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Sprüth Magers booth at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026

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As AI Arrives, How Does Art Basel Hong Kong "Refresh" Itself Amid the Upheaval?

If there is one place in Asia that comes fully alive every March, it is Art Basel Hong Kong. Within three hours of the doors opening on March 25th, fairgoers had already spotted Chilam Cheung and Anita Yuen, Lin Chi-ling, Yang Caiyu, Feng Tang, Yuan Hong, Zhang Zetian, Uli Sigg, Zhang Han — the roll call went on. But the real news this year was the fair itself: after more than five years in the making, a new sector called Echoes made its debut, a structural response to where mid-career artists and mid-size galleries now stand in the ecosystem......

3/26/20263,132 words

Installation view of Selective Eating at Hong Art Museum, Wenzhou

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The Year’s Most Vivid Exhibition: Starting with Everyday Food

During the 2026 Lunar New Year, an exhibition about food is unfolding in Wenzhou. Using familiar ingredients—apples, milk, rice, blood clams, spices, canned goods—as its point of departure, the work of eleven artists or artist groups places the everyday back within larger historical and social contexts, from oceans, forests, and factories to home kitchens and multinational supply chains. Food is not only a matter of taste; it also reveals the tangled relations among labor, capital, and power......

3/15/20265,010 words

Installation view of Wu Shanzhuan and Inga-Svala Thorsdottir’s Bird Before Peace in Hangzhou

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A Transnational Couple Stages a Show in Hangzhou: More Than Two Thousand Works and Thirty Years of Shared Thought

In early winter, Hangzhou usually carries a light mist. As you approach the reflecting pool plaza at Tianmuli, you see one of the city’s familiar blue-green taxis sitting quietly in place. The body bears the well-known Three Pools Mirroring the Moon motif, but where the headlights should be, the words “NATURE / natural” have been substituted. Not far away, a white flag with blue patterning snaps in the wind......

12/4/20254,046 words

At Nanjing’s Midnight Museum, a Late-Night Flower Show for the Overworked — image 3

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At Nanjing’s Midnight Museum, a Late-Night Flower Show for the Overworked

At 10 P.M., how do you step out of the clamor of Nanjing’s commercial center and into a hushed, expansive world of floral art? At Deji Art Museum, the only museum in the world open until midnight, its core permanent exhibition since the museum opened in August 2023, “Motion and Stillness Without End: Masterpieces of Floral Art from the Collection,” reopens on October 24, 2025, in its first major reinstallation after more than two years, with nearly one-third of the works on view replaced......

10/24/20254,227 words

Museum night openings and Shanghai Museum in 2025

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After Hours at the Museum

Most of us are used to visiting museums by day. But after dark, when the lights are up, galleries can take on a more alluring, mysterious air. In China, institutions such as the Museum of Art Pudong in Shanghai and the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing have launched evening programs that are drawing ever larger crowds. In fact, museum nights became widespread in Europe and the United States as early as the 1990s, eventually evolving into the annual European Night of Museums each May......

8/27/20253,393 words

Painting space of Yu Yan and Yoyo’s YY Collection Group

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The Beijing Collector Who Finds Collecting with Friends as Joyful as Falling in Love

Yu Yan is a veteran Beijing collector, former editorial director of Shilin magazine, and the laughing, playful, poetry-loving, art-market-skeptical “Auntie Yan” known throughout the art world. She began seriously collecting contemporary art in 2008 or 2009 and has continued for more than fifteen years. Her collection includes paintings, installations, sculpture, photography, and a substantial number of conceptual video works, totaling nearly 200 pieces, as well as......

5/11/20252,640 words

Video imagery accompanying Anicka Yi’s Another Evolution interview

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One of the Most Watched Artists in Asia Right Now Works in Smell — and Pushes Against Traditional Beauty

Anicka Yi is, without much argument, one of the most closely watched artists in the world today. Born in Seoul in 1971, she moved to the United States with her family at the age of two. She first "bombarded" people's sense of what contemporary art could be with pungent smells, deep-fried tempura flowers, and moldering colonies of bacteria in 2011, at Green Gallery in Milwaukee......

4/23/20252,851 words

Huang Yishan’s New Beijing Show Traces Nearly Eight Years of Making — image 1

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Huang Yishan’s New Beijing Show Traces Nearly Eight Years of Making

Born in Chaoshan and based in Guangzhou, Huang Yishan is one of the most watched artists of his generation. The texture of everyday life has fed his work and sharpened his fascination with building spaces of many kinds: he repeatedly joins two dimensions to three, making reliefs and collages of varying thickness through grinding, tiling, gouging, and pressing, as if he were renovating a house inside a painting......

4/17/20252,323 words

Wu Wei, a Collector Born in the 1990s, Built His Life from Scratch—and Uses Art and Collecting to Heal Himself — image 1

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Wu Wei, a Collector Born in the 1990s, Built His Life from Scratch—and Uses Art and Collecting to Heal Himself

Wu Wei, a collector born in the 1990s, is the founder and designer of a fashion brand. He began collecting in 2017 and has acquired sixty-five works over eight years, from artists across three generations in China—including Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi, Zhang Ding, Liu Guoqiang, Ding Shiwei, Li Ming, Zhou Yilun, and Yan Bing—and from younger international artists roughly his own age, such as Issy Wood and Rodrigo......

4/3/20252,762 words

Thirty-two Artists Who Signed With Blue-Chip Galleries in 2024 — image 2

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Thirty-two Artists Who Signed With Blue-Chip Galleries in 2024

With January 2025 already half over and Lunar New Year close at hand, people across the art world are trying to shake off the gloom of last year’s downturn and trust that this year may go better. The artists who secured blue-chip gallery representation in 2024 are also preparing for the exhibitions ahead. Looking across last year’s signings, one shift stands out: rather than pursuing the aggressive strategy of signing only young artists, as many did in previous years, blue-chip galleries have begun building rosters more deliberately across generations......

1/21/20258,929 words

Raw, Reckless, and Rough: How Did He Become One of the Hottest Artists of His Generation? — image 1

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Raw, Reckless, and Rough: How Did He Become One of the Hottest Artists of His Generation?

Daniel Crews-Chubb is one of Britain’s most sought-after artists born in the 1980s, and in recent years his work has found an expanding audience among collectors and institutions in Asia and China. His paintings arrive with a raw, reckless, even rough-edged force: he applies paint with his fingers, smears charcoal, dyes, cuts, and tears the canvas, sprays it with sand and ink, and staples layer upon layer of cut canvas onto the surface beneath......

12/4/20243,303 words

Fu Rao: Beyond East-West Labels, an Art of Sincerity — image 2

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Fu Rao: Beyond East-West Labels, an Art of Sincerity

Fu Rao is one of the very few Chinese artists born in the 1970s to have won recognition from both Western academia and the market. Born in Beijing in 1978, he graduated from the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University in 2001, then went to Germany to study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a junior contemporary of Gerhard Richter. He has now spent more than 20 years in Dresden, a city steeped in art, literature......

8/2/20242,768 words

104 Treasures, and a Yuanmingyuan You've Never Seen — image 2

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104 Treasures, and a Yuanmingyuan You've Never Seen

Mention the Yuanmingyuan and most people picture its European-style ruins and the looted zodiac animal heads that scattered into foreign collections over the years. Few know that this royal residence, considered on par with the Forbidden City itself, was in fact 98 percent Chinese in its architecture and gardens — the working home, for five generations of Qing emperors, of governance, family life, and the festivals of the court calendar......

4/21/20243,549 words

A Young Artist Heals Herself Through Art—and Pushes Beyond the Limits of the Body — image 2

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A Young Artist Heals Herself Through Art—and Pushes Beyond the Limits of the Body

Artist Zhu Liqing, born in Hong Kong in 1997, has lived with Tourette syndrome since childhood, making it difficult for her to concentrate and causing involuntary bodily tics. But painting has greatly eased her symptoms, quieting her whole being. Her artistic education and life have taken her from Hong Kong to Spain, then to the United States and Italy, and finally back to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied under Qiu Zhijie, one of the leading figures in contemporary art today. She is due to complete her master’s degree this June......

4/7/20242,961 words

Five Years in the Making, More Than 200 Works: A Life of Zao Wou-Ki — image 2

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Five Years in the Making, More Than 200 Works: A Life of Zao Wou-Ki

Zao Wou-Ki is the highest-valued Chinese-born artist in the world. In 2018, a single canvas of his sold for HK$510 million, setting a record for Asian oil painting at auction that still stands. He is celebrated as a leading figure of Western lyrical abstraction, yet the substance of his work never stopped being Chinese. His paintings hang in more than 150 major museums worldwide, and no history of modern art can leave his name out. Last year, 2023, marked the tenth anniversary of his death......

2/17/20242,988 words

The Rising Stars of the Post-’95 Generation: Four Artists to Watch — image 2

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The Rising Stars of the Post-’95 Generation: Four Artists to Watch

Last week, I introduced four promising female artists born after 1995 with overseas backgrounds, and the response was encouraging. This time, I’m turning to four other artists of the same generation who left China earlier and received almost all of their fine-art education in the West. Their experiences have shaped practices that are more inclusive, diverse, and international in outlook, engaging with questions of Chinese and Western culture and identity......

1/29/20245,014 words

Artist Zhu Liqing in front of her work

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Four Women Artists Born After 1995, and the Case for Optimism

In the past year, everyone seemed to sense a changing of the guard in the contemporary art market: artists born in the 1990s now account for a much larger share of secondary-market sales, chased by collectors closer to their own age, and museums and galleries alike have been filling their walls with new names born after 1995. At the start of 2024 I sat down with eight artists who share that birth decade and a foot in both China and the West to talk about their work, their sense of who they are, and where they think they're headed......

1/22/20244,352 words

Zhou Dawei: Twenty Years of Collecting, Ninety Private Works Revealed for the First Time — image 1

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Zhou Dawei: Twenty Years of Collecting, Ninety Private Works Revealed for the First Time

For two decades, Zhou Dawei has been one of the most consequential figures in Chinese contemporary art — a co-founder of the ART021 fair and the nonprofit Cc Foundation. This November, from a private collection of nearly a thousand works, he chose just over ninety pieces, the ones he felt came closest to defining his own taste, and opened them to the public for the first time......

12/6/20232,857 words

Inside Frieze at Twenty: London’s Long-Running Art Fair Enters Its Most International Era — image 1

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Inside Frieze at Twenty: London’s Long-Running Art Fair Enters Its Most International Era

In mid-October, London’s autumn has turned the city’s lawns and trees faintly gold. In trench coats of every color, hurried pedestrians seem to be heading toward a single destination: Regent’s Park. From October 9 to 15, Frieze London and Frieze Masters are in full swing. Twenty years ago, in the same season and at the same location, Frieze was born as one of the world’s three best-known art fairs......

10/13/20233,447 words

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Inside the Homes of Five Leading Collectors, from the 1960s to the 1980s Generations

This year, we visited the distinctive homes of collectors from finance, the arts, industry, architecture, hospitality, and media—including people who have made collecting a profession. From collectors born in the 1950s and 1960s to those born in the 1980s and 1990s, each could trace the stories behind the works in their homes: encounters with artists, the frustration of losing a beloved piece, and the moments when a work seemed to speak directly to them......

10/3/20235,253 words

Xiao Jiang: After a Decade of Painting Mountains, More Than Ten New Works Go on View in Shanghai — image 1

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Xiao Jiang: After a Decade of Painting Mountains, More Than Ten New Works Go on View in Shanghai

Born in 1977 in Jinggangshan, Jiangxi, Xiao Jiang liked drawing from childhood. After graduating from a teachers college, he worked as a designer at the local cultural center, and painting from life was then little more than a pastime. He later studied in the oil-painting department at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. In 2006, at his uncle’s suggestion, he moved to Shanghai and, by some mix of accident and fate, became a professional artist......

9/18/20233,440 words

Wu Shan: Thirty-Some Years of Painting, Still Chasing the Elegance of a Line — image 1

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Wu Shan: Thirty-Some Years of Painting, Still Chasing the Elegance of a Line

Wu Shan, Treading on Grass, 2022. The artist Wu Shan was born in Hangzhou in 1960, the son of a painter and a music teacher; for him, art has always felt like something close to a calling. He took up calligraphy as a child, then painting, and it seemed only natural that he would go on to graduate from the oil painting department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, now the China Academy of Art......

8/2/20232,950 words

Qu Fengguo: Painting as Fate — image 1

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Qu Fengguo: Painting as Fate

Born in 1966 and raised in Dalian, the artist Qu Fengguo graduated from the Department of Stage Design at the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 1988 and stayed on to teach. He has devoted himself to abstraction ever since, moving from charcoal powder to acrylics, oil paint, and even fabric paint, building his surfaces in dense layers that have shifted from early grays, browns, and blacks toward increasing color and radiance over more than three decades of work......

7/12/20233,807 words

Antony Gormley's Qingdao Exhibition: The Most Comprehensive, Most Ambitious Presentation of His Work in Asia — image 1

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Antony Gormley's Qingdao Exhibition: The Most Comprehensive, Most Ambitious Presentation of His Work in Asia

The British sculptor Antony Gormley is one of the most influential artists working today. For nearly forty years he has made sculptures of the human body and works for public space, winning prizes that include the Turner, showing in major museums and institutions around the world, and receiving a knighthood from the former Queen of England. Five years after his last visit, he returned to China this past April with Living Time, his exhibition at TAG Art Museum in Qingdao — the most comprehensive and most ambitious presentation of his work Asia has yet seen......

5/2/20233,081 words

Shen Yuan: Woman, Artist, Mother, Wife — image 1

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Shen Yuan: Woman, Artist, Mother, Wife

The artist Shen Yuan was born in 1959 into a family of artists and became one of the leading figures among the Chinese avant-garde who settled in France, one of the first generation of Chinese women artists to win an international reputation. In the 1990s, she and her husband, the artist Huang Yong Ping, also an artist, arrived in France, and the barriers of language and the rupture of culture became a wellspring of inspiration for her......

2/22/20233,827 words

Shang Liang: The Metamorphosis of the Muscle Man — image 1

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Shang Liang: The Metamorphosis of the Muscle Man

A beautiful boy with a muscular body and a child’s face, a boxer with bulging veins, a voluptuous sofa: at first glance, Shang Liang’s works seem full of contradictions and charged with force. Look closer, and these exaggerated, transformed figures echo both the young, powerful athletes of ancient Greek sculpture and the idealized idols shaped by today’s entertainment industry—as if they were images of the “posthuman” our era is on the verge of producing......

1/30/20232,866 words

Shi Jinsong: Five Solo Exhibitions in One Year, Where Hard Edges Meet Tradition — image 2

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Shi Jinsong: Five Solo Exhibitions in One Year, Where Hard Edges Meet Tradition

“Mm, pretty good—kuoyi, kuoyi!” the artist Shi Jinsong says, laughing in standard Wuhan Mandarin. His work is tougher and more experimental than his easygoing manner suggests: metal mecha strollers, nail-studded pine trees, metallic bamboo, ruin gardens, wire-wrapped figures, dazzling disco balls, and monumental portraits. His practice moves restlessly among sculpture, installation, painting, performance, multimedia, theatrical experiments, and conceptual design......

10/19/20223,661 words

The Most Comprehensive Showing Yet of China’s Post-90s Artists — image 2

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The Most Comprehensive Showing Yet of China’s Post-90s Artists

At Song Art Museum, the group exhibition “Generation of Rupture,” organized with the curator Cui Cancan, brings together fourteen of the most representative Chinese artists born in the 1990s. Born in the late nineteen-eighties through 2000, they have lived and worked in Beijing, Shanghai, London, Berlin, New York, and Paris, and the fractures within their generation may occur even more frequently than before, with wholesale shifts in outlook every five years, or even every three......

8/23/20224,854 words

Cai Yaling: Women's Suffering Is So Abundant, I Give It Voice Through Art — image 2

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Cai Yaling: Women's Suffering Is So Abundant, I Give It Voice Through Art

Cai Yaling is an artist born in the 1980s and the mother of two children. For eleven years, giving voice to women has been the guiding thread of her work, drawn from her own unfiltered experience as an ordinary woman — a body of work built around the most private, the most painful passages in a woman's life. It comes almost by instinct: she has burned 408 sticks of incense to render the pain of childbirth......

6/12/20223,238 words