Shows
Shows to See in Beijing, May 2025
Returning for its 9th edition, Gallery Weekend Beijing (May 23–Jun 1) opens today with the inaugural “Beijing Art Season,” bringing together an extended coalition of Beijing-based art and cultural organizations including Beijing Dangdai (May 22–25) and ART021 Beijing (May 22–25). As the capital continues to assert its unique cultural identity, institutions and galleries across the city have put on ambitious programs to coincide with the city's biggest fair week. From major exhibitions at UCCA Beijing and Red Brick Art Museum to notable presentations at local galleries, here are our picks for shows to see this weekend in Beijing.
Anicka Yi
There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One
UCCA Beijing
Mar 22–Jun 15
Co-organized by Seoul's Leeum Museum of Art and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, “There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One” is New York-based, Korean American artist Anicka Yi’s most extensive museum presentation in Asia. For over a decade, Yi has investigated how biopolitics shape sensory experiences with works that interrogate the boundary between organisms and artifacts. Grounded in rigorous multidisciplinary research, Yi’s practice probes how humans evolve, create, and coexist in an era where artificial intelligence harbors both hope and anxiety. Concurrently, UCCA is hosting two solo exhibitions by Chinese artists Chen Ke and Liao Fei, focusing respectively on the oft-overlooked contributions of female Bauhaus artists and materiality through multimedia sculptures.
Chiharu Shiota
Silent Emptiness
Red Brick Art Museum
Mar 23–Aug 31
A major solo exhibition by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is currently on view at Red Brick Art Museum, featuring a series of newly commissioned site-specific installations that resonate with the museum’s architecture, as well as manuscripts that blend Eastern philosophy's concept of “emptiness” with locally sourced materials. Opening with Shiota’s video installation Still from Bathroom (1999), the exhibition culminates in Gateway to Silence (2025), which a mass of red threads engulfing a Tibetan Buddhist door frame. The immersive exhibition is a tangible meditation on “emptiness” and a reflection on Shiota’s deepening exploration of “the presence in absence.”
It Always Sounds Somewhere: Sounding Sound Practice in Chinese Mainland and Hong Kong Since the 1990s
Inside-Out Art Museum
Feb 22–Jun 1
Curated by Hong Kong-based art critic and sound art researcher Edward Sanderson, “It Always Sounds Somewhere” traces the evolution of sound art in China and Hong Kong over two decades of drastic societal shifts through archival documents such as photographs, design drafts, and websites. The exhibition presents the work and experiments of more than 60 artists collected from a variety of unlikely spaces—including underground subways, air-raid shelters, barber shops, living rooms, and virtual platforms.
Liao Wen
Trust Fall
&
Dan Er
Greetings
MACA Art Center
Mar 22–Jun 15
MACA Art Center presents Chinese artist Liao Wen’s debut institutional solo show, featuring new sculptures and the interactive site-specific installation Trust Fall (2023–25), which explores the dynamics of fear and trust. Drawing on her background in puppet-making and performance, as well as recent personal experiences of relocation, Liao interrogates themes of social order, alienation, and disciplinary power. Also on view is a solo exhibition of Chinese artist Dan Er, whose work questions historical and “dialectal” shifts in visual languages through various cultural expressions and materials.
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Wang Evelyn Taocheng & Xinyi Cheng
Between the Shadow and the Highlight
Antenna Space
May 10–Jun 15
Presented by Shanghai-based gallery Antenna Space, the duo exhibition “Between the Shadow and the Highlight” features new works by two diasporic Chinese artists, Xinyi Cheng and Evelyn Taocheng Wang, in a decommissioned space in Beijing’s 798 district. Rooted in 20th-century Chinese academic formalism while critically engaging with Western contemporary art movements, both artists’ work explores quotidian ephemera through intimate visual storytelling, transforming everyday observations into mediations on cultural identity.
Guo Cheng
Bug
Magician Space
May 1–Jun 21
For his new exhibition “Bug” at Magician Space, Shanghai-based artist Guo Cheng harkens back to the first “bug” in computing history in 1947, when operators discovered a moth trapped between the relay contacts of a computer during a system malfunction. In the exhibition, Guo presents two distinct yet interconnected spaces: an uncanny data center and a peculiar outdoor field. Viewers moving through these spaces—separated by a wall but connected through a window—experience the dissolving boundaries between the natural and digital realms. As reimagined by Guo, the “bug” represents not just a technical glitch but also a living entity navigating an entangled spectrum of life.
Cao Shu, Yao Qingmei, and Yin Yunya
Lie Between
ShanghART Beijing
May 20–Jun 29
ShanghART Beijing presents “Lie Between,” a group exhibition showcasing videos and installations by Chinese artists Cao Shu, Yao Qingmei, and Yin Yunya. Through spatial and temporal reconstruction, the artists’ multimedia interventions examine the complexities of contemporary social experience. Employing a variety of media, their work interrogates the dialectical tensions between individual and collective identities, alienation and connection, revealing the nuanced entanglements of social existence under late capitalism.
