May 22–31, 2026
In the small project room of Magician Space, Beijing, one of three calligraphy works by Li Xianting offers an instructive lens through which to engage with the 2026 installment of Gallery Weekend Beijing (GWB). Li is better known in China as the firebrand critic who edited Fine Art from 1979 to ’83, but the exhibition is a reminder that he is also an important artist. The largest work, Art is the Politics of an Individual (2025), offers a detailed reflection on the purpose of art. In energetic sweeps of black ink, Li writes: “Art is a form of expression grounded first and foremost in the moral dimension within the artist’s inner world . . . one’s genuine conscience and position.”
Morality, positionality, and the individual are big, potentially very abstract ideas. With thirty exhibitions included by invitation only, GWB offers, on the occasion of its tenth anniversary, a significant opportunity to connect such ideas to specific practices and ask whether today’s generation of artists are engaging with Li’s ideals. Anchored in the 798 Art District, a vast former electronics factory complex in east Beijing, now home to many galleries, cafes, and boutiques, GWB is set across many spectacular buildings. High vaulted ceilings. Polished concrete floors. Béton brut and breeze blocks. In these striking spaces, there is a tendency for art to overinflate—too big or too much or both.
Proving that a maximalist approach can succeed is Ni Youyu’s ten-year survey show at Galleria Continua. The huge vaulted space includes sculpture, installation, and the artist’s signature black-and-gold paintings. Upstairs, a new iteration of “Galaxy” (2008–ongoing) shows his technical ability at its most delicate: dozens of hammered coins arranged in starlike constellations become miniature canvases for exquisite renderings of classical Chinese landscapes.
At Hive, London-based painter Xing Hao’s new works are refreshingly playful. Most pieces draw from Chinese folklore and ghost stories, combining resonant symbols—spoons, candles, bones, bats—with personal memories to create an intimate visual language that deftly weaves surrealism with naiveté. Arrested (2025) is a highlight: a mournful face peers from a brain-like cloud, lamenting five ghostly crabs below. Xing collected the creatures on a beach in Margate, hoping to keep them as pets, only to inadvertently kill them days later.
Inadvertent destruction could be a metaphor for some of GWB’s less successful exhibitions, which clutch at big ideas only to suffocate the subject of engagement. A double presentation of Julian Charrière and Laurent Grasso at 798 Cube is ambitious but hollow. Both artists address environmental crises, yet make highly polished work rooted in a tradition of grand, self-centering gestures that lack social or political engagement. Away from 798, at Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, another massive space in the west of the city, a group show guest curated by Jacob Fabricius takes a meta approach to the concept of exhibition-making while failing to engage with anything as prosaic as their purpose.
Across GWB, three exhibitions stand out—each of which takes a considered approach to questions of politics, aesthetics, and the position of the artist. At Tabula Rasa, Cheng Xinhao’s solo show retraces three journeys into and out of Yunnan, where the artist lives and works: on the trail of a British colonial explorer, a young Naxi student, and a highway connecting the province to Myanmar. Stratums and Erratics (2023–24), a two-hour film, follows the artist kicking a stone nearly 1,000 kilometers from Kunming to the China–Myanmar border, along a road built to connect China with India during World War II. This extraordinary journey, including eighteen months of rehabilitation from injury, is punctuated by quietly observed visual poetry: the artist walking alongside power lines intersecting temple stupas or an oversized penjing strapped to the back of a flatbed truck. The work speaks softly but confidently, reflecting contemporary China’s complex, messy, often beautiful interplay between tradition, nature, and modernity.
Across the ground floor of MACA Art Center is a brilliant exhibition of surprising material combinations by Luan Xueyan. Arranged according to the formal logic of Chinese painting, Luan’s works make imaginative connections between space, text, and reworked garments: a pair of jeans from an artist friend frozen in gauze webbing or a comically long dress created from a top given by another friend. A raised platform in the room’s corner echoes the lookout bluff so prominent in traditional ink painting, a place to survey the entirety. Suffused with warmth, the exhibition transforms once-loved clothing into a landscape of emotional resonance.
Finally, at UCCA, Yang Fudong’s ambitious work, Fragrant River (2016–25), envelops visitors in a poignant odyssey across scenes of everyday life in the artist’s home, Xianghe County, Hebei. In nine rooms, the fifteen-channel installation comprises fragmented black-and-white films that revel in light, shadow, and the joys and sorrows of the village. I was particularly moved by Young Man, Young Man (2025), a five-channel 16mm film capturing summer moments among a group of young boys—running, swimming, practicing martial arts. Some scenes appear candid, others artfully staged: recollections of Yang’s boyhood in a Beijing military compound rendered exquisite by the artist’s eye for color and composition, carried along on a dreamy soundscape of murmurs, cicadas, and flowing water. There is too much work—a result of attempting to fill UCCA’s vast space. A more focused show would better serve the soulfulness of the films. Grounded in his longstanding commitment to the expressive power of fragmentation, these are love letters, full of tender affection, to Yang’s youth, family, and community.
