art3f Luxembourg: my Popsan wall on the Atelier Joconde stand
By William San, on
From Friday 2 to Sunday 4 October 2026, Atelier Joconde had its stand at the art3f fair in Luxembourg, at Luxexpo The Box on the Kirchberg plateau. art3f is an international contemporary art fair; this was its ninth edition in Luxembourg, three weeks after the one in Monaco. The doors opened on Friday at 2 pm, the private view started at 6 pm, and it all closed on Sunday at 7 pm. There were three signatures on the stand: my father, Le Yack, my brother, Neo Pablo, and me, as Popsan. One of the walls was mine.
Three night paintings
The Popsan wall was built around three oil paintings on canvas, 60 × 60 cm, each in its black floater frame.
Tsuki shows a woman in a blue kimono holding a full moon in the hollow of her hands. Tsuki means the moon. In Japan, September is the month when people sit down to watch the moon and do nothing else, and that is the moment the painting refers to.
Shūden means “the last train”. A man waits alone at the edge of the yellow line on a platform. In Monaco I was already presenting it like this: I wanted to paint a man who could look like anyone, like you, like me, like whoever is standing on that platform.
Le passage de la nuit, the night crossing, is the only street on the wall. A woman under an umbrella crosses in front of the lit window of a konbini, one of those Japanese corner shops that stay open all night.
Below the paintings I had hung pieces from my Kintsugi series: ceramic tiles, 30 × 30 cm, whose cracks are highlighted by hand in gold. Seppun, a kiss after Klimt, was the only one in a gilt frame.
Tsuki did not stay on the wall for the weekend
On Friday, an hour before opening, Tsuki was hanging next to Le passage de la nuit. On Saturday her spot was empty: she had been sold during the fair, and she is now in a private collection.
That makes three paintings from the series sold at fairs in less than a month. In Monaco, Akari and Kingyo had already found buyers.
A father and his two sons
For us, a fair is first of all a family stand. The round sign carries my father’s signature, and around it hung his paintings, Neo Pablo’s and mine. Le Yack paints scenes bathed in a Hopper-like light: behind us, in the opening photo, a 1940s couple leans against a fighter plane. Neo Pablo paints in acrylic. Neo Pablo wants to stay anonymous: in photographs he wears his fox mask, which we add to the picture when it is not on his face.
Over the weekend, a visitor stopped to tell us he had already seen us, in a newspaper in Luxembourg. You do not go to a fair only to sell. You also go so that strangers remember your names, and sometimes they remember them before you expect it.
The next stop is art3f Brussels, in November.
