and in particular on its city dwellers. Visitors can move between RMB City (2007–), a virtual simulation of a fictional Chinese city which users can explore, to her 2018 fiction film Asia One, which followed the only two human employees in the world’s first fully automated sorting centre. The work forms her largest show in Europe to date. —Baya Simons

Rosa Loy, Silent Work (until 30 May) at Gallery Baton, Seoul

There is rarely just one strand to Rosa Loy’s painted narratives, in which multi-layered scenes play out just behind the female protagonist’s shoulder. Loy’s subjects are women who appear caught in time, as if plucked from an ongoing dream, yet firmly of this world in their modern tights, block-heeled shoes and knowing gaze. A key figure of the Leipzig School of painting, Loy draws deftly from Surrealist elements in her symbolism, from a lone woman clutching a bright red heart to a rounded vessel with a young female face adorning it, and disembodied eyes hidden among dense leaves. Her use of casein, a classical medium formed from milk whose fast-drying properties lends itself to frescos, imbues her paintings with a chalky, matte surface, and makes each image feel as if it is slowly being absorbed back into the artist’s own subconscious from which it came. In her latest exhibition, Silent Work at Gallery Baton, there is a calm sense of cloistered refuge to the stories that play out, as if these female archetypes have been left to their own devices in a strange utopia of their own making. —Louise Benson

Main image: Cao Fei, Nova, (2019) Courtesy the artist and Kunstmuseum Basel.