Tate Modern’s first ink painting show leads a Hyundai-funded push beyond the Western canon

Exhibitions are where a museum’s arguments go public, rarely where they are made. At Tate, much of that thinking happens in a unit most visitors never see: the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, whose symposia, seminars and adjunct curators feed the galleries from behind the walls. Its slate for the coming year makes one claim again and again: modern art never had a single centre.

The clearest test of that claim will hang at Tate Modern. Ink is the gallery’s first exhibition devoted to ink painting, one of the world’s oldest artistic traditions, told through seven modern artists from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan who reworked it for the twentieth century. Tate’s listing leads with Yuan Jai’s Jadeite Cabbage, ink and colour on silk, and frames the show around Life, the Garden and Breath, pitched openly against Western accounts of originality and the avant-garde. For a museum built on Turbine Hall spectacle, a show about brush, water and breath is a deliberate change of register.

The year opens with the Annual Symposium, Transnational Resistances, organised with IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. Speakers such as civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin, visual culture historian Zeina Maasri and the artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme will ask how resistance is practised and embodied through art. The next edition turns to art and spirituality, and a new adjunct curatorial post in that field will join the existing ones in indigeneity, ecology, and Africa and the Caribbean diaspora.

Audience seated on the ground among birch trees outside Tate Modern during the Like Spores, We Spread event, with textile banners on a white tent — Like Spores, We Spread, Tate Modern, September 2026. Photo: Ben Fisher / Tate

The research is already on the walls. It supports Tate Modern’s exhibition on Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and the free display Teach by Example, on artistic networks and education spaces that flourished across Africa in the late twentieth century. Alongside Ink, a new free display, A Year in Art: Lebanon 1990, will gather artists who examine how conflict and displacement shaped image-making and collective memory.

Smaller formats follow the same thread. Ink as Method, with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, digs into the philosophy of ink. To close artist Zineb Sedira’s Tate Britain Commission, Algerian archivist Nabil Djedouani presents Café Alger, a lecture-performance followed by a set from Algerian-Tunisian DJ Cheb Mimo.

All of it rests on Hyundai Motor’s partnership with Tate, extended last year to run until 2036 and covering both the research centre and the Turbine Hall’s Hyundai Commission. A carmaker underwriting a museum’s rethink of art history deserves scrutiny; so far, the money is steering Tate away from one story and toward many.

The symposium runs at Tate Modern on 6 and 7 November 2026, with Theatre of the Street, on street and public art, following on 5 December. Ana Mendieta (£18) is open until 17 January 2027, and Café Alger takes place at Tate Britain in mid-January as the Sedira commission closes. Ink (£18) runs from 22 April to 30 August 2027 in the Eyal Ofer Galleries; A Year in Art: Lebanon 1990 opens free on 12 April 2027.

Ink painting holds that a brushstroke keeps the breath of the hand that made it. Tate’s research centre is asking the museum to look for that evidence in traditions it once left at the margins.

Tags: Tate Modern, art exhibitions, Tate Britain, Ana Mendieta, Hyundai Motor, Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational