Image: Exhibition key visual, Pola Museum of Art, Hakone
The Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan, is presenting ‘The New Vision: Monet and the Contemporary Gaze’, on view from 17 June 2026 until 7 April 2027, bringing together Claude Monet’s paintings with works by 18 groups of contemporary artists. The exhibition marks the centenary of Monet’s death and the 25th anniversary of the museum, according to the institution’s exhibition page.
The museum is showing all 19 of its Monet paintings, a collection it describes as one of the largest of its kind in Asia. The works span the artist’s career from 1872 to 1908, including landscapes of the Seine, the Saint-Lazare railway station and coastal sites, as well as series depicting London, Venice and the gardens at Giverny. Among the paintings listed for the exhibition are ‘The Water-Lily Pond’ from 1899, ‘Sunset on the Seine, Winter’ from 1880 and ‘Rouen Cathedral’ from 1892.
Rather than presenting the contemporary works as straightforward art-historical comparisons, the museum positions them as creative dialogues with Monet’s subjects, methods and artistic circumstances. The participating artists include Félix González-Torres, Roni Horn, Pierre Huyghe, Amar Kanwar, Kapwani Kiwanga, Nile Koetting, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Ritsue Mishima, Fujiko Nakaya, Hinako Omori, Thao Nguyen Phan, Susan Philipsz, Wolfgang Tillmans and Su-Mei Tse, alongside Lucas Arruda, Allora & Calzadilla and Yojiro Imasaka. The museum’s list also names historical works by Émile Gallé and Georges Seurat, and the exhibition is organised by its chief curator Yoko Iwasaki and senior curator Kota Suzuki for the Pola Art Foundation.
The presentation extends beyond the conventional gallery layout, with works in exhibition rooms 1, 2 and 4, the atrium gallery and the lobby, as well as the surrounding forest walkway. The museum describes a programme that includes a large-scale fog sculpture, immersive video, glass objects, sound installation and performance. It also says that artists including Lucas Arruda, Noémie Goudal, Yojiro Imasaka and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané are being introduced at a Japanese museum for the first time, according to the exhibition materials.
Several pairings outlined by the museum focus on the ways artists construct or transform perceptions of nature, memory and place. Monet’s ‘The Water-Lily Pond’ is shown in relation to Noémie Goudal’s constructed landscapes and images, while ‘Sunset on the Seine, Winter’ is presented with González-Torres’s candy installation ‘Untitled’ (Portrait of Marcel Brient), a 1992 work held by the Pola Museum. The museum describes both artists as addressing absence through different materials and forms. Another pairing brings Monet’s ‘The Flowered Banks at Argenteuil’ together with Thao Nguyen Phan’s video work ‘Becoming Alluvium’ (2019), in a dialogue concerning industrialisation, environmental damage and the relationship between nature and civilisation.
The exhibition also introduces recently acquired contemporary works collected by the museum as part of an expansion begun in 2015. These include González-Torres’s candy installation, a photographic and textual work by Horn, and a large commissioned work by Su-Mei Tse. Tse is additionally producing a new work for the exhibition, using as possible subjects places associated with Monet, including the Saint-Lazare station, the cliffs at Étretat, Rouen Cathedral, Giverny and Bordighera.
Related programming listed by the museum includes a children’s collage workshop on Sunday 23 August 2026, capped at 10 places with advance booking, and a lecture for 60 people on Saturday 5 September by Takayuki Hayashi, a professor at Tokyo University of the Arts who specialises in postwar American contemporary art, focusing on González-Torres’s candy works and their intersections with Monet. The museum is open every day of the run except 1 December 2026.
