Restitution Stalemates, Biennale Censorship, and Stolen Masterpieces

Para Site in Hong Kong is turning 30, and its new executive director, James Taylor-Foster, is already mapping a reset. The 33-year-old British curator filled the role last month after it sat empty since last year, and he describes the next chapter as “both a continuation and a rupture.” He’s coming in with a background spanning architecture, design, and digital culture after nearly a decade at ArkDes in Sweden, not the standard contemporary-visual-art pipeline. Taylor-Foster keeps returning to one line: “The legacy is undeniable, but of course you can’t be burdened by a legacy.” His focus is lowering the threshold for audiences without lowering ambition, and he’s also prioritizing a move from Para Site’s Quarry Bay space, which he says has been pushed close to its limits.

Paris’s Palais de Tokyo is giving Cathy de Monchaux a major survey—her first significant exhibition in more than a quarter of a century. The show, titled *Studio, Wounds and Battles: Desire is the Reiteration of Hope*, revisits the artist who became one of the 1990s’ most distinctive sculptors, with success that included a Turner Prize nomination in 1998 and works bought by Tate. De Monchaux says, “The phone just stopped ringing,” but she kept making work while raising her son as a single mother, supported by a small group of collectors. The exhibition avoids a straight timeline, mixing decades of work, from a student-made, life-sized cane-and-tissue unicorn to recent wall-mounted tableaux of faceless pregnant figures erupting from papery fissures, plus a painstaking recreation of her London studio’s “tool shelves of ideas and spells.”

Italy is reeling after thieves stole four paintings by Antonello da Messina from the Regional Museum of Messina on the night of August 15. Authorities say the burglars bypassed the alarm system, broke into display boxes, and escaped in minutes with three panels from the *Polittico di San Gregorio* altarpiece and a smaller double-sided devotional painting. Enzo Caruso, Messina’s top culture official, called it “a very, very strange affair,” saying it’s hard to imagine without intimate knowledge of the museum. Sicily’s president Renato Schifani said the video surveillance and alarm were working and guards were on site, and an internal investigation is looking at possible staff complicity. Two Antonello paintings were later found abandoned against the museum fence, apparently too heavy.

Another Italy-linked report looks at cultural heritage through criminal law: prosecutors in Crimea and Sevastopol have opened a war-crimes investigation into alleged illegal archaeological expeditions in occupied Crimea. Two unnamed researchers are being investigated—one linked to the Hermitage, and another tied to “the so-called ‘Institute of Archaeology of Crimea of the Russian Academy of Sciences.’” Prosecutors allege unpermitted digs since 2014 at Medieval Solkhat in the city of Old Crimea destroyed culturally significant parts of the site. One suspect allegedly transferred objects—including elements of an ancient water supply system, bowls, and dish fragments—to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, which then catalogued them as its own collection. The charges could carry sentences of up to 12 years, and Ukraine maintains excavations there require Ukrainian permission.

A new book is sharpening an old, unresolved question: why Britain won’t return looted gold to Ghana. In *The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Treasure* (2026), Barnaby Phillips reconstructs how British colonial forces plundered the Asante people and traces the stolen objects’ afterlives in museum storage. The story centers on the Asante Empire’s collision with British power: after forces led by Sir Garnet Wolseley sacked Kumasi in the 1873–74 war—remembered by Asante people as the “Sagrenti War”—British troops returned in late 1895 under Sir Francis Scott, looting and burning the royal palace and mausoleum. They demanded a huge indemnity in gold and the Golden Stool. Prempeh I was deported to the Seychelles for nearly three decades; the Golden Stool remained hidden.

Taiwanese artists are accusing South Korea’s Gwangju Biennale of political censorship after organizers removed the country’s name from promotional materials. The dispute centers on the official name of a pavilion: the artists say the Biennale’s decision to exclude “Taiwan” from the pavilion’s title “is a threat to freedom of expression and the global art community.” The artists’ complaint is direct: the issue isn’t aesthetics, it’s naming—what appears in official communication, and who gets publicly identified on their own terms. The reporting frames it as a conflict triggered by that change in promotional materials, with artists arguing that the omission carries political consequences beyond the exhibition itself. As the artists present it, the name removal effectively narrows what can be said and recognized in a major international art platform.

In New York City, faculty at the School of Visual Arts say they were “blindsided” by course and program cuts as the school tries to close a twenty two dollars million structural deficit—described as the largest in SVA’s 79-year history. The faculty union is calling on SVA leadership to work with the community on the impact of the reductions. Interim president Christopher J. Cyphers wrote in a July 1 all-staff email that the school would reduce operating costs, citing factors including “the ongoing dismantling of education and the arts by the federal government,” a 40% drop in enrollment since 2019, and a shrinking international student population. The email said international students in fall 2025 made up 45% of undergraduates and 53% of the graduate cohort. On August 7, the union said even department chairs didn’t know about cancellations of many courses and foundation blocks.

At the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in Soho, Shu Lea Cheang is the focus of the museum’s largest commission to date. Cheang’s *LOVER LOVE*, on view through January 3, 2027, is a 28-minute film spread across four screens suspended on tracks, and visitors are invited to push and reposition them, creating shifting overlaps and juxtapositions. The installation opens into projections of an animated Berlin apartment block looping around the room; a window swings open and smoke becomes a six-winged seraphim that moves into another portal. Cheang, a Taiwanese-American artist and filmmaker, describes the work as excavating the experiences and dreams of transgender and gender-nonconforming people through physical and virtual landscapes. The commission is also a tribute to Cheang’s late friend and collaborator Aérea Negrot, a Berlin-based Venezuelan musician and DJ who died in 2023.

Upstate in western New York, the inaugural Medina Triennial is being framed as a community-wide exhibition that treats art like infrastructure. Set in rural Medina, a town bisected by the Erie Canal, it brings together more than 100 artworks by 39 artists across 10 locations. Co-artistic directors Kari Conte and Karin Laansoo commissioned and selected projects synthesizing art, ecology, architecture, and rural culture, using “maintenance” as a social, political, and environmental act. The show’s organizing question is practical and huge: what does it take to keep things going? Artist Mary Mattingly helped spark interest in the triennial; she’s launching *Floating Garden* (2026), a permanent iteration of *Swale*, her publicly accessible edible garden first launched on New York City’s East River in 2016. The triennial’s works examine labor, regulation, extraction, and repair in shared systems.

ARTnews “Morning Links” leads with a major museum arrival: Joshua Reynolds’s monumental 18th-century portrait of Mai—a young Tahitian man who came to London with Captain Cook in 1774—will make its West Coast debut at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times reports the eight-foot painting was jointly acquired for more than sixty one dollars million by the Getty and the National Portrait Gallery in Los Angeles, then traveled to the Getty for intensive conservation research. That research has already revealed layers of paint, revisions, and pigments including lead and vermilion. It goes on view at the Getty next month and remains up until the institution’s 2027 closure. The links also note a documentary, *Douglas Gordon By Douglas Gordon*, directed by Finlay Pretsell, premiering at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

That’s the download for today—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art world signals, noise, and the occasional revelation; Chinga la migra.

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