That sound you hear is the starting pistol for the race to succeed Maria Balshaw as Director of Tate - one of the biggest jobs in the UK art scene.

The gallery announced today she will step down next spring after nine years in the job.

Balshaw, who took over from Nicholas Serota having been director of the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester in the north of England, will sign off by curating a major Tracey Emin show at London's Tate Modern.

She said she hoped the next director would "take the organization into its next decade of innovation and artistic leadership".

Balshaw added: "My greatest thrill has always been to work closely with artists, and so it is fitting that Tracey Emin’s exhibition at Tate Modern will be my final project at Tate."

Her tenure has seen major shows featuring artists including Yoko Ono, Isaac Julien, Emily Kam Kngwarray and J.M.W. Turner and John Constable.

Recent visitor figures showed Tate Modern and Tate Britain - both in London - had lost 2.2 million visitors since 2019. Balshaw said the drop was in part due to the pandemic and the UK leaving the European Union.

Taiwan's new Museumbrary - an art museum meets library - opens to the public tomorrow.

Its inaugural exhibition brings together work by 70 artists from more than 20 countries including Joan Jonas, Joseph Beuys and Ana Mendieta.

Museum director Yi-Hsin Lai said integrating it with the library was central to its aim to "fulfill the potential of an art museum to enter the everyday life of the city and its residents, as well as to inspire creativity and imagination".

The building, in a 67-hectare park in the city of Taichung, was designed by a team including Japanese architecture firm SANAA led by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa.

The number of visitors to the National Museum of Korea in Seoul this year. It reached the milestone at around 2pm on December 11, when museum director You Hong-June presented the lucky visitor with a commemorative gift.

Tributes have been paid to artist Ceal Floyer who has died aged 57.

She grew up in Britain but was based in Berlin and her death was announced by her gallery in the German city, Esther Schipper, which said she died "after a long battle with illness".

Its statement described her as "one of the most radically conceptual artists of her generation" and praised her "concise humor and profoundly understated visual language".

Her work, which included a series of sculptures made from everyday objects including ladders, umbrellas and drains, can be found in the collections of major museums including London's Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.

In 2001, one of her most memorable works saw her standing alone in front of an audience at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham, England, to create Nail Biting Performance where she bit her fingernails into a microphone for five minutes.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art has returned three sculptures to Cambodia after research pointed to them having been looted.

It said the works had been taken from Cambodia "during a period of widespread looting amid civil conflict" and were "associated with art dealers suspected of trafficking looted antiquities from Southeast Asia".

It is the first time the museum has repatriated work since it signed up to a "Shared Stewardship and Ethical Returns policy" three years ago.

The museum said Cambodia's Ministry of Culture has "agreed in principle on a path toward the long-term loan of the objects" which will allow them to remain on view in Washington D.C.

San Francisco's Asian Art Museum is also currently in the process of returning artworks to Cambodia.

1 - Crosshatch paintings and drawings by Jasper Johns are going on show at Gagosian's Madison Avenue gallery in New York from January 22 - 50 years after they were first seen at the Castelli gallery. Among the works are some from the artist's own collection as well as others from major museums from across the United States.

2 - Painter Merike Estna and curator Natalia Sielewicz will represent Estonia at next year's Venice Biennale. Estna is a graduate of Goldsmiths College in London and divides her time between Tallinn and Mexico City, while Sielewicz is chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

3 - John Utterson has joined Thaddaeus Ropac as a director and will be based in its London gallery. He previously worked at New York's Clearing gallery, Pilar Corrias in London and started his career at Thaddaeus Ropac where he worked as a sales and research assistant.

4 - Beyonce, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour will co-chair next year's Met Gala in New York. This year's event raised a record-breaking $31 million, the most in its history, for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute.