Gallery Weekend Beijing 2022: Artist Selections

Each year, Gallery Weekend Beijing brings together the best of the Chinese capital’s art scene, offering collectors a chance to encounter local and international talent. We highlight some of the artists who caught our attention at the latest edition, which runs until 3 July.

Luo Zhongli at Tang Contemporary Art

A prominent Chinese painter with a career spanning 50 years, Luo Zhongli’s retrospective across Tang Contemporary Art’s two spaces in 798 Art District traces the personal triumphs and setbacks that have defined his career.

Curated chronologically, the first four sections of this ten-section show focus on time and history, while the latter sections look to the influence of the Daba Mountains in Central China on the artist’s practice.

Featuring both painting and sculpture, the exhibition offers a welcome respite from the many contemporary showcases on view.

Austin Lee at M WOODS

Austin Lee’s surreal and playful presentation of paintings, animations, and large-scale installations transforms M WOODS into a hallucinatory wonderland.

Marking his first solo museum exhibition, Austin Lee was one of first artists to incorporate digital technologies into his artistic practice.

A Yale MFA graduate, Lee’s unique tragi-comic figures are bathed in saturated, glossy hues— almost resembling plasticine figurines—nodding to the history of animation and the evolving world of emojis in our daily visual repertoire.

Andrea Marie Breiling at Almine Rech

Speaking to Ocula Magazine on her new-found love of spray paint—a material she’s been working exclusively with over the last three years—American painter Andrea Marie Breiling emphasised, ‘I am so obsessed with working this way . . . I feel like I’ve only just tapped into the potential of what this sole medium has to offer’.

Chosen for its associations with optimism, joy, and friendship, yellow is the base coat for each painting in this exhibition, as in the case of this work, interwoven with pulsating colours that create waves of energy across the canvas.

Victor Man at UCCA

To celebrate UCCA’s fifteenth year, the museum’s curatorial team has selected works from the collections of members of the institution’s Foundation Council.

Bringing together a selection of nearly 100 works by 53 artists, the exhibition celebrates both local talent, including Ma Quisha, Cui Jie, and Zhang Enli, alongside international heavyweights such as William Kentridge, Cy Twombly, and artist of the moment, Beeple.

Among the exhibition’s highlights is this set of paintings and a marker-on-acetate illustration by Victor Man, differing from the artist’s close-up, blue and emerald-toned portraits that we’re familiar with today.

Kristy M Chan at Tabula Rasa Gallery

Tabula Rasa Gallery have put on a stellar show of works by UK-based emerging artists Kristy M Chan, Nell Brookfield, and Alicia Reyes McNamara, among others.

The exhibition marks the first time many of these artists are presenting their work in China, with Gallery Weekend Beijing being the perfect introduction to the country’s collectors on the search for up-and-coming talent.

Kristy M Chan is a team favourite, having been introduced to her work at The Artist Room’s solo show at the end of last year in London.

Featuring dizzying forms and vivid hues, Chan’s abstract paintings made an impressive auction debut last year at Phillips, which saw her 2021 work Weather Going Bananas go for just over £ 60,000, nearly nine times its high estimate.

WORKS

Main image: Exhibition view: Austin Lee, Human Nature, M WOODS 798, Beijing (13 February–3 July 2022). Courtesy M WOODS. Photo by Xiao Niu/ Zhao Yihan.