Ocula Conversation Zac Langdon-Pole: Lines of Flight Over the last few years, New Zealand-born Berlin-based artist Zac Langdon-Pole has cultivated a practice of elegant, if at times uncanny, elisions. His recombinations of objects, words, and images—poetry, meteorite fragments, literary translations, furniture, photographs, mollusk shells—emphasise, with a fine-tuned lyricism, the...
Ocula Report MoMA Expansion: Once the Modern, Always the Modern 29 Nov 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula In the early decades of its existence, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, transformed from a philanthropic project modestly housed in a few rooms of the Heckscher Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to an alleged operating node in the United States' cultural struggle during the cold war, and one of the...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
Temple of Heaven, Beijing, China. Photo: Andrey Filippov (CC BY 2.0).
Ocula Report JINGART Lowdown: Beijing Art Shows to See 28 May 2019 : Shanyu Zhong for Ocula 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 29 Mar 2019 : Tessa Moldan for Ocula 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 Artist 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 law...
Ocula Report Local to Global: Gallery Weekend Beijing 2018 13 Apr 2018 : Bowen Li for Ocula 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 Artist, Taiwan 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 16 Mar 2018 : Bowen Li for Ocula 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 at...
Ocula Report Ten Private Museums in China You Should Know 3 Jul 2015 : Sam Gaskin for Ocula 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...
Ocula Photolog Ai Weiwei Exhibitions in Beijing 30 June 2015 Wang Jiaci was an ancestral temple of Ming age, taken as reference by all future dynasties, from Tang to Qing. Today, Wang Jiaci is the hub of Ai Weiwei’s monumental project, an ancient building which was disassembled into more than 1500 pieces and meticulously re-built inside two exhibitive areas: Galleria Continua and Tang Contemporary Art...
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Related Press Into Infinity and Beyond with Artist Wu Jian’an TL mag : 4 December 2018 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 ArtAsiaPacific : 4 July 2018 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 ArtReview : 6 June 2018 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 editions by...
Related Press CHEN CHIEH-JEN NAMED ARTIST OF THE YEAR AT 12TH AWARD OF ART CHINA ArtAsiaPacific : 23 May 2018 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 ArtAsiaPacific* : 23 November 2017 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 Art Radar : 23 November 2017 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 and...
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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.
The 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.
