4 Must-See Shows at Gallery Weekend Beijing
By Cathy Fan
Walking through the 798 Art District, the main hub of Gallery Weekend Beijing (GWBJ), this past weekend, I noticed many visitors who were not there primarily for art. Instead, they were simply strolling and shopping, enjoying time off. It felt worlds apart from the colder, more austere atmosphere of a gallery neighborhood like West Chelsea in Manhattan.
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Located in Beijing’s northeastern corner, 798 has existed for nearly a quarter-century, though little remains of the art utopia it once aspired to be. It is now a commercial landscape that is familiar across urban China, with dessert shops, bubble tea chains, cafés, concept stores, and even a Pop Mart gallery just off the main street. Art is no longer the unquestioned protagonist, but that may be what makes Beijing’s art scene feel uniquely alive today.
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Returning to Beijing for the Gallery Weekend each May carries a particular excitement for me. The city’s art world remains complicated, intricately layered, intensely grounded in its own context, and persistently rough around the edges.
Even as the Yangtze River Delta scene (centered around Shanghai) and the Greater Bay Area ecosystem (shaped by Hong Kong and Shenzhen) continue to attract growing attention, Beijing still occupies an essential role. It has never been especially sleek or swanky, yet it remains intensely magnetic.
Collector Tian Jun designed the exhibition of Ouyang Chun’s exhibition “Nirvana” with White Space, as a Special Sector of Gallery Weekend Beijing. Photo: Cathy Fan
In this sprawling capital of China, one still encounters galleries, nonprofit institutions, art academies, curators, and critics at a remarkable density. The city’s collectors, too, are deeply embedded in the scene, often shaping exhibitions rather than simply funding them. Interior designer and collector Tian Jun, for instance, has increasingly contributed exhibition design to major GWBJ projects (including a special project this time with artist Ouyang Chun), while actress and patron Zhu Zhu co-curated an outdoor sculpture program this year.
Back in 798, curators move constantly between galleries, meetings, and openings; even within this single district, there is enough activity to keep one occupied year-round. Increasingly, the area feels less like an arts neighborhood than a self-sustaining microcosm of China’s contemporary art world.
“Economic downturn” has become one of the most repeated phrases on Chinese social media in recent years, and the challenges facing the art industry are impossible to ignore. But those pressures are not experienced equally across the ecosystem.
Painting still occupies the largest share of the landscape, but younger artists, cross-disciplinary practices and more experimental projects continue to emerge alongside it. Veteran Beijing galleries such as Hive Center for Contemporary Art and Tang Contemporary Art have not pursued the relentless expansion of some Western blue-chip galleries, but they have also not dramatically downsized. They continue do shows and projects at a rapid rate, and serve as important talent scouts.
Installation view of “Yang Fudong: Fragrant River,” UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Yang Hao, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.
What struck me most at the 10th annual GWBJ was not just the resilience of the ecosystem, but the sensibilities that are emerging among a younger generation of Chinese artists. Moving fluidly between sculpture, installation, sound, digital imagery, and participatory environments, many of these artists seem less interested in grand ideological statements than in examining the textures of contemporary life itself: technological anxiety, bodily perception, emotional residue, systems of consumption, and the unstable relationship between humans and the material world.
Across three tightly packed days, I encountered no shortage of memorable projects. The following four solo exhibitions each revealed a different facet of a younger generation of Chinese artists—and the shifting concerns shaping their practices today.
“A User Guide: Tian Jianxin,” Capsule Shanghai at Visiting Sector of Gallery Weekend Beijing
GWBJ’s Visiting Sector took over 798’s A07 building with tautly curated gallery solo shows. Among the standouts was a witty solo exhibition by Beijing-based artist Tian Jianxin (b. 1994), whose sculptures transform ordinary household objects into strangely anthropomorphic presences.
The exhibition’s title, “A User Guide,” serves as a playful nod to Tian’s process of reactivating old objects while also suggesting an alternative manual for looking at the everyday. Working with found items collected from daily life—including rice cooker pots, Jeep hoods, enamel mugs, safety helmets, and other discarded objects—Tian hammers and assembles each piece in his studio, imbuing these otherwise utilitarian materials with unexpected personality.
“A User Guide: Tian Jianxin,” Capsule Shanghai at Visiting Sector of Gallery Weekend Beijing. Photo: Cathy Fan
Importantly, he rarely cuts or destroys the objects outright. Instead, he works with their existing forms, textures, and traces of use, allowing new figures to emerge organically from the objects themselves. A kettle becomes a hand flashing a Hawaiian shaka-like gesture, also known in Chinese internet slang as the “six” sign, while a flat aluminum tray suddenly sprouts the muscular torso of a male bodybuilder.
Most striking are the various faces emerging from rows of hanging pot bottoms across an entire wall. My personal favorite, however, was a “bra” suspended near the window, assembled from two bowls and thin metal wires.
I first encountered the work of Payne Zhu (b. 1990) at the 2023 Shanghai Biennale, where he presented a banquet-like installation built around three lake-shaped “dining tables” or gambling surfaces. Across his multidisciplinary practice, Zhu often explores the entangled relationship between capital, financial systems, consumer society, and the contemporary body. His new solo exhibition at Spurs Gallery takes its deliberately vulgar title, “Anal Intelligence,” as both provocation and conceptual framework.
On the first floor, five earlier works are reactivated, each pointing toward a different manifestation of this so-called “Anal Intelligence.” Interspersed among them are eight algae-based paintings in which octopus imagery repeatedly emerges, evoking the sprawling, decentralized logic of artificial intelligence itself.
Upstairs, the atmosphere shifts more dramatically: 12 LED screens hang suspended from the ceiling, cycling through fragmented streams resembling TikTok feeds. In this world—where production becomes digestion, and digestion becomes production—the subject is broken down into analyzable, storable data. Even emotion becomes data itself: processed, labeled, and circulated onward. The exhibition was awarded this year’s Best Exhibition Prize at GWBJ.
Michele Chu, “gasp,” installation view, MACA Art Center, 2026. Photo: Sun Shi
At the entrance of MACA, I was handed a small copper plate and a packet of salt. This was part of Michele Chu’s (b. 1994) participatory exercise The Sound of Salt. Following the instructions, I poured the salt onto the plate, recalled a song or memory, and let my fingers trace its rhythm into a small “salt-scape.”
At the center of the exhibition is a simple question: Can grief be heard? The title, “gasp,” refers to the bodily reaction that follows intense emotion or exhaustion. Salt is tactile and heavy; sound and emotion remain invisible and fleeting.
Along the staircase, sacks of salt wrapped in fabric brush softly against visitors’ bodies. Upstairs, a long winding corridor unfolds between suspended layers of cloth that had been soaked in saltwater over time, allowing crystals to slowly bloom across their surfaces. The passage stretches so far that it briefly felt endless. At the end stood four installations that visitors can enter by kneeling or curling inside them. Pressing against blocks of salt, the body itself became a resonating chamber.
“Ao Jing: A Straight Line,” at Magician Space
This was one of the few exhibitions during the week with almost no explanatory text, yet it quietly moved many viewers, myself included. Artist Ao Jing (b. 1993) continues to use relationships between materials to reflect on the relationship between the self and the world. Inside the gallery’s darkness, what remained most palpable were one’s own breathing and the installation’s delicacy, restraint, and quiet precision.
The exhibition unfolds through three installations exploring light, vibration, time, and chance. In one work, moving light is paired with raw wood and silk strings, creating an immersive environment suspended somewhere between the tangible and the intangible. Another uses vibration and the slow falling of sand to suggest how minor shifts can gradually accumulate into unknown outcomes. A final installation stages a series of near-misses and accidental collisions between piano wires, guzheng strings, and swinging mechanisms, turning temporal gaps into moments of unpredictability.
“Poetic” is a word often overused in art criticism, but here it feels genuinely earned. Jing describes her practice as a kind of “material anthropology,” one that uses exchanges between materials to evoke subtle forms of coexistence between nature and humanity beyond direct human control. The exhibition’s title is deceptively simple, accompanied by a short poem written by the artist. Its final line reads: “When you are here, you will encounter a different line at each moment.”
Gallery Weekend Beijing runs through May 31.
This article was originally published by Artnet News.