{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/why-the-beijing-artscene-is-still-compelling-opinion-yiyi-you/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":123438,"slug":"why-the-beijing-artscene-is-still-compelling-opinion-yiyi-you","title":"Why the Beijing Artscene Is Still Compelling","excerpt":"There are plenty of reasons to knock Beijing, writes Yiyi You, but this year’s Gallery Weekend offers plenty of reasons not to","content":"\n

There are plenty of reasons to knock Beijing, writes Yiyi You, but this year’s Gallery Weekend offers plenty of reasons not to

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Beijing’s first Gallery Weekend opened in the spring of 2017. Around that same time, the city began a largescale overhaul of its hutongs (traditional alleyways), rebuilding alley walls and clearing out shopfronts. By winter, the campaign to ‘clean up low-end population’ had become a sombre collective memory of that year. On its ten-year anniversary, Gallery Weekend Beijing (GWBJ) inevitably brings to mind the upheavals in the city at its onset, and the trajectory of the capital’s art scene over the decade that followed: during that time independent spaces in the hutongs closed one after another, artists and artworkers moved out, and institutions gave off a feeling of depression. As with the rest of the world, Beijing’s artscene rapidly declined during COVID-19: a large number of expat arts-professionals left for home, and the image of Beijing as an international art hub, alongside the mirage of globalisation, faded away. Yet, as the old Chinese proverb goes, when things get to their extreme they turn into their opposite. For the past three years, I’ve toured Gallery Weekend Beijing at the end of May, witnessing the pendulum swing back.

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The best thing about art in Beijing has never been its ability to produce spectacles; rather it’s because, even in a dehumanising megalopolis, art still sprouts through the cracks in the rubble – testimony to an enduring idealism that never ceases to astonish. Take, for example, Wu Shangcong, who this year won GWBJ’s Boundless Exploration Award. In his solo exhibition BOX at Platform China, hundreds of handcrafted boxes are stacked on a long table (the show is named after the Chinese title of the 1995 Jeffrey Lau comedy film, A Chinese Odyssey Part 1: Pandora’s Box). Each box is filled with small sculptures and readymades, the outsides covered in drawings and collages, all of which theatrically reimagine various ‘odysseys’ through a mundane world.

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Wu Shangcong, Box, 2026 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Platform China, Beijing
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Wu’s boxes unleash a maximalist burst of worldly passion, whereas nearby at Magician Space, Jing Ao’s A Straight Line distils acute material observations into a conceptual framework. In the darkened gallery are three kinetic works, including A Dream (2026), in which a rapier prods at a horizontal bamboo tube. Sometimes, at the point of contact, sand sifts through punctures in the bamboo and falls onto the dark floor. The rapier, the tube, and the trickling sand all manifest a straight line. But Jing is no Platonist. Here, each item is either too short, bent or easily blown away. Inhabiting the embodied spacetime of lived experience, they dissolve the ideal form. Like Jing, Michele Chu is also skilled in leveraging the quiet forces of the material world. In gasp, her solo exhibition at MACA Art Center, a curved, pale curtain spirals inward. Responding to the air currents generated by passing bodies, it subtly contracts, drawing us into a semi-open enclosure (gasping, 2026). Four interactive sound sculptures in the space invite visitors to engage in private or collective mourning (gravestone lullaby i–iv, 2026) – a series intimately tied to the recent passing of the artist’s mother. The exhibition layout evokes a womb or umbilical cord: moving counterclockwise towards the centre feels like a prepartum return to the maternal body, where the air currents and the humming sculptures recall a once-shared respiratory action.

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Ao Jing, A Straight Line, 2026, wood, sand, bamboo, ceramic, xuan paper, cowhide, cotton rope, silk thread, stone, single-channel HD video (sound), dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Magician Space, Beijing
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This experience brings to mind Yang Fudong’s video Father’s Fireworks (2025), on view at his mid-career survey at UCCA, in which an email from Yang’s father, sent years earlier checking in on his health, unfolds as intertitles. The video, like the other items from his personal archives on display, gently pries open the opportunities and costs behind becoming the artist he is today. Largely as a result of dogged effort. The exhibition’s eponymous video installation Fragrant River (2016–25), for example, took a total of 30 years from conception to completion, ten of which were spent in post-production; the work also shows dreamlike fragments of everyday labour, festive celebrations and the passages of birth, aging, illness and death in his hometown unfolding across 15 screens installed in nine interconnected rooms. Language recedes, leaving only the murmurs and rustling sound of people and their surroundings.

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Cheng Xinhao, And We Shall Go Through Their Hills Without Much Delay, 2026 (installation view). Courtesy Tabula Rasa, Beijing & London
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At Tabula Rasa, Cheng Xinhao, a chemistry PhD and China’s most tenacious walking artist, presents a solo exhibition titled And We Shall Go Through Their Hills Without Much Delay. Yet here he’s not walking but takes a train: albeit a toy one, for which he laid tracks encircling an ethnic Naxi village in Yunnan last year. The resulting video, It Is Midnight, and the Rooster Hasn’t Crowed (2025), alternates between the low-slung perspective of the train and the gaze of passers-by. Which encourages us to think about the way in which a Western regime of modern time was forcibly inscribed onto the region via the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway built by the French in the early twentieth century. And the extent to which this is now the norm. Although this seems self-evident – is there anywhere left that has not been modernised? – Cheng remains captivated by a creative syntax that brings together ‘times from different origins’, which also happens to be the title of a work he made a decade ago in the very same village.

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Payne Zhu, Anal Intelligence, 2026 (installation view). Photo: Yang Hao. Courtesy Spurs Gallery, Beijing
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Whether it is the leverage employed by Wu Shangcong, Jing Ao and Michele Chu, or the persistence of Yang Fudong and Cheng Xinhao, all these practices remain anchored in the physical world. In Payne Zhu’s Anal Intelligence (which won the Best Exhibition Award) at Spurs Gallery, though, the artist reveals a more detached observation: all of the above has already been absorbed by a completely new system. His reinterpretation of AI as ‘Anal Intelligence’ points out a reality in which AI has not digested the best of humanity; rather it has been feeding on our digital excrement and now it’s returning to devour our physical world. Humans are reduced to mere tentacles of this gluttonous beast. On the ground floor, rows of mobile phones flash with indistinct images (Reverse-rendering, 2022); upstairs, 12 vertical screens suspended from the ceiling endlessly loop social-media feeds populated by CGI or drone footage. Edited and remixed in realtime, they hem us in like cornered animals.

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Translated by Yuwen Jiang

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Read next The Generative Slowness of Gallery Weekend Beijing

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