Beginning in late February, museums and art institutions in Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Shunde, and elsewhere will gradually open new exhibitions. We have selected 57 of the most noteworthy exhibitions at institutions across China in 2025, to help you prepare your exhibition-going plans for the year ahead. Long Museum: Jean Michel Othoniel solo exhibition. On view April 27–July 27, 2025. Jean Michel Othoniel, “The Narcissus Theorem,” installation view; photograph by Claire Dorn; image courtesy of Perrotin and the artist. The French contemporary artist Jean Michel Othoniel was born on January 27, 1964, in Saint-Étienne, France, and now lives and works in Paris.
His most recognizable works are his large, brightly colored installations of glass beads, made in collaboration with master glassblowers on Murano, Italy’s famous “glass island.” His most widely known work may be Le Kiosque des Noctambules, a new entrance installation he designed in 2000 for the Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre metro station in Paris. Its aluminum structure is set with eight hundred Murano glass beads, and it has become a notable feature of the city.
His work is held by major institutions around the world, including MoMA and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and has appeared repeatedly in important international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and documenta. Wang Yi solo exhibition. On view April 12–June 29, 2025. Wang Yi, “Islands,” installation view, Jiushi Art Museum, Shanghai, 2025. Wang Yi, an artist born in the 1980s, grew up in an artistic family in Shanghai and graduated from Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts and the New York Academy of Art.
His grandfather, Wang Guanqing, was one of China’s earliest artists to make comic strips and is still working today. His father and uncles were also involved in ink painting, while his mother graduated from the oil-painting department of the China Academy of Art. He entered the affiliated high school of Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, then the academy itself in 2002, eventually becoming a full-time artist. His escape from realism led him to construct, through painting, a comfortable, pleasurable, and absurd world—one filled with landscapes, experiences, and narratives, and animated by strange ideas.
Last year, he held a major solo exhibition at Jiushi Art Museum in Shanghai. Yang Bodu solo exhibition. On view July–October 2025. Yang Bodu, At the Museum AL 5:04, 2023. Yang Bodu, a woman artist born in the 1980s, was born in Tianjin in 1986 and now lives and works in Beijing. She graduated from Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 2008 and then studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a master’s degree in art. Her work frequently features rooms, museums, and various kinds of architecture, drawing viewers into limitless imaginings of space.
Ji Xin solo exhibition. On view July–October 2025. Ji Xin, “Moonlight · Butterfly,” installation view, Almine Rech Paris; photograph by Nicolas Brasseur; image courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech. Ji Xin, an artist born in the 1980s, has emerged as one of the most closely watched young Chinese artists in recent years. Last year, he appeared frequently at art fairs in Hong Kong, London, Basel, and Paris. His work has also been highly active on the secondary market.
This 2025 solo exhibition is his second institutional solo show, following his 2023 exhibition at Song Art Museum. His “retro girls” have undergone transformation after transformation as the artist has married, had children, and moved. Guan Yinfu solo exhibition. On view November 2025–January 2026. Guan Yinfu, “Skin Language, Flesh Speech, and Aside,” installation view, Triumph Gallery, Beijing, 2024; image courtesy of the artist and Triumph Gallery. Guan Yinfu was born in Heilongjiang Province, China, in 1975. He graduated from the stage-design department of the Central Academy of Drama in 2002 and now lives and works in Beijing.
Large accumulations of color often appear in his paintings. By smearing blocks of paint, sometimes thin and sometimes thick, across the canvas, he constructs an ordered spatial field. Power Station of Art: Fabrice Hyber: de la Vallée. On view April 2–June 29, 2025. Fabrice Hyber’s work for Lujiazui metro station; image courtesy of the Fondation Cartier. Fabrice Hyber was born in Vendée, France, in 1961. He studied mathematics in his early years before attending the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes.
His career began with drawing and painting and gradually expanded into many forms of artistic expression. In 1997, he received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. This is Hyber’s second exhibition at PSA, and he is about to begin his second journey to Shanghai. Last year, he came to Shanghai and created a monumental painting for Lujiazui metro station, depicting the entire valley where he grew up. He also traveled to Jingdezhen, where he painted on ceramics. This exhibition will include a series of works deeply connected to China.
I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture. On view April 19–July 20, 2025. I. M. Pei in front of the Louvre Pyramid, which he designed. The PSA exhibition I. M. Pei: Life Is Architecture is a traveling exhibition from M+, the museum in Hong Kong. It is the celebrated architect’s first comprehensive large-scale retrospective, examining the work and remarkable life of the Chinese American master. The exhibition is organized around six themes: “Pei’s Cross-Cultural Foundations,” “Real Estate and Urban Redevelopment,” “Art and Public Architecture,” “Power, Politics, and Patronage,” “Material Improvement and Structural Innovation,” and “Reinterpreting History through Design.”
The exhibition includes drawings, sketches, videos, models, photographs, and numerous archival records, many of them being shown publicly for the first time. 15th Shanghai Biennale, “Does the Flower Hear the Bee?” On view November 8, 2025–March 31, 2026. Installation view of the 14th Shanghai Biennale, 2023. The Shanghai Biennale was the first international contemporary-art biennial established in China and is one of the most influential contemporary-art events in Asia and the world. This year’s curator is Kitty Scott.
The title “Does the Flower Hear the Bee?” refers to a phenomenon in nature: when flowers “hear” the vibrations of a bee’s wings, they release sweeter nectar when the bee arrives. The idea is that artworks offer us a fertile place in which to become fully present, connect with one another, build stronger relationships within and between groups, and live in harmony with “the world beyond humans.” At the 15th Shanghai Biennale, every visitor will, like a flower, become aware of the importance of hearing the bee’s arrival.
Fosun Foundation: Wang Guangle solo exhibition. On view March–May 2025. Wang Guangle, solo exhibition at Pace Gallery, Le Beige building, Hannam-dong, Seoul, 2024. Wang Guangle is widely recognized as a pioneer of Chinese conceptual painting and a representative of the generation of Chinese artists born in the 1970s. After graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2000, he helped establish the young artists’ group N12 as one of its principal founders. He was among the first Chinese contemporary artists to break from the tradition of figurative painting and turn toward personal expression.
His signature series include “Terrazzo,” “Lacquer of Life,” and “Afternoon.” After signing with the international blue-chip gallery Pace, he showed new works from his representative “Untitled” and “Lacquer of Life” series for the first time at Pace’s Seoul space during Frieze Seoul in 2024. Curated by Leng Lin, this solo exhibition at Fosun Foundation is one of his larger exhibitions in recent years and will present works from every stage of his career.
Tsuyoshi Hisakado solo exhibition. On view May–July 2025. Tsuyoshi Hisakado, Pause, 2016. Hisakado was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1981. His practice focuses particularly on the apparently mundane aspects of daily life. He uses sound, light, and ordinary household objects to create situations that activate viewers’ memories and experiences. For this exhibition, he will present large-scale, site-specific works including FUZZ and Power. Some will produce tremendous sound, others intense flashes of light, engaging visitors and drawing them rapidly into a parallel world created by the installations.
Zhao Yao solo exhibition. On view May–July 2025. Zhao Yao, “The Power of Nature: A 10,000-Square-Meter Work in Beijing.” Conceptual artist Zhao Yao was born in Sichuan, China, in 1981. He graduated from the design-art department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2004 and now lives in Beijing. Over more than 10 years of artistic practice, he has never created anything new; he only recombines found objects, and each intervention is unusual. His largest installation covered 10,000 square meters and was once presented at Beijing Workers’ Stadium.
The Sheet from the Countryside is a new work, presented for the first time as an interactive, participatory project. Based on the exhibition site, the work uses a specially designed pattern centered on the “sheet.” The pattern is divided into 240-by-120-centimeter units, which visitors will be invited to assemble collectively throughout the exhibition. Jörg Immendorff solo exhibition. On view September–October 2025. Jörg Immendorff, To All the Loved Ones in the World, 1967. Jörg Immendorff was a German master of Neo-Expressionist painting, born in Lüneburg, Germany, in 1945.
He studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Joseph Beuys. His early work was strongly influenced by Beuys and charged with political and social critique. Immendorff’s major exhibitions were held throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States, including at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
Carsten Höller solo exhibition. On view November 2025–January 2026. Carsten Höller, Double Mushroom Window (Twenty-Four Folds), 2018; image courtesy of the artist and Galleria Continua. Carsten Höller was born in Brussels in 1961 and now lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, and Bijilo, The Gambia. He draws on his experience as a scientist in his artistic practice, using it to investigate the nature of human relationships.
Over more than twenty years of artistic practice, Höller’s work has appeared around the world, including at Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille, the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, and the New Museum in New York. Yuz Museum: Werner Büttner solo exhibition. On view March 22–June 22, 2025. Werner Büttner: Human Conditions: Similes, Fables, and Metaphors, installation view, Yit Triumph Gallery, China, 2022. Born in 1954, Büttner is one of Germany’s most important postwar contemporary artists. Trained as a lawyer, he never attended art school and is a defender of “bad painting.”
He is humorous in conversation and dislikes socializing. He taught at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts for 30 years, and many of his students have become central figures in the contemporary-art world. Some young Chinese artists have even gone to Germany to study because of Büttner’s reputation. This exhibition is his first solo show at a Chinese art museum. It spans 45 years of his career, and the artist himself will attend to share with visitors the pleasures of the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.” Syaiful Aulia Garibaldi personal project. Syaiful Aulia Garibaldi, Antara Muara, 2024. Garibaldi was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1985. Known as Tepu, he is a contemporary artist active in Bandung.
Tepu initially studied agriculture before turning to experimental art, incorporating his scientific background into his artistic concepts. His work encompasses installation, painting, drawing, printmaking, and video, producing an elegant fusion of art and science. Museum of Art Pudong: Time and Yifei: A Retrospective of Chen Yifei. On view April 26–October 12, 2025. Chen Yifei, Lady with Birdcage, 1992. The museum’s first major exhibition of the year, Time and Yifei: A Retrospective of Chen Yifei, commemorates the 20th anniversary of Chen Yifei’s death in 2025 and presents a comprehensive view of every stage of his career and intellectual development.
Born in Zhenhai, Zhejiang, in 1946, Chen Yifei was one of the first outstanding artists to achieve broad influence after the reform and opening-up period. His work brought together the essential qualities of Chinese and Western art, leaving a forceful mark on the history of modern and contemporary Chinese art. He achieved distinction in painting, film, fashion, and environmental design, and was an early proponent of collaboration across disciplines. The exhibition presents nearly one hundred works in oil, printmaking, drawing, watercolor, sculpture, and moving image. It includes many of Chen’s best-known masterpieces: foundational early works such as Ode to the Yellow River and Pioneer in Road-Building; the “Old Dreams of Shanghai” series, represented by Night Banquet, Spring Warmth in the Jade Hall, and Echoes of Xunyang; the popular “Musician” series made during his years in the United States; and the “Water Town” series, which introduced the landscapes of Jiangnan to a wider international audience.
Nanshige Art Center: Hajime Sorayama: Light, Transparency, Reflection. On view February 28–June 15, 2025. Hajime Sorayama, Untitled, 2023. Hajime Sorayama was born in Ehime, Japan, in 1948. At 74, he remains active on the front line of contemporary art. As a teenager, he became absorbed in American popular culture, especially the visual style of Playboy magazine, which foreshadowed his later work. His best-known and most controversial series is Sexy Robot, designed in 1978 to avoid paying licensing fees for Star Wars.
His works are marked by exquisitely rendered metallic surfaces and human curves and are often labeled “cyber-erotic.” He has said, “My interest is in breaking taboos.” He frequently incorporates elements such as leather clothing and medical equipment, provoking the viewer’s senses. The exhibition will present, for the first time in China, the robot Sorayama first drew for a whiskey advertisement in 1978; the legendary female-form robot that became the cover of an Aerosmith album; mechanical dinosaurs and unicorns; and his newest paintings and sculptures.
Tank Shanghai: Anna Uddenberg: Super Economy. On view March 2025. Anna Uddenberg, Super Economy, 2023–2024, installation view of “Unlimited,” Art Basel, 2024. Anna Uddenberg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1982 and now lives and works in Berlin. Her practice combines sculpture, installation, and performance to examine the ways body culture, spirituality, and self-presentation intersect with the circulation of new technologies.
Her work challenges traditional female identities and investigates performativity in consumer culture, using sculpture and performance as its primary media. The March exhibition at Tank Shanghai will be her first solo exhibition in Asia and will recreate Super Economy, the performance she presented in the “Unlimited” section at Art Basel in 2024. Deborah-Joyce Holman: Set. On view March 20–May 25. Deborah-Joyce Holman, Moment 2, 2022, commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Cordova Gallery, Barcelona, 2023. Holman is a nonbinary multidisciplinary artist, born in Basel in 1991 and now living in London and Basel.
Set is Holman’s first solo painting exhibition in Asia. It will present six recently made large-scale works. Holman’s work examines the opacity, illegibility, and absence of Black and queer antihegemonic positions, while exploring a range of media, including text, image-making, moving image, sculpture, and installation. Louise Giovanelli solo exhibition. On view November 2025. Louise Giovanelli, Here on Earth, installation view, White Cube Hong Kong, 2024; photograph by Kitmin Lee. Giovanelli was born in London, England, in 1993. She now lives and works in Manchester.
She graduated from Manchester School of Art with a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 2015, then earned a master’s degree from the Städelschule in Frankfurt in 2020. Giovanelli’s paintings are known for their refined, luminous style. They often feature intimate female faces and mysterious curtains; the women’s expressions may be ambiguous, pained, intense, or divine. Their vivid tones seize the viewer’s emotions at once, drawing one into a contemplative mode of looking.
Her exhibition at White Cube Hong Kong in early 2024 was one of the most highly praised shows during Basel week. A major solo exhibition of her work is currently on view at The Hepworth Wakefield. Yik Art Museum: Shay Frisch Peri: Halo. On view spring 2025. Shay Frisch Peri, exhibition view, ZAC Palermo, 2018. Shay Frisch Peri was born in Israel in 1963 and now lives and works in Rome.
His practice primarily assembles ordinary electrical adapters into electrical-field installations that interact with their surroundings. Peri’s work embodies central principles of Minimalism, probing the structural elements of painting and sculpture—light and space, for example—and materializing light to create spatial experiences that viewers can perceive. Francesco Vezzoli: Crying Divas. On view spring 2025. Francesco Vezzoli, Musei delle Lacrime, installation view, Museo Correr, Venice, 2024. Vezzoli was born in Brescia, Italy, in 1971 and is an artist and filmmaker.
He graduated from Central Saint Martins in London in 1995. Vezzoli uses film, performance, embroidery, and other media to explore celebrity worship, structures of power, and the relationship between history and popular culture. During the 2024 Venice Biennale, he revisited Renaissance masterpieces through the theme of tears; it was one of the most popular collateral exhibitions. His work has been shown at major international institutions including MoMA in New York, Tate Modern, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Kenny Scharf: Emotional. On view summer 2025. Kenny Scharf, “Earth,” solo exhibition view, Almine Rech Shanghai, 2021. Scharf was born in Hollywood, California, in 1958. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York in the 1970s and now lives and works in Los Angeles. His mentor was the celebrated Andy Warhol, and he was a “comrade” in New York’s East Village art movement of 1980 alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.
Scharf’s work is saturated with popular culture, borrowing cartoon figures from The Flintstones and The Jetsons, as well as imagined anthropomorphic characters. Francesco Clemente: Nomad Soul. On view autumn 2025. Francesco Clemente, “Flowers of Winter,” installation view, Lévy Gorvy Dayan Asia, 2023. Clemente was born in Naples, Italy, in 1952 and is known for his important role in the Neo-Expressionist and Transavantgarde movements.
In 1980, he moved to New York and collaborated with artists including Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat on a series of works. Clemente’s practice combines Surrealist and Expressionist approaches and addresses mythology, religion, sexuality, and self-exploration. His work has been exhibited at major institutions including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. HOW Art Museum: Yang Song solo exhibition. On view July 27–October 19, 2025. Yang Song, NGC362, 2024. Yang Song was born in Liaoning in 1987, graduated from the sculpture department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2013, and now lives and works in Beijing.
He grew up in Tieling, Liaoning. A tank unit was stationed on the hill behind his childhood home, and the soldiers once took him into the unit and let him play inside a real tank’s cockpit. That experience became the original memory behind the steel elements in his work. Wu Jian’an solo exhibition. On view July 27–October 19, 2025. Wu Jian’an, Tiger in Negative Space, 2022. Wu Jian’an was born in Beijing in 1980 and now lives and works mainly in Beijing. He is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
In 2017, Wu Jian’an represented China at the 57th Venice Biennale. His work is rich in elements from the East, drawing nourishment from folk craft and tales of the strange. He uses carving, paper-cutting, and shadow-puppet collage in his works. In recent years, he has focused on large-scale installations, using various materials, media, and artistic languages to connect nature and wildness, and the contemporary and the ancient. Yunchul Kim solo exhibition. On view November 1, 2025–March 15, 2026. Yunchul Kim, installation view at 798CUBE, Beijing, 2024. Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1970. An artist and electronic-music composer, he now lives and works in Seoul.
His practice encompasses installation, painting, sound, and text, incorporating mathematics, technology, music, philosophy, poetry, and cosmology. Through an investigation of “matter” and “materiality,” he seeks to create realities beyond existing human experience and to attend to their latent tendencies. In 2024, he held the large-scale solo exhibition Bipolar Ellipse: Affective Particle and Secretions of a Flux at 798CUBE in Beijing, the largest exhibition of his work to date.
Glass Museum: Antoni Muntadas solo exhibition. On view May 18, 2025. Antoni Muntadas, Look, See, Perceive, 2019. Muntadas was born in Barcelona in 1942 and moved to New York in the 1970s. He helped advance video art within the context of contemporary art and was also a pioneer of multimedia installation and urban intervention.
His work brings together interdisciplinary investigation and research in linguistics, history, anthropology, and sociology. Through collaborative research projects in different regions, he further weakens the limits imposed on artistic production by any single geography. chi K11 Art Museum: WISUT PONNIMIT: The Call I Missed. On view April 4–August 3, 2025. The artist WISUT PONNIMIT with his work. Wisut Ponnimit (วิศุทธิ์ พรนิมิตร) was born in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1976. Known as Tum or Tam, he is a cartoonist, animator, illustrator, and musician.
He is known for creating the comic character Mamuang, which is famous in both Thailand and Japan. His series of short comics, hesheit, was also among Thailand’s earliest alternative comics; some of it has been translated into English and Japanese. Hayley Barker solo exhibition. On view November 5, 2025–March 1, 2026. Hayley Barker, “Laguna Castle,” installation view, Night Gallery, 2023. Barker was born in Oregon in 1973 and now lives and works in Los Angeles.
Her paintings are known for delicate brushwork and rich color. She often depicts the natural landscapes and ordinary scenes around her, blending reality and dream to create a distinctive visual experience. Her work is held by major institutions including the Columbus Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Her exhibition at chi K11 will be her first in China. UCCA Center for Contemporary Art: Anicka Yi solo exhibition. On view March 22–June 15, 2025. Anicka Yi, “Another Evolution, or Being There,” installation view, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024; photograph by Andrea Rossetti. Yi was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1971 and now lives and works in New York City.
She is one of the most closely watched Asian artists of recent years. This exhibition is a traveling version of Another Evolution, or Being There, her 2024 exhibition at Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul. Her work may involve bacteria, scent, and organic, perishable materials such as tempura-fried flowers. Guided by emotion and motivation, scent moves through the air, microorganisms color the soil, and machines imitate insects or float overhead in the form of tentacled amoebas . . . The artist folds existential questions of life, death, and decay into her work, emphasizing the mutually beneficial coexistence of all forms of life.
Her work has entered numerous public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf, the Rubell Family Collection, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Pipilotti Rist solo exhibition. On view July 19–October 19, 2025. Pipilotti Rist, In the Circle, still, 2024. Rist was born in Grabs, Switzerland, in 1962 and now lives and works in Zurich.
Since the mid-1980s, Rist has become a major figure in the international art world, and her work has been widely exhibited around the globe. For this exhibition, she has created an entirely new video installation specifically for UCCA’s Great Hall and its Chinese audience. Its ecological-feminist concerns and its sensitivity to the Daoist view of nature and the interdependence of life will be present in the work. Visitors will experience the force of a “total art” that brings together moving image, installation, sculpture, and other media.
Yang Fudong solo exhibition. On view November 15, 2025–February 22, 2026. The Summer Palace, photographed around 1976; image provided by Yang Fudong Studio. Yang Fudong was born in Beijing in 1971 and graduated from the oil-painting department of the China Academy of Art. He is one of the most innovative and internationally acclaimed artists working in Chinese contemporary visual practice. This will be his most comprehensive institutional solo exhibition to date and will present the first part of his “Library Films Project.”
Drawing on his childhood in the rural outskirts of eastern Beijing, the project presents Yang Fudong’s cinematic narratives, in which past and present, public and private, are closely interwoven. Chen Ke solo exhibition. On view May 17–September 7, 2025. Chen Ke, Factory No. 1, 2024. Chen Ke was born in Sichuan Province in 1978. She earned a bachelor’s degree in oil painting from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2002 and a master’s degree there in 2005. She now lives and works in Beijing.
She is one of the women artists most sought after by collectors in China and abroad. From the cartoonlike little girls of her early work to the “Bauhaus Girls” series, begun in 2020 and still ongoing, Chen continually reshapes herself and different images of women through her own perceptions and memories. This exhibition will present the newest works in the series: nearly twenty paintings expressing her hopes for and imaginings of female heroes from that once-utopian moment.
Her work is held in public collections including the Voorlinden Museum in the Netherlands, the Uli Sigg Collection in Switzerland, the Frank-Suss Collection in the United Kingdom, Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and Long Museum in Shanghai. Liao Fei solo exhibition. On view May 17–September 7, 2025. Liao Fei, Partially Obscured Circle 4, 2022. Liao Fei was born in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, in 1981. He graduated from Shanghai Normal University in 2006 and now lives and works in Shanghai.
Liao Fei’s practice began with reflections on existence and doubts about the self, seeking through creative practice to approach “the essence of things.” This exhibition is his largest institutional solo show to date. It will systematically trace his early works, including “Unidirectional Sculpture” and “Generative Arrangement,” as well as the major lines of inquiry that continue today. Koki Tanaka solo exhibition. On view September 27, 2025–January 4, 2026. Koki Tanaka, production still from Migration and Destruction, 2024. Tanaka was born in Tochigi, Japan, in 1975 and now lives and works in Kyoto.
In 2000, Tanaka received a bachelor’s degree in art from Tokyo Zokei University; in 2005, he earned a master’s degree in art from Tokyo University of the Arts. His practice encompasses moving image, photography, site-specific installation, and interventionist projects. He is skilled at making visible the multiple contexts concealed within everyday actions and revealing their meanings. His early work centered on found objects and experimentally used ordinary things to explore how to escape the routines of daily life. This exhibition will systematically survey more than a decade of his practice, presenting dozens of works, including early installations and a completely new moving-image work shown for the first time.
Tanaka’s work is held by museums including M+ in Hong Kong, Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands. Red Brick Art Museum: Chiharu Shiota solo exhibition. On view March–August 2025, provisionally. Chiharu Shiota, “The Key in the Hand,” Japan Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2015; photograph by Sunhi Mang. Shiota was born in Kishiwada, Osaka Prefecture, Japan, in 1972 and now lives and works in Berlin.
She is known for large-scale installations woven from red and black thread. Using thread to connect herself with the outside world, she makes her inner life visible and creates astonishing spatial environments that explore stories of life and death, migration, home, identity, memory, and consciousness. For this exhibition, Shiota will create a series of new site-specific installations for the Red Brick galleries. Early video works and landmark pieces from every stage of her career will also be reviewed.
Song Art Museum: Huang Yishan solo exhibition. On view March 2025. Huang Yishan, Drawing a Circle, 2023. Huang Yishan was born in Shantou, Guangdong, in 1983 and earned a master’s degree from the oil-painting department of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2009. He is one of the most closely watched Chinese artists born in the 1980s. His work has moved from early realism to the later “Interior Theater” and “Painting within Painting,” and more recently to the “Toys” series, continually testing painting’s limits and changing how people understand and look at it.
Li Binyuan solo exhibition. On view June 2025. Li Binyuan, Three-Way Intersection, 2012. Li Binyuan was born in Hunan in 1985 and graduated from the sculpture department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. He is one of China’s most important performance artists. He uses bodily action as expression and video as record—sometimes absurd, sometimes mocking, sometimes darkly comic. Running naked, playing with fire, throwing firecrackers into a foul ditch . . . yet what he wants to express goes far beyond performance’s surface. The body is the medium, and the first site where the event occurs.
Zhang Xiaogang solo exhibition. On view September 2025. Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodline—Big Family No. 1, 1994. Zhang Xiaogang was born in Kunming, China, in 1958 and graduated from the oil-painting department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1982. He now lives and works in Beijing. He was among the first artists from mainland China to achieve enormous international prominence. His signature “Bloodline—Big Family” series set the first million-dollar record for Chinese contemporary art at Sotheby’s New York in 2006.
One of China’s best-known contemporary artists, he continues to work without pause, producing new paintings that record the era through disjointed narratives and blurred faces. Qiu Ruixiang solo exhibition. On view December 2025. Qiu Ruixiang, “Contact,” installation view, Platform China, 2021. Qiu Ruixiang was born in Shaanxi in 1980 and graduated from Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts in 2003. He now lives and works in Xi’an. His paintings tend toward subdued, even obscure colors, and most take two to three years to complete. Their heavy surfaces seem to have time congealed into them.
His subjects often come from everyday memories and passing moments, but he does not translate these sources directly. Instead, he cuts, distorts, and resets different images and symbols to construct a Wagnerian stage with an air of mystery and symbolism. Today Art Museum: Feng Tang, As a Flower, I Have Never Failed. On view March 22–June 2, 2025. Feng Tang, I Am a Cat, 2024. Feng Tang is perhaps best known as a writer, and many readers remember his pungent prose and explicit descriptions.
He began painting in ink after turning fifty, which gave him greater passion and vitality, as if he had returned to adolescence. Using a tribute to Feng Tang’s mother as its organizing thread, the exhibition examines a woman’s changing identities across the personal, familial, and social spheres and considers the beauty of women’s power in contemporary society. It presents 100 works from Ms. Liang Guilan’s collection, 166 paintings and calligraphic works by Feng Tang, and moving-image works made by Feng Tang and his mother.
Yit Art Center, Hangzhou Xixi: 20th-Century Chinese Oil Painting Collection. Opening March 21, 2025. Yit Art Center’s inaugural exhibition, “Autumn Waters Share the Sky,” installation view, 2024. In March, Yit Art Center plans to hold a collection exhibition of 20th-century Chinese oil painting in a Qing-dynasty residence in Wu Jia Wan, Hangzhou. The exhibition will present 66 oil paintings and works on paper, including classics by Sanyu, Fang Junbi, Lin Fengmian, Wu Dayu, Guan Liang, Xu Beihong, and Chen Junde.
The exhibition is intended to allow visitors to encounter the masters’ works unexpectedly inside the old residence and, amid silent gray bricks, drifting wood fragrance, and carved window screens, to sense the whispers of a changing century. Deji Art Museum, Nanjing: “Endless Motion and Stillness: Three Hundred Years of Floral Still Life,” renewed exhibition. On view in the second quarter of 2025. “Endless Motion and Stillness: Three Hundred Years of Floral Still Life,” installation view, Deji Art Museum, 2024. The museum’s collection and research are organized around floral still life. Since opening, the exhibition has continually been renewed, using the ancient dialogue between “motion” and “stillness” as its central axis. Through additions and adjustments to the works and an expanded narrative in the galleries, it further uses flowers to excavate the subtle, hidden connections running through three hundred years of art history.
This time, Deji Art Museum has supplemented and adjusted the works within its existing narrative structure, offering visitors a more varied range of artistic perspectives. Nanjing Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art: Li Ran solo exhibition. On view April 4–July 6, 2025. Li Ran, “Waiting to Happen,” installation view, Lisson Gallery, London, 2023; photograph by George Darrell. Li Ran was born in Hubei, China, in 1986 and graduated from the oil-painting department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2009.
He moved from Beijing to Shanghai in 2018 and continues to live and work there. The figures in Li Ran’s paintings have a distinctive visual language and often appear with “white eyes,” reflecting the complex relationship between contemporary Chinese society and individual identity. Through painting, moving image, installation, and other forms, his exhibitions combine reflections on historical memory, gender roles, cultural conflict, and related questions. Ding Liren: Chance Encounters. On view August 1–November 2, 2025. Ding Liren, Sun Wukong Battles the White-Bone Demon, 2016. The eminent contemporary painter Ding Liren was born in 1930 in Haimen Town, Taizhou, Zhejiang, into a prominent family whose home was a well-known gathering place for literary and artistic salons.
Ding Liren was both student and friend to Republican-era masters including Liu Haisu and Guan Liang. His media have ranged from painting and seals to African woodcarving, paper-cut collage, toy design, and furniture design. Now 95, he lives in Shanghai, where he paints, writes, and reads novels every day, keeping busier than many younger people. This exhibition will present work from every period of his career, including new pieces made after he turned 95. Julius von Bismarck solo exhibition. On view October 2025–February 2026. Julius von Bismarck, The Elephant in the Room, installation view, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, 2023; photograph by Roman März. Bismarck was born in Breisach am Rhein, Germany, in 1983, grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and now lives and works in Berlin and Switzerland.
His practice encompasses photography, video, installation, and performance, examining the relationship between human perception and the natural environment. This solo exhibition will present his newest installation and interactive works. He Art Museum: Nathanaëlle Herbelin solo exhibition. On view March 8–June 8, 2025. Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Ma grand-mère à son mariage/funérailles, 2022. Herbelin was born in Israel in 1989. She earned a master’s degree in fine art from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016 and has lived in Paris ever since.
In 2024, she held a major solo exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay and became the youngest artist to receive a solo exhibition there, attracting considerable international attention. Herbelin’s work centers on everyday life, family scenes, and intimate relationships. Close to lived experience, it uses quiet colors and soft, loose brushwork. This exhibition at He Art Museum is her largest solo exhibition to date and will include works made between July and September 2024, during a two-month residency at the museum with her husband and child.
Huang Baoying solo exhibition. On view March 13–June 22, 2025. Huang Baoying, Sometimes I Want to Become Invisible, 2021. Huang Baoying was born in Shenzhen, China, in 1997. She received a master’s degree in painting from Boston University in 2022 and now lives and works in New York. Her work invites viewers into the artist’s daily life: cups, flowers, books, houseplants, and other ordinary objects form an intimate space.
Huang Baoying seamlessly interweaves her personal experience of diaspora, representations of contemporary culture, and a melancholy resonant with recent collective social events. Mamma Andersson solo exhibition. On view June 15–August 31, 2025. Mamma Andersson, Coastline, 2021. Andersson was born in Luleå, northern Sweden, in 1962 and now lives and works in Stockholm.
Andersson is known for melancholic landscapes and interiors inspired by film stills, theatrical sets, and classical interior design. Her painting combines late-19th-century Nordic figurative painting, folk art, and contemporary elements. Through rich colors and distinctive compositions, she creates dreamlike, expressive atmospheres. Her work is held by major institutions around the world, including MoMA in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Dallas Museum of Art, and Moderna Museet in Sweden.
Tong Wenmin solo exhibition. On view June 22–August 31, 2025. Tong Wenmin, Waves, 2019; image provided by the artist and Blankspace. Tong Wenmin was born in Chongqing, China, in 1989. She graduated from the oil-painting department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2012 and is a closely watched Chinese contemporary performance artist whose performance practice has lasted more than 10 years. Her work is connected to nature: trees, waves, and the body seem to merge in her performances.
Making art is Tong Wenmin’s life, a series of profound adventures concerning the true self and the relationship between the self and the world. Jason Martin solo exhibition. On view June 28–October 7, 2025. Jason Martin, “The Everywhere Gesture,” installation view, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Marais, 2014. Martin was born on Jersey in the British Channel Islands in 1970. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1993, he became an important member of the Young British Artists and a close friend of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. He now lives and works between London and Portugal.
His practice builds a bridge between two and three dimensions. Paint accumulated on the canvas gives the image an extraordinary sculptural quality. He uses a comb-like tool of his own invention to work stripes of oil paint or acrylic gel across metal or Plexiglas surfaces. He has continually refined this method throughout his career. Qingdao West Coast Museum of Art: Zhao Gang solo exhibition. On view April–July 2025. Zhao Gang, “Carnivores,” installation view, Lisson Gallery, Beijing, 2024; photograph by Yang Hao. Zhao Gang was born in Beijing in 1961 and now lives and works between Beijing and New York.
He studied at the Maastricht Academy of Art, formerly the City Academy of Applied Arts in the Netherlands, in 1983; attended Vassar College in New York from 1984 to 1987; and earned a master’s degree in art from Bard College in New York in 1999. Zhao’s paintings often repeatedly depict still lifes, placing different meats, fruits and vegetables, wineglasses, and flowers in domestic settings. They convey the unsettled emotions of a life lived across the Netherlands, New York, Beijing, Sanya, and other places, giving form to his sense of dislocation and the ever-surging, leaping stream of feeling within him.
Zang Kunkun solo exhibition. On view August–September 2025. “Zang Kunkun: Screen Struggle,” installation view, Small·Qu Garden, Shanghai, 2024. Zang Kunkun was born in Qingdao in 1986 and is the first Chinese artist born in the 1980s to sign with a Swiss homegrown gallery. In his work, he attempts to deconstruct real-world symbols through artistic language, combining signs of poverty and wealth within the same image. With a teasing, joking tone, he considers ideology, cultural perception, consumerism, and alienation.
Zang’s work is held by numerous public art institutions and important private collectors, including M+ Museum of Visual Culture in Hong Kong, Long Museum in Shanghai, the Uli Sigg Collection, HOW Art Museum, MOCA Singapore, and Today Art Museum in Beijing. Christian Achenbach solo exhibition. On view August–September 2025. Christian Achenbach, “Kaleidoscope,” installation view, HANS ALF Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2018. Achenbach was born in Siegen, Germany, in 1978 and now lives in Berlin. He works in both painting and sculpture.
Inspired by the master Wassily Kandinsky, he incorporates musical elements into his images. Vivid colors, sharp geometric forms, and flowing lines resemble musical tones and rhythms; the interaction of color and form seems to produce an audible resonance. Each work is charged with energy. Rather than concentrating on a single focal point, it creates varied movement through intersecting shapes and lines. Ding Hongdan solo exhibition. On view November–December 2025. Ding Hongdan, Butterfly Flies to the Dinner Table, 2023. Ding Hongdan was born in Guangzhou, China, in 1995. She entered the affiliated high school of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2010 and studied in its oil-painting department from 2014 to 2021. She now lives and works in Beijing and is pursuing a doctorate at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. She was the winner of the second TAG·New Contemporary, organized by Qingdao West Coast Museum of Art.
Ding Hongdan’s paintings attend to the real lives and inner states of her peers under new realities, particularly young Chinese women. Using a realist approach, she presents contemporary young women’s multiple reflections on everyday life and social relationships. Hangzhou Tianmuli Art Museum: Wu Shanzhuan + Inga Svala Thorsdottir. On view November 2025. Inga Svala Thorsdottir and Wu Shanzhuan. Wu Shanzhuan was born in Zhoushan, China, in 1960. He graduated from the teacher-training department of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1986 and from the free-art department of the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. He is one of the representative artists of China’s “’85 New Wave.”
Inga Svala Thorsdottir was born in Iceland in 1966. She graduated from the painting department of the Iceland University of the Arts in 1991 and from the free-art department of the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. The two have collaborated since 1991 while continuing to work as independent authors. They live and work in Hamburg, Shanghai, and Iceland. Important artists in the history of conceptual art, Wu and Thorsdottir address a wide range of subjects, with flashes of insight and wit throughout their work.
The museum’s more than 2,000-square-meter exhibition space will be given over to these two artists, who have continued to collaborate in both work and life, gradually unfolding several interconnected lines of inquiry that they have pursued for decades.