22 Exhibitions and 3 Forums: If You're in Beijing Right Now, These Are the Art Events to See

The event "gathers up Beijing's best art resources and lets the world know what 798 is doing"

From March 23 to March 30, walk into the 798 Art Zone or the Caochangdi art district and you'll see huge posters from the big galleries, along with the districts' own themed posters, pasted up everywhere.

In China, Gallery Weekend Beijing is still a young event on the contemporary-art calendar. Wang Yifei, its newly appointed executive director, says the point of it is to "gather up Beijing's best art resources and let the world know what 798 is doing."

This year's Gallery Weekend Beijing drew 22 galleries and art institutions — 18 leading galleries from China and abroad, plus four nonprofits — showing work by more than 60 artists. The galleries sit close together, still following the "small but excellent," "one area, easy to walk" approach that the German artist Thomas Eller, who founded Gallery Weekend Beijing, set out at the beginning.

Gallery Weekend Beijing takes its model from Gallery Weekend Berlin. Besides Berlin, cities around the world — Zurich, Brussels, Paris, Barcelona and others — have their own histories of holding a gallery weekend each year.

Beyond the exhibitions, this year's edition added art forums, outdoor public projects and a public day, which the organizers call an expression of "an anti-elitist emphasis on public participation." Gallery Weekend Beijing brought together artists from every field and every school, and invited some 400 collectors, art professionals, leading artists and museum directors from China and abroad.

Follow the guide map from one hall to the next and you start to notice a balance in how all these galleries fit together.

There is UCCA and Beijing Commune, both already known internationally; Long March Space, White Space and Triumph Gallery, which mainly show homegrown Chinese contemporary art; and Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Ink Studio and X Gallery, which fold an Eastern sensibility into the contemporary. Then there are PIFO Gallery and Ginkgo Space, more focused on abstraction; Magician Space and Gallery Yang, more experimental; and Taikang Space and Hyundai Motor Studio Beijing, which work more like forums.

A "spring outing" itinerary, if you want one:

1. Beijing Commune

Richard Deacon's first solo exhibition in China, Richard Deacon: New Sculpture, uses new materials to build sculptures with a distinctive sense of form, and presents entirely new work from the Custom and Alphabet series.

1. Boers-Li Gallery

5 x Berlin brings together painting series, reliefs, works on paper and sculptures by five artists, hoping to strike new sparks in Beijing, a city whose culture is not unlike Berlin's.

1. Galleria Continua

This artist once studied natural science and is fond of the principle of division; exploring how a line crosses a plane, he keeps turning out beguiling new forms. Höller's inquiry into method is plainly practical and plainly productive — he has made an endless run of color blocks and geometric series. Working across several media, he shows how far the sensory experience in his experiments can travel past common sense. To know this world, how should we "divide" it?

1. Long March Space

Liu Wei's recent installations and paintings keep answering the fast-changing fabric of the city, using abstraction to push viewers' attention onto the materials themselves and to distill a set of physical relations in the city: "the relations among material, texture, volume, speed, time and space."

1. Tang Contemporary Art

The show runs across Tang Contemporary's Space I (Boat of Time) and Space II (Refusing the River). Boat of Time, a large rice-paper installation, is imposing yet carried off with a light touch, and gathers up the plain devotion the artist has brought to installation art since 1988. Refusing the River selects Zhu Jinshi's abstract paintings from the early 1980s to today, with particular weight on the "thick painting" he has led the way in over the past decade.

1. Hive Center for Contemporary Art

Halls A and B at Hive (Beijing) hold "Earnest Questioning," a large solo show of Guo Gong's installations from recent years, made across different spans of time and in different materials, letting his sense of life and art seep through a space that keeps moving.

Halls C, D and E hold "Hive · Becoming, No. 29: Yu Feifei Solo Exhibition." Yu Feifei's practice is rooted in sociology and anthropology. She sets out to explore personal cultural identity and to analyze how it forms and changes — questioning herself and rediscovering ordinary, everyday scenes — and to propose some new visual possibilities.

1. Ginkgo Space

"Zhang Fan," the artist's eponymous solo show, makes clear that in recent years "writing," drawn from traditional Chinese art, has become the main content of his painting. Zhang Fan doesn't want that writing to become a copy of what the ancients left behind, and he doesn't want to chase the shifting fashions of the day. The Zixu Tie ("Autobiographical Manuscript") and Jijiu Zhang ("Improvised Chapters") series are what survived three thousand discarded paintings: the artist works day after day, year after year, in a process that has nothing to do with the present moment and yet seems, obscurely, tied to it.

1. White Space

The show presents Wang Haiyang's recent paintings, sculptures, video and installations.

1. Galerie Urs Meile

The show presents Shao Fan's most recent work in contemporary ink from the past few years. In the rabbit and monkey portraits he has painted again and again, he looks at animals from an animal's point of view, trying to state a distinctly Daoist way of thinking in a distinctly contemporary language.

1. Magician Space

The source images Liang Wei chose for the show reflect her strong interest in history, in classical art and architecture, in the city around her and in film. Each work seems to build a world of its own out of its own energy and its own reason for existing.

1. Ink Studio

Ink Studio presents Fractured Form and Shadow, a new group of installations by the experimental ink artist Zheng Chongbin that combine light and shadow, space and video.

1. Pace Beijing

Bamboo: still, plain, hard and pliant at once. In "Transposition," Xiao Yu takes bamboo as his medium and turns sharpness into a kind of give. While he quietly mocks history, hegemony, the environment and human nature, everything settles back into an aesthetic experience full of imagination.

1. PIFO Gallery

McLean paints unconsciously on big canvases with liquid pigment, in abstract, rhythmic compositions. He carries a certain amount of narrative, so any shape in his work can be read as a sign or a metaphor. Wang Jian's work, meanwhile, can be read as a visual autobiography.

1. ShanghART Gallery

The show presents the artists' newest paintings from the past three years.

1. Gallery Yang

"Song of the Mountain Eagle," Zhang Yue's second solo show, presents a project he worked on in 2016 and 2017, made mostly out of documents and archives. It runs on two threads: one built around guns, the other tied to the former Soviet bloc.

1. Triumph Gallery

The show selects nearly twenty of Xu Hongxiang's latest and strongest paintings, mostly from his landscape series, and gives a first showing to his newest project, Mulianchong.

1. X Gallery

Speak, Grey is a video installation: 99 documentary shorts, one per shade of grey, each two to three minutes long, subtitled in Chinese and English and playable online, plus a roughly 60-minute compilation screened on site. Ninety-nine limited-edition grey blocks are lined up at eye level, each one printed with the story that goes with it, in Chinese and English, and a QR code linking to the video online.

1. Platform China

This is Liu Gangshun's largest show so far, and also a wholly new experiment in the language of curating by the curator Cui Cancan. It comes in three parts — "Three Elements of the Concept," "Notes on History" and "Midnight Publishing House" — telling the story of Liu Gangshun's more than 20 years of work.

1. M Woods

The first solo exhibition in China by the American contemporary art master Paul McCarthy, whose experimental practice exposes the dark side of contemporary culture — above all the consumerism and mainstream media values that soak everyday American life.

1. Taikang Space

"Manufacturing Gender" combines exhibition, forum, workshop and publication to open up discussion and performance around questions of gender.

1. UCCA

During Gallery Weekend Beijing, UCCA is running solo shows by three artists: Sarah Morris's "Odyssey," "Xie Nanxing: Spice," and Zhang Yunhan's "New Directions."

1. Hyundai Motor Studio Beijing

"Adrift" wants to find creative ways to understand and describe a state of social mobility that has sharpened regional conflict, marginalization and inequality — to open up other ways of imagining and choosing, and so to practice one possible common ethics.

Public Day Events

Beyond the exhibitions, Gallery Weekend Beijing's new public art program presents nine outdoor works by the participating artists Timur Si-Qin, Cai Lei, Zhang Yue and Tong Kunniao. The 798 Art Zone has also added five works to its permanent collection, by Sui Jianguo, Shen Yuan, Zheng Guogu, Liu Wei and He An.

Working with well-known cultural institutions and platforms for ideas, Gallery Weekend Beijing has put together a run of conversations, talks and livestreams for public day.

Here are the forums you haven't missed yet:

March 28

Theme: A livestreamed conversation from the artist's studio

Time: 15:00–17:00

Speakers: Ma Qiusha, ALEX

Place: Ma Qiusha's studio

Co-organizers: Gallery Weekend Beijing, OWSpace, Dandu

Description: Walk into Ma Qiusha's studio for a conversation broadcast live, using the livestream to widen where art can be felt. See up close how an artist works and lives in the studio, talk through work in progress, and look for the thinking and friction that happen at the very site where art is made.

March 30

Theme: Beijing's Galleries Converge and Change — Are You Ready?

Time: 15:00–17:00

Place: Gallery Yang

Speakers: Yang Yang, Wang Yifei

Organizer: Artron

Description: Beijing has excellent galleries and a deep pool of artists and collectors, but in recent years it has had no good platform to pull all of it together. As the contemporary art scenes in Hong Kong, Shanghai and elsewhere grow busier, Beijing's need to change stands out more sharply. Gallery Weekend Beijing, which began in 2017, gave the city's primary market a chance to come together. During the second edition, in 2018, the Artron Roundtable will bring people from Gallery Weekend Beijing and its participating institutions together to talk through where Beijing's gallery ecosystem stands, what is wrong with it, how it might converge and how it might change — and what "converging and changing" could mean for Beijing galleries in future.

Theme: Technology and Objects in Contemporary Art and Philosophy

Time: 19:00–21:00

Speakers: Wang Jianwei, Wang Min'an, Dai Weina

Place: UCCA Auditorium

Co-organizers: Gallery Weekend Beijing, OWSpace, Dandu

Description: The object has become a hot subject in Western philosophy and in the art world. Objects have always been seen as a field attached to people, subordinate to them, but the new speculative realism holds that objects have a field of their own — that they can be released from their relation to people and possess their own being and their own fate. From Duchamp's readymades to Japan's Mono-ha, and on to the many forms of installation art that followed, artists have kept exploring how to use objects, and objects have been given spirit, emotion, even life.

Image source: Gallery Weekend Beijing