The Garden Claude Monet Turned Into a Painting

By Jonathan Shih

Few artists reshaped the world around them as completely as Claude Monet. After settling in Giverny in 1883, he transformed a modest pink house and its land into a living work of art, where daily life and painting became inseparable.

Monet didn’t just paint nature—he designed it. He arranged flower beds with the eye of a colorist, planning blooms across seasons like shifting palettes. In the early 1890s, he expanded the landscape further, diverting water from the river Epte to create a reflective pond. There, he introduced water lilies, bending willows, and a Japanese-style bridge, crafting a scene that felt both natural and carefully composed.

This garden became his primary subject. Over the years, Monet returned to it obsessively, capturing subtle changes in light, weather, and time of day. The result was the Nymphéas series—vast, immersive paintings that pushed the boundaries of perception and helped shape modern art.

Today, Giverny stands not just as a preserved home, but as a rare place where an artist’s vision still exists in full scale—part landscape, part studio, and part masterpiece.

Broken Chairs - Michael Wolf

By Jonathan Shih

German artist Michael Wolf spent years walking the back alleys of Hong Kong and mainland China, documenting improvised DIY chairs – each one patched, repaired and rebuilt from whatever materials its maker could find.

On occasion members of the public notified authorities of his amblings. “I was never actually arrested, but was detained twice for more than six hours in a public security bureau and questioned. Both times my films were confiscated”, he said of the experience.

The project was part of his wider practice, concentrated on capturing the culture and architecture of megacities.