27 Institutions at Gallery Weekend Beijing: Importing the Avant-Garde, and Taking Stock of Itself
The public days run from the 26th to the 29th, but most of the shows stay up through the end of the season.
The public days run from the 26th to the 29th, but most of the shows stay up through the end of the season.
The third Gallery Weekend Beijing opened on the 22nd, and with it a wave of Beijing art institutions put on their first shows since the Lunar New Year.
Twenty-seven galleries and non-profit institutions are taking part. The newcomers are the Faurschou Foundation, Hunsand Space, the Song Art Museum, Star Gallery and Tabula Rasa Gallery — a bigger line-up than last year, though what the number really records is a changing of the guard.
According to Beijing Business Today, Gallery Yang, which won last year's best-exhibition prize, has since closed; Pace Beijing, which staged the crowd-pulling "Flower Forest," has cut its floor space and skipped this year's gallery weekend altogether. Most of the newcomers moved in only recently — Star Gallery has just landed in the 798 Art District, and its door plate is still temporary.
Wang Yanling, founder of the 798 Art District, says Gallery Weekend Beijing is meant to show the world China's most avant-garde contemporary art, and to do it inside an international conversation. Three editions in, it still carries less weight than Shanghai or Hong Kong. The first Beijing International Art Summit Forum runs alongside it this year, an attempt to build a louder platform for that conversation.
Three special sections were added this year. The Visiting section set up an exchange with Zurich Art Weekend, bringing two mid-sized Zurich galleries into 798's exhibition spaces for the first time; the New Forces section concentrates on young Chinese artists; and the Public section puts large sculptures and installations in 798's outdoor spaces and at The Opposite House in Beijing.
A gallery weekend exists for the galleries and their collectors. Gallery Weekend Beijing is timed each year to the eve of Art Basel Hong Kong so that collectors, gallerists and artists can do their rounds in one concentrated stretch. Ordinary visitors are under no obligation to see it all in one go. What follows is a guide to the shows we think are worth the trip.
Two documentary photography shows running at the same time both point their cameras at the faces of the unnamed.
Leila Alaoui was a French-Moroccan photographer whose subjects were identity, cultural diversity and migration around the Mediterranean. In 2016, while working in Burkina Faso, in West Africa, on an Amnesty International project on women's rights, she was killed in a terrorist attack there. Her sister wrote these words in her memory.
The mafia sold them the dream of Paris, Madrid, Milan or Brussels, and sold you the dream of paradise: seventy-two young girls, rivers running with wine, trees hung with honey...
You see, you who killed me, I would want to know your name, your story, fragments of your life, and then record them in photographs and show them to the world — perhaps that could save you.
Galleria Continua's show You Who Are Leaving 《离别的你》 is Alaoui's first solo exhibition in China. The gallery has given the huge wall of its main hall to her portrait series The Moroccans: men and women, the old and the very young, their varied and distinct traditional dress, all set down with the same care and in the same visual language.
Her work looks squarely at people who are usually pushed to the edge of the frame and left unheard. No Pasara shows the faces of young Moroccans who dreamed of getting to Europe; Devil's Island is about the migrant workers who staffed the French factories on Île Seguin, the island nicknamed "the devil's island"; the Crossings series is made of portraits of sub-Saharan African migrants. These are people displaced by a reality they did not choose and then filed under a single label. In plain, quiet pictures, Alaoui tries to give back their individual dignity and the differences between them.
Star Gallery's photography show Spring Breeze 《春风》 belongs to Liu Heung Shing, a Pulitzer Prize-winning documentary photographer whose best-known pictures cover two of the twentieth century's largest events: the rise of China and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Everything on view comes from China After Mao, the collection Penguin published in 1983, made up of photographs Liu took between 1976 and 1983 as an Associated Press correspondent in China. He stood at a hinge of history, but his pictures are not confined to big events or politics. Most of the works chosen here look at ordinary city life — a time of upheaval in which people were full of appetite for anything new, and the grand narrative seeps out through the small vivid details of daily life.
Spring Breeze won this year's best-exhibition prize at Gallery Weekend Beijing. At Art Basel Hong Kong, which opens on March 28, Star Gallery will also bring Liu's solo show A Life in a Sea of Red; the book of the same name, from the German publisher Steidl, is about to be released in Hong Kong. It records political and cultural change in China and Russia between 1976 and 2017, and what ideology did to the look of both societies.
Painting again fills a great deal of this year's gallery weekend, from the psychedelic abstraction of the German artist Franz Ackermann to Sun Daliang's surreal canvases, part erotica and part fairy tale. The liveliest of them is The Market: A Year of anusman 《市井：anusman 的一年》, the cartoonist's solo show at Tabula Rasa Gallery.
The whole space has been made over into a market, a street corner, a card room. A sunken area is roped off as a ring-toss pitch, and in one corner lies a "happy-foot board" — "happy foot means being happy to wash your wife's feet" — which visitors are invited to slide on. The walls carry the thoughts and mutterings of the cartoonist anusman (Wang Shuo).
Paper has to be chosen once every three days. There are four kinds at different prices; one kind is enough for ordinary life. I prefer the coreless roll because it takes up no space and can't cost much to ship. Mostly, though, it's just cheaper.
Everything on China United Airlines costs money. A blanket is 20 yuan and you can take it home. Meals come in two grades: curry chicken at 35 yuan, braised chicken over rice at 58. It's a careful piece of design. On the surface you have a choice; underneath, the message is that what's in the 35-yuan box is worth exactly 35 yuan.
anusman is the author of the best-selling comic book Mr. Door 《门先生》. His ink-brush style and his running mutter let you put your guard down and take a break from the pressure to "interpret art" — welcome relief in the crowded looking that a gallery weekend demands.
Station, vegetable market, park, restaurant: whatever the setting, the scenes are the familiar street life the title points to. The author is loose and offhand, occasionally a little cranky, and endearing for it, never afraid to lay out his small private thoughts, "scrawling down a few plain truths."
Over the opening weekend, the line heard most often from curators and artists was that everyone "really went all out." In earlier years the galleries did little more than move their openings into the same few days; this third edition had a much longer run-up, and most institutions saved a heavyweight show for it. The international artists the non-profits joined forces to bring in are all, in their way, stars.
The Faurschou Foundation is showing the American artist Doug Aitken, known for large digital installations and his use of many media at once; the exhibition includes New Era, Three Modern Figures (Don't Forget to Breathe) and Crossing Over, immersive sound-and-image pieces that leave you dazzled. M Woods Museum has mounted a solo show, A Gift in Return 《回赠》, with the minimalist Richard Tuttle, taking in sculpture, easel painting, works on paper and poetry. The Song Art Museum is presenting The Eternal Thread, a solo exhibition of the French-born artist Louise Bourgeois, whose large installations and sculptures build a world at once whimsical and disorienting, intimate and unsettling — the world that earned her the name "spider-woman."
Long March Space and Galerie Urs Meile have each opened a painting show by an artist who mattered after China's '85 New Wave: Wu Shanzhuan at one, Wang Xingwei at the other, both conceptualists, both packing their canvases with political signs and layers of metaphor. Recognizable faces, the big characters of propaganda posters: the work mocks and exaggerates, and at the same time keeps the brushwork of revolutionary art.
The New Forces section is also new this year, an attempt to supply the young artists' voices that events on this scale usually leave out.
It takes the form of a group show on the ground floor of the 798 Art Center: nearly 40 works by 31 artists under the title "Here Be Lions." The subjects and the media range widely, but the show has the trouble many group shows have — a grand premise, a murky explanation, and the unavoidable suspicion that the pieces were assembled rather than argued.
The wall text explains that "hic sunt leones" — here be lions — was Latin shorthand that ancient sailors wrote on maps to mark unknown territory, land where lions, dragons and sea serpents were waiting. The phrase is meant here to stand for a world that keeps changing and keeps getting stranger, and the works do read more like a young generation's response to the reality it lives in: migrant populations, the climate, political events, labor under new modes of production.
From the awakening of Chinese contemporary art in the 1980s to now, most of what is on view stays tied to the real world. Wang Huanqing, another artist central to the '85 New Wave, has a large solo show at Hive Center for Contemporary Art covering everything he has made since 1982; told in chronological order, it shows a language becoming steadily more abstract and more inward.
In the introduction to the second chapter he writes: I don't want to pretend that social and political questions leave me unmoved, but I don't want to pretend to be an expert and handle them on the surface either. What I care about more is my sense of my own situation, and that sense keeps prodding me to feel the shape of society and politics from the inside out.
The full exhibition guide:
- Doug Aitken
Immersive video, sound and sculptural installations that lay bare the odder features of modern society and culture, and both the good and the bad in a life lived on the digital internet.
- Richard Tuttle: A Gift in Return
A survey of a fifty-year career: more than 100 of Tuttle's best-known works, laid out through the galleries around a set of symbols the artist designed.
- Quasi-Nature: Bio Art, Boundaries and the Laboratory 《准自然——生物艺术，边界与实验室》
The young curator Wei Ying won the second Hyundai Blue Prize's "Creativity" award with this show. Built around the prize's theme, "Future Humanity," it takes a global view of life and the planet, society and the environment, existence and extinction, and presents them plainly without making them shallow. It also guesses at what art joined to technology might yet become.
- Wu Shanzhuan: Today Later Became a Festival 《今天后来成了节日》
Thirty years of Wu Shanzhuan's work on the flat surface — more than 200 paintings make up the "festival." A central figure of the '85 New Wave, Wu founded the Red Humor group in 1986 and the International Red Humor Organization in 1990, using humor and satire to think about political subjects.
- Wang Xingwei: The Mystery of the Face 《面相之谜》
- Chen Yujun solo exhibition
Chen Yujun's most important large solo show in a decade, curated by Cui Cancan and spread across both of Tang Contemporary Art's Beijing spaces. The first space looks at how his work relates to the space around it, tracing where his thinking started and where it went; the second gathers his large flat works, which show how far his language has moved and how he keeps experimenting.
- André Butzer solo exhibition
Acrylics on canvas and pencil drawings made by André Butzer since 2018.
- Leila Alaoui: You Who Are Leaving
- Liu Heung Shing: Spring Breeze
- Liang Shuo: Scenic Area 《景区》
Liang Shuo works mainly in paint here, setting out what he makes of the old and the new, of time and space, ideology and taste — and he has built the room itself into a shape that serves the looking.
- Wang Huanqing: Art Since the '85 New Wave
On March 2, 2019, Hive Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing) gave all five of its halls to "Wang Huanqing: Art Since the '85 New Wave." It is the artist's first retrospective, arranged as five linked sections that gather and distill more than three decades of his painting, video and installation work.
- The Market: A Year of anusman
- Franz Ackermann
Franz Ackermann is known worldwide for psychedelic abstract paintings and for immersive installations that grow into the architecture around them. His subjects are international travel, globalization and urbanization, and through them the social upheaval and political trouble that follow when cultures everywhere start to look alike.
- Shi Guowei: A Walk in the Forest 《林中漫步》
Shi Guowei watches and records a scene, makes a black-and-white photograph in the traditional way, and then spends a long time coloring it by hand.
- Gong Lilong: Rehearsal 《彩排》
Gong Lilong was born in Dalian in 1953 and stands for painting in the north of the country. Platform China's show sketches out more than thirty years of his work.
- Wu Daxin: Harmony of the Land 《陆地和声》
Curated by Fabio Cavallucci, the show presents four important new works: Long, Homage to "Inoue", Seven-Story Pagoda and Medicine Buddha.
- Michel Pérez Pollo: Toward the World
The newest work by the young Cuban artist Michel Pérez Pollo, an inquiry into figurative scenes, sculptural portraits and metaphysics.
- Shara Hughes
Thirteen new paintings by Shara Hughes, who treats her paintings as psychological or invented landscapes — an idea that comes out of how she works, since the picture only takes shape in the moment of painting. Traces of fin-de-siècle styles run through the work: Fauvism, Art Nouveau, German Expressionism.
- Louise Bourgeois: The Eternal Thread
Nearly 50 works spanning more than 60 years, including the most important series of the artist's career, with the weight on her late work.
- Liu Shiyuan: What Lies Beyond Words 《言外之意》
New video, installation, painting and photography by the artist, opening onto her questions about where the individual ends and the group begins, how the two are bound together, and what each is owed and worth.
- Tracing the Mushroom at the End of the World 《追踪末日松茸》
The title comes from the anthropologist Anna Tsing's book The Mushroom at the End of the World, which follows the matsutake — an ancient species that grows in harsh old-growth forest — and the many ties that bind it to the Anthropocene. The mushroom is also a figure no one can get around in early religion, in witchcraft and in Taoist legend. The exhibition tries to connect what the Anthropocene tells us about the present with philosophical and spiritual ideas from outside the West, using installation, video, sculpture and VR.
- Wang Xingwei: Shenyang Nights 《沈阳之夜》
- Sun Daliang: Xiao You and Xiao Xiu 《小幽与小羞》
Sun Daliang's first solo show at Hunsand Space, 30 paintings in all. It is staged as a fairy tale, which throws into relief the humor and the eroticism that have always run through his work; the room is painted from the colors in the pictures to hold up the fairy-tale mood.
- Li Jin: Bone and Flesh 《骨与肉》
The ink painter Li Jin is widely known for putting food and sex in contemporary Chinese life on paper.
- Zhao Yang: Rome Is a Lake 《罗马是个湖》
"Rome Lake is not a lake in Rome. It got the name only because it sits between the villages of Luogezhuang and Matouzhuang, and so became a misread lake awash with romance." Zhao Yang's painting show comes out of his time there; the figures drift and blur, like a misty morning over water.
-
CAFA Art Museum
-
Bruno Walpoth: Silent Encounter 《沉默的邂逅》
- Marc Quinn: Under the Skin 《皮相之下》
-
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art
-
Civilization: The Way We Live Now
- Qiu Zhijie: Map of the Universe 《寰宇全图》
- New Directions: Yu Honglei
Cover image: Spring Breeze, the solo photography exhibition at Star Gallery
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.