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Reuben Wu: A Sunset Becomes a Face in Paris

At ASIA NOW in Paris, Reuben Wu's Homage to Homage to the Square hangs in Faces, a show by Gallery BYGRIDA and Art on Tezos that treats landscapes, avatars and video signals as portraits.

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Can a landscape be a portrait? That is the bet of Faces, a group show presented by Gallery BYGRIDA in partnership with Art on Tezos at ASIA NOW 2026, the fair of art from Asia and its diaspora held at the Monnaie de Paris through October 24. "The face is our most familiar image, yet the most elusive to capture," the curators write. Their 5 artists push portraiture past anatomy: Shavonne Wong's virtual figures, Niceaunties' AI-built aunties, ALIENQUEEN's surreal bodies drawn from her family's history as Cambodian refugees, POLYGON1993's portraits born from the glitches of 1980s and 1990s analog video, and the illuminated landscapes of Reuben Wu.

Wu is known for working in remote places, using drones to draw geometric lines of light across the terrain, so that a familiar landscape starts to look like the surface of an unknown planet. The objkt presentation calls these works "illuminated portraits of unknown planetary surfaces." In Paris, he shows Homage to Homage to the Square. A sun sits low on a flat sea, and rising from it, a set of nested rectangles of light stack up into the sky, a nod to Josef Albers' Homage to the Square, the long series of squares within squares Albers used to show how color shifts with its surroundings. Here, the color study is done with a horizon. "Nature becomes a silent face," Art on Tezos wrote, "receiving and releasing light into the dark."

The show lives in 2 places at once. At booth R03, the works hang as physical pieces, and on objkt they exist as on-chain editions on Tezos, so collectors who are not in Paris can follow the show remotely. Shavonne Wong posted on October 20 that her largest print was "hanging in Paris right beside" Wu's work. "We're helping connect artists with a global community of collectors," Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, Head of Art at Trilitech, said in a statement, "while showing how blockchain can support provenance and ownership without defining the creative process."

Wu himself was on the move this month. On October 15 he wrote that he was heading back to New York to present at Fujikina and FotoFest on how a single portfolio review in 2017 changed his career. Faces closes on Saturday, October 24.

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