GROUP EXHIBITION

By bringing local galleries and institutions together, the opening of Gallery Weekend Beijing signals the revival of Beijing’s art scene and offers hope to other art scenes around the world.

New to this year’s programme is an expanded digital offering, designed to ensure remote access via a variety of digital channels to visitors around the world. Taking careful consideration on how to engage international audiences unable to travel abroad while prioritising the health and safety of local visitors, partners and staff, Gallery Weekend Beijing has evolved and transitioned its 2020 programme into the digital realm through the development and launch of a new mobile app, featuring a centralised online viewing platform, audio/video content, a live event schedule and a map, as well as a series of pre-recorded and live-streamed events, from moderated panel discussions to guided tours of exhibitions, artist studios and prominent collections.

Our current exhibition Empty/Not Empty by Qiu Shihua (*1940 in Sichuan, China) marks his fourth appearance in our gallery’s Beijing branch. The most comprehensive exhibition of his works in China to date displays oil on canvas as well as paper works spanning 25 years of his oeuvre with earlier pieces he painted in Beijing and Shenzhen until very recent ones he just finished in Sacramento.

Qiu certainly abstracts from reality, goes to the limits in reducing the recognisable world, but it is always there somewhere; all his picture remain figurative. They are radical within the category of landscape painting. They follow no systematic, conceptual search for the fundamentals of painting, of the kind Robert Ryman pursues in his works, for example. Qiu Shihua’s paintings originate in traditional Chinese landscape painting. The painting seems to be behind a veil. The landscape reveals itself gradually to the concentrated and patient viewer. Like classical Chinese landscapes, Qiu Shihua’s pictures are exempt from the laws of central perspective. There is no recognisable centre, neither a horizontal nor a vertical axis, no left or right,perhaps not even an up and a down.

Besides, Hu Qingyan‘s (1982 in Shandong, China) sculpture Go in One Ear and out The Other No. 5 (2017–2018, carbon steel, air, 410 x 212 × 190 cm) will be presented in Public Sector. The work is made from carbon steel pipe bends randomly welded together anywhere two ends match each other. This seemingly abstract sculpture is an extract and representation of the system of myriad pathways in life, or the abstract system of society.

Meanwhile, Zhou Siwei (1981 in Chongqing, China) will be presented in Up & Coming Sector with two paintings at 798 Art Center.