Seven Standout Solo Exhibitions to See in Shanghai
Shuang Li, With a Trunk of Ammunition too (2024). Installation with sound, light, shadow, metal, acrylic. 9 min, 53 sec. Exhibition view: Distance of the Moon, Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai (6 November 2024–12 January 2025). Photo: Alessandro Wang.
As ART021 (7–10 November) and West Bund Art & Design (8–10 November) animate Shanghai this week, Ocula highlights seven of the best solo exhibitions by Chinese artists—including Chen Ruofan, Li Tao, Gao Lei, and Yin Xiuzhen—to see across the city.
Shuang Li: Distance of the Moon
Prada Rong Zhai, No.186 North Shanxi Rd
6 November 2024–12 January 2025
Expect: melancholic multimedia works that explore the paradoxes of digital communication and familial relationships in Prada's refurbished 1918 villa.
Taking its title from Italo Calvino's sci-fi short story collection Cosmicomics (1965), Shuang Li's exhibition examines how technology both connects and distances us by combining electronics, mass-produced objects, sound, and light.
At the show's core are two sets of chandelier works, each programmed with shifting light patterns synced with audio composed in collaboration with DJ Hyph11E. On the top floor is Demolition Lovers (2024), where a pair of chandeliers communicate through abstract audio-visual messages inspired by pandemic-era mother-daughter conversations, adding an unexpectedly intimate sonic touch.
Yin Xiuzhen: Piercing the Sky
Power Station of Art, 200 Hua Yuan Gang Lu
9 November 2024–16 February 2025
Expect: over 20 monumental installations by the renowned Beijing-based artist that promise to draw equally significant crowds.
Yin Xiuzhen has transformed the museum's ground-floor space with 23 ambitious works that extend into the back gallery. Highlights include Piercing the Sky (2024), a 15-metre trombone-like metal pin, and Exit (2024), a series of signs embedded with videos featuring the artist's entire family—aged between 3 and 90—who move towards the venue's real exit sign.
In the atrium, Yin has assembled worn clothes for Sky Patch (2024) which is suspended above Flying Machine (2008), channelling childhood wonderment for the celestial realm. There's a dialogue between them on individual experience and the vast unknowability of the cosmos, both uncovering the artist's ability to infuse monumental scale with warmth.
Cao Shu: Afterglow and Theremin
HOW Art Museum, 3F, No.1, Lane 2277, Zuchongzhi Road
4 November 2024–16 February 2025
Expect: multimedia installations and virtual illusions that consider how technology shapes our perception of time, memory, and existence.
Cao Shu's latest solo exhibition showcases the artist's signature video games, 3D digital simulations, and installations that probe the mechanisms behind computer graphics technology.
The digital simulation Phantom Sugar (2023) investigates sugar plantations and socialist industrialisation, while for Pisces (2024), Shu draws from a family member's work experience at the Lop Nur nuclear testing site in China's northwest desert, as well as the urban legends that have long surrounded the area. The result is a fantastical vision of Lop Nur with a filmic rendering of a Dragon Inn-style oasis in the desert blended with the dizzying scale shifts reminiscent of Jonathan Swift's Lilliput.
Li Tao: Order
Gao Lei: Store
Blunt Society, 2F, No.14, Xinkang Garden, 1273 Huaihai Middle Road
5 November 2024–19 January 2025
Expect: a conversation between two artists who question standardised power structures through their use of industrial materials.
Blunt Society presents recent works and site-specific installations by Li Tao and Gao Lei, with the deadpan, industrial nature of each artists' practice forming an intriguing dialogue with the historic apartment building setting in Shanghai's former French Concession.
Li Tao examines the entwinement of regulation, obligation, and self-realisation embedded in the concept of order. His new series of assemblages include an uncanny steel android 'god' composed of kitchen wares and instrument parts (Small Kitchen Treasure [Baby Girl], 2024) that allude to surveillance and discipline.
Gao Lei's exhibition Store weaves together symbols of labour, finance, and industrial standardisation in a series of monochrome paintings and installations. Through connecting disparate objects and industrial materials—honeycomb patterns, mechanical parts, 19th century French currency, a personal tattoo—Lei examines how measurement systems shape our world, and meditates on the intersection of the body, capital, and ecology.
Who's Mimi?
33ml offspace, –1F, No.4, 518 Zhaohua Road
5 November–29 December 2024
Expect: an underground installation in a former motorcycle park from an artistic persona who challenges the corporatisation of identity.
At the labyrinthine artist-run space 33ml, Mimi Shi Co., Ltd presents a variety of installations and videos, among them a sculpture of a tiger sphinx with a bald middle-aged man.
Founded in The Hague in 2018, Mimi Shi Co., Ltd has evolved into a complex entity whose services encompass image production, personality management, and creative consultancy, reflecting how contemporary identity is increasingly shaped by corporate logic in a radical departure from the romanticised notion of the solitary artist.
Gathering the various cultural references of the word 'mimi' in Chinese—among them a snack brand, a nickname for cats, and a slang term for 'breasts'—Who's Mimi? playfully asks who any of us really are beneath our carefully managed professional personas, exploring the contemporary condition where individuals become assets reduced to metrics and market value.
Chen Ruofan: shelter
THE VAULT, BANK, Basement, Building 2, Land, 298 Anfu Road
2 November 2024–4 January 2025
Expect: a metaphorical shelter exploring climate crises and emotional sanctuary in BANK's experimental space for emerging artists.
During the pandemic, the screen became Chen Ruofan's only portal through which to see the world and to draw inspiration for her painting. Since then, the artist has created elaborate digital 3D archives for trivial objects such as a plant or a strand of hair, while translating the process of working on electronic screens into her paintings.
Chen paints on stretched fabrics, from linen and cotton to silk and organza. Appearing like digital screens of varying resolutions, the resulting works convey the fragility of modern existence. —[O]