Text and Images_Chen Chi-Hsiang

If not postponed, the landscape art exhibition at the Pont Neuf Cave in Paris will enter the collective memory of Parisians at midnight on June 28th. Here, we remind everyone to seize the remaining opportunity. JR (born 1983 in Paris) is a top street artist today. Starting with graffiti, finding a camera in the metro at age 17 changed his creative life, beginning with documenting his graffiti process and portraits of friends around him. He soon focused on photographic portraits as his main form of street creation. JR printed their black-and-white portraits and pasted them on Parisian streets, in basements, and on rooftops; Paris became the birthplace of his artistic exploration experiments. Between 2004 and 2006, JR created the "Portrait of a Generation" series, featuring young common folk from the suburbs. JR hopes to bring art to the streets: "On the street, we can reach those who have never been to museums." In 2008, JR launched an international touring exhibition titled "Women Are Heroes," a project aimed at highlighting the dignity of women, who are often victims in conflicts. Exhibited during the 2009 Nuit Blanche in Paris, JR won the 2011 TED Prize, which turbocharged the launch of a global art project, "Inside Out," starting at Project Fulfill Art Space, opening a new chapter in his creation, allowing thousands of people worldwide to engage in dialogue with their communities by posting portraits in public spaces. (Note 1)

In March 2014, JR created an installation artwork inside and outside the Panthéon in Paris composed of 4,000 faces. In 2016, JR was invited by the Louvre to create a stunning anamorphic work that made I.M. Pei's famous glass pyramid entrance disappear. Four years later, he reinterpreted the Louvre pyramid's geographical landscape exhibition with a 3D optical illusion, and in 2023, the Paris Garnier Opera returned to the cave -1, and so on. JR is renowned for his global vision, his huge black-and-white printed portrait series of common people everywhere, and his transformative, hyper-realistic urban landscape art series, presented in various urban corners and marginal environments worldwide, attempting to articulate a dialogue with the social environment and human landscape of different regional communities, sparking social, political, and geopolitical care and inquiry, like Plato's myth making us reflect on society and ourselves (Note 2).

JR's Pont Neuf Cave inspiration comes from the Oise rock hills (the oldest Pont Neuf in Paris was built from this rock), creating a spatiotemporal dialogue between the present and the past. Remember the master wrappers Christo and Jeanne-Claude's feat of wrapping the Pont Neuf in 1985; JR also uses this to pay the highest tribute to the wrapping masters, the couple, achieving two goals at once. JR's dramatic, undulating small hill on the Pont Neuf over the Seine in central Paris is constructed from an inflatable canvas forming an irregular hill volume and structure, covered externally with a hyper-realistic hill image, 120 meters long, 20 meters wide, and 18 meters high. Inside the hill extends a cave tunnel, inviting the audience on a journey through the cave (the unknown), symbolically entering the sensory dimension of a bodily spatiotemporal journey (scan the QR code with your phone for enchanting natural ambient light music accompaniment, and you can see flying bats, stalactites, dinosaur fossils, etc.). Open 24/7, visiting during the day offers a different perspective and atmosphere. JR says, "Art is a transformation, and also a way to renew how we see the world around us through the Pont Neuf Cave. This is precisely what I hope to achieve in Paris" (Note 3).

Interlude: The Pont Neuf cave in Paris was originally scheduled to open on the evening of June 6th during the Nuit Blanche in Paris. Everyone was looking forward to seeing what was inside the cave. Unexpectedly, at noon on June 5th, a strong gust of wind blew over the hill, causing it to tilt and sway (fortunately, the inner inflatable volume structure was undamaged). The opening was called off. After some overtime repair work, the opening was extended by a week, rebirth restoring the cave's appearance.

Note 1 - JR's biography from Wikipedia. Note 2 - No91 2026 Summer Issue Aparis p6. Note 3 - A sentence written by JR on a Paris metro poster, 2026-06-25.