Artsayssimon, Forbidden City, Dongcheng, Beijing, China, Beijing (2026)

26/04/2026

Impressive residence and beautifully curated, the in Brussels. Stunning geometric abstract art. Sol Lewit, Roni Horn, Turrell. All present 🥰

My favourite is the Cube called ‘Cocktail Sculpture’, by 🧊Filled with paraffin oil and distilled water, floating on top of each other due to the different densities. Minimal art. And with a rainbow diffraction effect 🌈

In the background, 🟧 ‘Hommage to the Square’ by Joseph Albers

The 📐Aluminium sculpture, Bicho Ponta Pa, by Lygia Clark, 1960. Was revolutionary back in the days. It has no top or bottom side. It can be arranged in a variety of configurations.

Other beautiful works: 🟦 light projection by James Turrell, 🔲 Donald Judd, ⚪️ by Dan Graham and another ⚪️ by Roni Horn, 5.000kg massive glass. The Sol Lewitt structure together with the white painting by Mary Corse and the 2 blue verticals are part of the SoundSpace installation 🎼by Bernard Leitner

22/03/2026

I expected scale, i found time 🇨🇳

For almost 500 years, this wasn’t history,
it was daily life inside these walls.

You don’t just see the Forbidden City
you feel how long it must have taken🙏🏻

14/01/2026

Atacama Desert, north of Chile🇨🇱 Together with Arjan and Danny, I travelled for a couple of weeks in Chile.

Our home base in Atacama was San Pedro de Atacama, at 2.400m, a small lodge just outside the centre. Dusty roads without asphalt, barely wide enough for one car, became familiar quickly. Cold nights, burning sun during the day, ands temperatures around 26°C

From there we moved toward lakes above 4.000m, and finally to steam rising at El Tatio. Lakes Chaxa, Legar, Miscanti and my favourite lake Miñiques at 4.200 (see photo 7)

The Atacama is the driest desert on Earth, with less than 1 mm of rain per year, yet it is kept alive by meltwater from the Andes. Beneath the salt flats lie vast lithium reserves, roughly one third of the world’s known supply. Lake Chaxa, see photo 3, with the Pelicans is next to that reserve)

Life adapts quietly at altitude. Vicuñas, which I kept calling mini llamas, suri that look like a kind of desert ostrich, and Andean geese live where oxygen is thin. Vegetation shifts color through minerals, water, and lichen, Lizan R would have loved this

Salt lakes are so dense you float effortlessly, the water clearer than the Dead Sea. In Laguna Legar, we could float standing up

All of this sits in a volcanic landscape. 🌋Around 200 volcanoes rise in the Atacama, part of nearly 2.000 across Chile, with about 90 still active. El Tatio covers 10 km² as the third largest geyser field in the world. The sunset above the valley of Moon, see final photo was beautiful. And at night, with almost no light pollution, the darkness is deep enough to lose count of the stars, just sitting there, looking up. Thanks

13/01/2026

Oh my dear people of Rapa Nui 👯‍♀️🗿Wishing you a beautiful Tapati festival this February🥰

May the dances, songs, and gestures keep carrying memory forward. Thank you for letting tradition stay alive. 🤍This is my sweetest memory of the island🤍

Rapa Nui culture is often cited as a strong example of living Polynesian heritage. Here, language, dance, and ritual are actively practiced, not reconstructed. If you can, do visit! It’s really a living island, not a resort 🌸

09/01/2026

🗿Rapa nui. Island life first. Visitors second 🌿👏🏻

In 1722, the Dutch 🇳🇱 explorer Jacob Roggeveen reached this island by chance. It was Easter Sunday, which is how it entered European maps. But the island already had a name, Rapa Nui, Big Island.

Long before that, Polynesian navigators arrived here by canoe, sometime between 800 and 1200 AD. They came from the same ocean world as Tahiti, about 4,200 km away, and Hawaiʻi, more than 7,500 km. No instruments. Just stars, wind, and memory.

There was no writing system. History lived in genealogy, chants, rituals, and in stone. Villages followed clans and land. Gardens in half open caves were built in volcanic soil using stone to protect crops like sweet potatoes and bananas. The caves were also used for shelter, storage, and burial. You can still visit the ancient city Orongo, high on the edge of Rano Kau 🌋 where stone houses with grass roofs are present.

Between the 10th and 16th centuries, around 900 moai🗿were carved and placed on ahu platforms, facing inland. These were not gods, but ancestors, watching inland over the living and carrying mana (the living)

To me, Rapa nui felt calm and real. You have to see this island! Tourism is regulated. Seeing islanders live their daily lives, unhurried and grounded, made me genuinely happy 🌺And i felt incredibly lucky to see the rehearsals for the Tapati Rapa Nui festival 👯‍♀️🌸

05/01/2026

One day in Uruguay. Less noise than Argentina. Less FOMO. Montevideo has the same French DNA and Art Deco lines as Buenos Aires, but it wears them looser. No rush. The museums feel calm, and the art keeps returning to structure, to symbols, to a kind of quiet order

About the photos:
Palacio Salvo, completed in 1928, designed by Italian architect Mario Palanti, an eclectic icon on Plaza Independencia

Museo Blanes (Museo de Bellas Artes Juan Manuel Blanes), a municipal fine arts museum in the Prado

Palacio Taranco, commissioned in 1907 and completed in 1910, designed by French architects Charles Louis Girault and Jules Chifflot

Palacio Taranco, interior rooms, Belle Époque atmosphere, decorative detail ✨

🎨Joaquín Torres-García, work in his Universal Constructivism language (grid + symbols, developed in the 1930s)

Torres-García again, a visual alphabet about abstraction

👶Pupil of Torres; José Gurvich, a key artist from the Torres-García circle, later developing a more personal narrative voice

Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales (MNAV), created by law in 1911, the core public collection of Uruguayan painting and sculpture.

Jardín Japonés (Jardín Heisei), inaugurated in 2001, located on the grounds of Museo Blanes 🌿

Montevideo va más lento.
Menos ruido, más aire.
Y el arte, más cerca

01/01/2026

Happy New Year.

Grateful for the art, places, and conversations along the way. Wishing you a year of meaningful connections, kindness, and shared ❤️ for art 😊

28/12/2025

Why is Buenos Aires so beautiful?

Because so much of the city was built with France in mind🇫🇷

Les premières funérailles (1878) by Louis-Ernest Barrias, seen at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes shows grief as something shared. Bodies depend on each other. No hero. Égalité.

The sculpture came to Argentina in the late 19th century. This was the moment when the country collected European academic art to look outward, especially toward France. The museum, founded in 1895, was part of that ambition. Buenos Aires wanted to stand next to Paris and Rome. You still see that choice in the city’s buildings today.

Seen now, the sculpture feels human and open. About dependence. About loss. About how power moves between people. Let’s see more of BA🥳

21/12/2025

Study for Carl Van Vechten

Shown in the exhibition Nowhere but the Night, a tribute to Erwin Olaf 🖤🤍
On view until January 11.

A beautiful exhibition, and a personal return to my favorite video work by Julien, Looking for Langston, from which this still is taken

Looking for Langston is a 1989 British art film blending documentary and fantasy, reflecting on the life and legacy of Langston Hughes and Black gay identity

16/12/2025

The Egyptian museum Cairo is about closeness in ancient Egypt. And a firm yes, it is still worth a visit, even if you are mainly heading to the Grand Egyptian Museum

The ‘old’ Egyptian Museum still holds around 120,000 objects and dozens of mummies. It is quieter, dated, and therefore a far more relaxed visit. Visit the GEM first, but only after coming here do you realise how much is still left to discover. To me, here the works stay close and human.

From pharaohs to priests to elites, my favourites:

Thuya
An elite woman whose mummy and gilded mask feel remarkably calm and personal. Not distant or idealised, but carefully preserved as an individual.

Yuya
High official and husband of Thuya. His burial feels specific and human, not symbolic. You sense a real person rather than a role. From both of them, the actual mummies are on display too.

Head of Nefertiti
An unfinished portrait where the process is still visible. Rough stone and painted features exist side by side, making intimacy emerge through incompletion rather than perfection. So much different from the famous statue in Berlin!

Seked-kau with his wife and son
A family group defined by proximity. Bodies touch lightly, gestures are restrained, and closeness is shown without drama. Notice the son standing, on equal height as long as his parents remain seated.

Seneb and his family
A rare and direct portrayal of family life. Difference is not hidden. Affection and social reality are carved openly into stone. Notice in the male figure.

Akhenaten holding Kiya, his second wife next to Nefertiti
An unprecedented moment of physical affection. A king holding his wife on his knee, a type of intimacy that appears only briefly in Egyptian art. He was the only pharaoh that allowed only one God ☀️to worship

14/12/2025

Minutes from the Great Pyramid, slightly hidden from view. Ons of the very few places at Giza where reliefs and colour have survived instead of bare stone.

You won’t see any of this when you visit the pyramids. This is the tomb, the mastaba of Meresankh III who was the granddaughter of King Khufu, also known as Cheops. The figures here are not placed statues, but carved directly from the rock. The reliefs and hieroglyphs you see here are around roughly 4,500 years old!🥰

Walk downwards east from Cheops and search for the signs. You can book it online

Artsayssimon

26/04/2026

22/03/2026

14/01/2026

13/01/2026

09/01/2026

05/01/2026

01/01/2026

28/12/2025

21/12/2025

16/12/2025

14/12/2025

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