Ocula Conversation transmediale Artistic Director Kristoffer Gansing Looks Back Terence Sharpe, Berlin Kristoffer Gansing traces eight years of change at Berlin's digital media and culture festival transmediale, as his final iteration as artistic director, End to End , opens 28 January.
Ocula Report Taipei Lowdown: Shows to See Tessa Moldan, Taipei As Taipei Dangdai returns for its second edition between 17 and 19 January 2020 at the Nangang Exhibition Center, a selection of exhibitions across the city confirm Taipei as one of the region's most exciting art hubs.
Ocula Insight Images from Abroad: Lada Nakonechna at Galerie EIGEN + ART Phoebe Blatton, Berlin Images from abroad , Lada Nakonechna's solo exhibition at Galerie EIGEN + ART in Berlin, considers the barriers that exist between depictions of conflict and their viewers.
Temple of Heaven, Beijing, China. Photo: Andrey Filippov (CC BY 2.0).
Ocula Insight Sarah Lucas at Red Brick Art Museum: Exhibition Walkthrough Beijing Sarah Lucas' first major solo exhibition in Asia at Beijing 's Red Brick Art Museum (2 November 2019–16 February 2020) features sculptures, installations, and photographs created over the past three decades. In this Ocula video, Yan Shijie, founder and director of Red Brick Art Museum, reflects on what it means to introduce Lucas' feminist...
Ocula Report JINGART Lowdown: Beijing Art Shows to See Shanyu Zhong, Beijing The second edition of the Beijing art fair JINGART will take place from 30 May to 2 June 2019 at a new venue, having moved from Beijing Quanyechang to the Beijing Exhibition Centre. The new location's Sino-Soviet-style building is reminiscent of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre where ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, founded by the same team...
Ocula Report Gallery Weekend Beijing 2019 Tessa Moldan, Beijing Beyond the fanfare of a gallery weekend, there remains the perennial question: to what end does such an event serve a city? During this year's Gallery Weekend Beijing (22–29 March 2019), this question was raised during a snippet of the inaugural Beijing Art Summit (22–24 March 2019) on a chilly Saturday morning, staged at Ullens Center for...
Ocula Conversation Amalia Ulman Li Bowen, Beijing Amalia Ulman's recent solo exhibition in China, Privilege , was staged at the KWM artcenter in Beijing (22 March–19 May 2018). This comprehensive show took full advantage of the office context and the partition structures of the space, which is located on the second floor of the WFC centre in Beijing's CBD area (the centre is supported by the...
Ocula Report Local to Global: Gallery Weekend Beijing 2018 Bowen Li, Beijing Gallery Weekend Beijing was first staged in 2017 on a number of premises, including the fact that Beijing needed an annual event with international appeal to maintain its place as an art destination after the rise of successful art fairs, and an increasing number of museums, in other regional cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong . As its title...
Ocula Conversation Chang Yun-han Wu Jianru, Beijing Based in Taipei , artist Chang Yun-han frequently carries out 'local' critiques by describing the visible and the invisible, and dealing with complex and variable narrative structures related to the contexts in which she intervenes. A graduate from the National Taiwan University of Arts with a major in sculpture, Chang extends her sculptural...
Ocula Report The Lowdown: shows to see during Gallery Weekend Beijing Bowen Li, Beijing To coincide with the second edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing , taking place between 23 and 30 March 2018, various institutions have brought out the big guns, including a list of international artists from Sarah Morris to Paul McCarthy . Galleries are also gearing up for the weekend, from Liu Wei showing at Long March Space, to Richard Deacon...
Ocula Report Ten Private Museums in China You Should Know Sam Gaskin, Shanghai China is building contemporary art museums at an unrivalled pace. Private companies and individuals increasingly have not only the means to establish these museums but also the know-how to keep them going, often to a higher standard than China’s public institutions. This report lists ten of the best private art museums in China (in no...
Related Press Review: Doug Aitken at Faurschou Foundation Beijing 2 May 2019, Ran Dian Internet and smart phone technologies have led to sweeping change in society in our lifetime, forcing us to wrestle with new modes of thinking about and experiencing time, space, and speed, whereby our intellectual and emotional responses to past, present, and future are constantly shifting. Questions of who we are as social beings and what kind...
Related Press Into Infinity and Beyond with Artist Wu Jian’an 4 December 2018, TL mag Infinity is ungraspable. It has no shape, no defined time period, no boundaries. Given this, how can we explore concepts of shapeless, infinite existence? Artist Wu Jian'an explores this and more in his solo exhibition Of the Infinite Mind .
Related Press SPICES: XIE NANXING 4 July 2018, ArtAsiaPacific On one of his now legendary ocean voyages in search of foreign and uncharted lands, Christopher Columbus once mistook a kind of Caribbean tree bark for a new spice. Centuries later, this anecdote inspired the title of Xie Nanxing's solo show at Beijing's Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Xie is an explorer of a different sort—his 'Spice'...
Related Press Liu Xiaodong 6 June 2018, ArtReview Just what is it that makes Liu Xiaodong's painting so different, so appealing? The fifty-year-old artist's work has been exhibited from Beijing ( Hometown Boy at UCCA in 2011) to Graz (where The Process of Painting has just closed at Universalmuseum Joanneum); Parkett this month launched its 91st volume at Leo Koenig, New York, featuring...
Related Press CHEN CHIEH-JEN NAMED ARTIST OF THE YEAR AT 12TH AWARD OF ART CHINA 23 May 2018, ArtAsiaPacific On May 21, Taiwanese artist and filmmaker Chen Chieh-jen received the prestigious Artist of the Year honor at the Award of Art China (AAC) ceremony in Beijing. In its 12th year, AAC is an annual award founded by Chinese art media group Artron, recognizing the best of contemporary art within Greater China. Chen was presented with a trophy for his...
Related Press Nevergreen: Interview with Liu Chuang 23 November 2017, ArtAsiaPacific* The story of how the dioecious poplar tree, rapid-growing and short-lived, was planted in China is one that is rarely thought about while one strolls through the abundantly green streets of Beijing. Native to sylvan North America, broad-leafed, column-structured poplars can grow up to ten feet per year, which makes it a valuable commodity for...
Related Press “Cold Nights” at UCCA: curators Boliang Shen and Zhanglun Dai 23 November 2017, Art Radar Capitalist excess, a dysfunctional family, communication breakdown, and a widening gap between traditional and modern ideologies are some of the issues raised by modern Chinese writer Ba Jin in his 1947 novel Cold Nights . Although these problems persist in today's China, in fact in many societies around the world, they are set in an era of war...
Related Press US artist Dan Graham brings 'Greatest Hits' to China 15 November 2017, Global Times A total of more than 20 artworks, from videos to installation works, on display at Beijing's Red Brick Art Museum will give Chinese visitors a chance to look back at US artist Dan Graham's five-decade-long art career. Titled Greatest Hits , the exhibition will run until February 25, 2018.
Contemporary art sprung up in many cities after China's reform and opening in 1979, but Beijing quickly emerged as the most dynamic. Pioneering exhibitions by artists and collectives such as the Stars Art Group helped establish the city's reputation for an energetic art scene that drew in artists from around the country and then collectors from abroad. Now, with the art market thriving in Shanghai, Beijing is no longer the uncontested home of Mainland Chinese contemporary art, but its galleries and museums continue to put on some of the best exhibitions in the country.
Read MoreThe Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) has long anchored Beijing's art scene with important retrospectives and surveys, such as Bao Dong and Sun Dongdong's ON / OFF (2013), an authoritative overview of Chinese artists born after 1975. After the museum's original owners withdrew funding, the UCCA's future looked doubtful, but director Philip Tinari cobbled together financing to ensure it endures at the heart of the 798 Art District in the northeast of the capital.
Many of Beijing's leading galleries can also be found in 798, including Beijing Commune, Boers Li, Galerie Urs Meile, Long March Space, Magician Space, Tabula Rasa Gallery, PIFO Gallery, the Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Platform China, and Tang Contemporary Art. There are also a number of important and engaging art spaces, including private institutions M WOODS and the Faurschou Foundation.
Many more of the top galleries are located just a short drive further northeast in Caochangdi, and while some have been evicted by the state, Chambers Fine Art, INK Studio, White Space Beijing, and ShanghART Beijing still remain for the moment. The 20,000-square-metre Red Brick Art Museum—founded by Yan Shijie and Cao Mei in 2014—is also located in the northeast of the city.
Between them, 798 and Caochangdi host Gallery Weekend Beijing each March, prior to Art Basel in Hong Kong. In 2019, the Beijing Art Summit was inaugurated to supplement galleries' exhibitions with a talks programme hosted by UCCA.
Other key galleries and institutions that warrant a special trip are largely to be found in the east of the city, including Aye Gallery in Dongcheng District and the China Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) Art Museum, the Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, Vitamin Creative Space, Song Art Museum and OCAT Institute. Out west, another noteworthy nonprofit is Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum.
Among the most intriguing independent art spaces are The Bunker, which is both literally and figuratively underground, hutong storefront Arrow Factory and DRC No. 12, a scrappy little art space in a former Diplomatic Residential Compound, all of which are in Chaoyang District.
While Beijing has struggled to build an art fair to rival the likes of Art Basel in Hong Kong, JINGART—established by the co-founders of Shanghai's ART021—is starting to get some buzz after its inaugural year in 2018, filling out the calendar alongside Beijing Contemporary and Art Beijing.
