Highlights From The 2022 Edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing

Gallery Weekend Beijing held its sixth edition this past June in China's capital. Galleries and non-profit organisations from China and around the world gathered on 24 June to celebrate innovation in various art spaces in Beijing, such as the 798 Art District.

Gallery Weekend Beijing is a culturally cohesive platform – initiated and managed by art professionals – that seeks to bundle and share cutting-edge contemporary art in Beijing. During the fair, galleries and institutions worked closely alongside each other to present the most striking exhibitions of the year to a national and international audience. On a global level where boundaries increasingly blur into new fields of opportunities, this exciting venture sought to eliminate creative limits and connect Beijing’s artistic potential to the global contemporary art hubs. An attractive framework programme, including relevant talks, panel discussions, and workshops accompanied the week-long event.

Scroll down to view some of the programme highlights!
 

Tang Contemporary Art

Tang Contemporary Art presented their exhibition "Back to the Beginning: A Luo Zhongli Retrospective Exhibition 1965-2022" on June 8 2022, across both of the gallery's Beijing spaces. Featuring more than 200 works, this exhibition was Luo Zhongli's first major retrospective in Beijing and his most comprehensive retrospective to date. Curated by Cui Cancan, the show focused on Luo's work from 1965 to the present and traces the changes in his art that have taken place since the beginning of Reform and Opening. The exhibition explored recurring themes and artistic ideas from his fifty-year career, examined personal triumphs and setbacks, and revisited the return to human-centric art that started with Father.

HdM Gallery

HdM GALLERY Beijing Space showcased Yang Maoyuan's solo exhibition "Double Landscape". This exhibition was the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery after "Backup Copies of Memory" in 2020. This year, the exhibition featured Yang's new paintings and sculptures created in the past two years. 

Pilar Corrias

Pilar Corrias showcased recent works by Peppi Bottrop, Cui Jie, and Rirkrit Tiravanija in "Here or there!". The paintings, sculptures, and conceptual pieces on view illustrated the idiosyncratic world-views of the artists – who are from three different generations and regions – encouraging us to reflect on the events and factors that separate a local reality from another in a post-globalisation era. Bringing together three distinct bodies of work that pertain to diverse realities and urgency, "Here or there!" encourages fair visitors to take their own sense of belonging and here and there-ness as a starting point. Living in either the metropolis of Beijing, the magnificent Shanghai, or the old coal-mining town in Bottrop's works, one can always be concerned with events and developments elsewhere, asking important questions, and working on critical projects that give solidarity a chance.

Kiang Malingue

Kiang Malingue presented the works of Chou Yu-Cheng "Sedimentary Gradient", showcasing ten paintings created in the last two years. Appearing for the first time in Beijing, is Chou’s Moody series of distinct abstract compositions conceived at the peak of the pandemic in 2020, and the consecutive series of Bibiliotheque and Water, Color & Paper, dealing in ever sophisticated fashions with the nuanced equilibrium of matters and motion.

Magician Space

"The antiquated makes an attempt to re-establish and maintain itself within the newly achieved form" at Magician Space. Artist Liu Yefu’s recent works expanded from this core idea in "Liu Yefu: Fool's Paradise". Liu visited the border region of Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia many times and filmed the life of his protagonist, Liu Huiqing. Despite his dire circumstances, the old man Liu Huiqing continued to practice traditional painting and calligraphy, writing about local vernacular culture. What his preservation of traditional Chinese society and culture represents is particularly contradictory to the current trend of seeking novelty with new benefits. In Liu Yefu’s video work, "Fool’s Paradise", Liu Huiqing’s old-fashioned way and Elon Musk’s space exploration become two sides of the same coin that are essentially the same: whether it is global, scientific, evolutionary, and radical, or local, secular, ancient, and conservative. In his works, Liu Yefu probed the imagined interior and exterior with a highly charged visual language and insisted on responding to the division of the contemporary world below secular life in this land. In this solo exhibition, Liu Yefu presented an eponymous video and a series of pottery and ink drawings.

Galerie Urs Meile

Galerie Urs Meile's latest exhibition "A Place for Concealment" (2022) was showcased at Gallery Weekend Beijing. This exhibition presented works from more than twenty Chinese contemporary artists born in the 1960s to the 1990s, including works in painting, photography, video, and installation. Curated by independent curator Yang Zi, this exhibition took the form of two painting storage racks, inviting the viewer to enter a game of partial concealment: the artists "conceal" their mental visions within the confines of the artwork; creation can be seen as a journey of activating these visions. Simultaneously, they are awaiting the moment these visions are activated by the gaze. The psychological visions emerge and then disappear and capturing them becomes an impetus for the act of creation. With the actions of the body as a medium, revealed through creation, the vision is tactfully transmitted to the viewer - to the audience, to the collector, or to the artist himself - while also planting a distant, indistinct origin point in their minds, awaiting the next act of targeting and correction.

All images are courtesy of Gallery Weekend Beijing