Gallery Weekend Beijing turned 10 this May, opening the capital’s annual art season that has come to be defined by a certain quality of attention—measured, assured, understated yet intellectually rigorous. Apart from strong gallery programs, institutions delivered. Here are six presentations not to miss.

Duan Jianyu
Daisies, a Light Breeze, No Relatives Writing Poems
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art
May 1–Aug 30, 2026

Few painters working in China today move between registers—the comic, the tender, the deadpan, the quietly devastating—with as much ease as Duan Jianyu, whose midcareer survey at UCCA makes the case with force. Among the most accomplished painters of her generation, Duan populates her canvases with an incongruous cast—chickens, air hostesses, large fish whose bellies host human characters, goat-shaped recluses—drawn equally from the Western canon, Chinese painting history, and the textures of everyday life. Working in a deliberately naïve register, she uses wit, humor, the banal and the lowbrow as vehicles for incisive excavations of emotion and collective memory.

Fu Luofei
The Shape of Content: Fu Luofei’s Realist Painting and Wartime Art in China
Taikang Art Museum
Apr 19–Jul 5, 2026

Art history has a particular blindspot for realists whose allegiance was to the world above formal innovation. Fu Luofei (1897–1971), one of modern China’s most significant yet underexamined realist painters, is the subject of an overdue and rigorously researched exhibition at the Taikang Art Museum. Over four decades, he fixed his gaze on peasants, soldiers, and life during revolution and war, developing a figurative practice that documented the upheavals of the 20th century with poignant precision and emotional directness. Assembling more than 400 works, the survey offers a compelling encounter with a master the canon left behind.

Julian Charrière & Laurent Grasso
Kairos Resounding
798CUBE
Apr 25–Aug 30, 2026

This two-person show marks the first institutional presentations in China for Julien Charrière and Laurent Grasso and arrives with a precise conceptual proposition: kairos, the Greek term for the decisive, unrepeatable moment rather than chronological duration. Charrière approaches time through deep geological materiality—ice cores, glacial mass, mineral residue, the slow violence of planetary change; Grasso, through perceptual installations that collapse the medieval and the interstellar, the analog and the digital. Staged across the vast concrete and brick halls of 798CUBE, the exhibition is curated by Zhang Ga, a key figure in art and technology discourse in China. 

Tesfaye Urgessa
Primordial Paths
Red Brick Art Museum
Mar 21–Aug 9, 2026

There is an irreducible radiance to Tesfaye Urgessa’s paintings: long-limbed, precarious bodies that carry their dignity through the crushing weight of displacement. Born in Addis Ababa in 1983 and trained at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, where 13 years abroad sharpened both his politics and his palette, Urgessa works in a visual language fused from Ethiopian iconography, European Surrealism, and the gestural intensity of German Neo-Expressionism. Emaciated, contorted, luminous in deep ocher and earth tones, his figures speak to fragility and resilience simultaneously. Marking his Asian debut and his most comprehensive international solo presentation to date, “Primordial Paths” brings together more than 60 works made since 2019.

Michele Chu
gasp
MACA Art Center
May 17–Aug 23, 2026

Grief takes architectural form in Hong Kong-based artist Michele Chu’s first institutional solo exhibition in Mainland China. Salt—the material of tears, of preservation, of holding on—governs the show’s textures, sounds, and spatial logic. A curved curtain of salt-encrusted fabric leads into a dim enclosure, where four sculptures shaped for specific corporeal postures, gravestone lullaby i–iv (all 2026), offer themselves as vessels for mourning: visitors curl inside, cheek pressed against translucent Himalayan salt brick, sound entering the body through touch. To move through “gasp” is to trace our earliest somatic memory—enclosure, breath, the hum of another life held close.

Jean-Michel Othoniel
Dazzling Trilogy
Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing
Apr 15–Sep 6, 2026

A different type of brick, albeit similarly hued and luminous, appears in Jean-Michel Othoniel’s Rivière Rose (2026), a site-specific pool of pink glass tiles flowing across the gallery floor at Espace Louis Vuitton Beijing. Meditating on beauty, fragility, and transformation, the exhibition unites an early installation Lágrimas (2002), in which delicate forms hover in shimmering glass jars; the rarely seen monumental boat sculpture Le Bateau de Larmes (2004); and the sacred garland White Wild Lei (2009), each made from the artist’s signature hand-cast and blown glass and drawn from the Fondation’s collection.