In just over half a month, the Lunar New Year of 2026 will arrive. Over the year just past, Yitiao Art accompanied readers through many important exhibitions in China and abroad, from large institutional shows and academically inclined biennials and triennials to exhibitions of twentieth-century masters and presentations of new work by contemporary artists. As the holiday approaches, major museums are gradually unveiling their post-New Year plans. In 2026, what promising exhibitions will museums around the country have in store?
Which exhibitions are worth a special trip to another city? Come with us and open this year’s exhibition calendar in advance. Long Museum Echoes: Her Century: A Global Exhibition of Women Artists Dates: March 9, 2026-May 31, 2026 “Yang Bodu: Black Eagle, White Eagle,” installation view, Long Museum (West Bund), Shanghai, 2025 The Long Museum’s first exhibition of the spring season is “Echoes: Her Century: A Global Exhibition of Women Artists,” a tribute to women artists around the world. Drawing on outstanding work by about 200 women artists from more than twenty countries and regions, and spanning more than a century from the early twentieth century to the present, the exhibition sets out to write a hundred-year history of art that belongs to “them.”
The exhibition is both an echo of women pioneers’ search for the truth of art and an echo of Long Museum director Wang Wei’s call, made in 2016, to attend to women’s artistic achievements: “Understand what they have already accomplished, pay attention to what they are accomplishing, and advance what they hope to accomplish.” Wang Chuan: Forty Years of Abstraction Dates: May 30, 2026-August 23, 2026 “Wang Chuan: The Path of the Line,” installation view, A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu, 2024 The artist Wang Chuan was born in Chengdu in 1953.
After 1980 and 1981, Wang Chuan left behind the scar-art mode of Goodbye! Little Road and Survivor and gradually turned toward abstract painting: ink, installation, Minimalism, and, more recently, oil on canvas. It is fair to say that Wang Chuan is a “living fossil” of the development of Chinese contemporary art. From 1985 to the present, his career has run continuously through the turbulent forty-year history of transformation in Chinese contemporary art. This exhibition will, for the first time, offer a systematic account of the trajectory of his work, confirming from the perspective of art history that Wang Chuan not only witnessed the emergence of Chinese abstract art from nothing, but also, through sustained and searching exploration, built its inner spiritual system.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, with his highly pioneering “ink dots” and minimalist structures, he broke through the constraints of realist tradition and confronted the purity of modern form head-on. At the same time, his work on paper gradually turned toward a more spiritual ink practice, infusing black and white, presence and absence, with an introspective Eastern philosophical temperament. After a serious illness in middle age, he arrived at a deeper understanding of life, and his work came increasingly to disclose a search for the essence of being. The pictures grew more distilled and profound, as if, in the simplest lines and fields of color, they were asking after a truth of life beyond appearances.
Wallace Chan: Objects Beyond Worlds Dates: July 2026-October 2026 Wallace Chan, “Transcendence,” installation view, Santa Maria della Pieta, Venice, Italy, 2024 For the artist Wallace Chan, 2026 will be a banner year. In May 2026, his “Objects Beyond Worlds” will open as a collateral exhibition during the Venice Biennale in Italy, and in July the Long Museum will inaugurate another of his exhibitions in a two-city format.
This year marks Wallace Chan’s seventieth birthday, and the exhibition will be the largest of his career to date, presenting a series of new monumental titanium sculptures along with earlier works, fully extending the spatial and conceptual boundaries of his artistic practice. PSA Chimney Power Station of Art Liu Jianhua Solo Exhibition Date: November 2026 Liu Jianhua, “Climate,” installation view, Beijing Commune, 2025 Liu Jianhua is one of the most experimental, emblematic, and internationally renowned artists in Chinese contemporary art.
In the summer of 1975, Liu Jianhua arrived in Jingdezhen from Ji’an carrying a dream of “painting,” and began making work with ceramics as his medium. After moves through Yunnan and Shanghai, his work has entered major museums around the world. This exhibition at the PSA will be his largest in recent years and one of the major parallel exhibitions coinciding with Shanghai Art Week. Museum of Art Pudong “Carolina Caycedo: A Tribute to the Whales” Dates: February 12, 2026-February 21, 2027 Installation view of “A Tribute to the Whales,” 2026 “A Tribute to the Whales” marks another collaboration between the Museum of Art Pudong and Tate, following their 2024 project “El Anatsui: After the Red Moon,” commissioning Carolina Caycedo to create a site-specific work for the museum’s central hall.
“A Tribute to the Whales” takes as its models two real living humpback whales, Alia and Batman. Alia is a female humpback born in 2022. Batman is older: this giant male whale was first identified as an adult in 1988, which means he is now at least forty years old. The artist insisted on making the whale installation at full scale, resulting in the largest installation of her career to date. Through elaborate embroidery, beadwork, and textiles, she recreates the markings on their bodies, while transforming the central hall, roughly 34 meters high, into an immersive underwater territory, opening a portal between humans and “Batman” and “Alia” so that they might “appear” in the gallery and “tell” their own ocean stories.
At the same time, two major exhibitions at the Museum of Art Pudong, “Picasso for Asia: A Conversation” from the Musée national Picasso-Paris and “The Wonders of Pattern” from the Louvre, will remain on view through May 2026. Yuz Museum Liu Ren + Zhang Ruyi Two-Person Exhibition Dates: March 20, 2026-June 20, 2026 Zhang Ruyi, “Where Is Supposed to Be,” installation view, Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2019 Both Liu Ren and Zhang Ruyi were born in Shanghai, where they grew up and where they live and work.
Since graduating together in 2007 from the Printmaking Department of the Fine Arts College at Shanghai University, they have become not only partners in life but artists who place art at the center of that life, each pursuing distinct artistic languages, materials, and paths of making. Zhang Ruyi uses film, cement, cactus spines, and other materials to build a visual grammar at once austere and poetic, capturing the hidden structures in urban space where order and fragility coexist. Liu Ren, by contrast, uses straw paper, eggshells, and transformed found objects to create floating, fragile narrative fields, exploring the fluidity of technology, knowledge, memory, and everyday things in contemporary society, and suggesting the vulnerability of the individual and the impermanence of life.
Within galleries reconstructed by grids, the two artists’ works form a dialogue that is light yet dense, like the coexistence of individuals in a city: connected to one another, yet always retaining their own time zones and traces. The exhibition will concentrate on the past decade of work by these two Shanghai artists, while using their cases to observe modern urban existence, emotional expression, and individual thought. Tank Shanghai Grace Schwindt: “A Boxer’s Dream” Dates: March 21, 2026-July 5, 2026 Documentation of a past performance by Grace Schwindt This exhibition is the German artist Grace Schwindt’s first in Asia.
Born in Germany in 1979, she now lives and works in London. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, painting, performance, video, and installation. The exhibition sets out to explore the relationship between human beings and nature, and to advocate for a deeply interwoven connection between people and the natural world. Using plants and animals as a way of approaching history has become one of Schwindt’s key strategies for probing our inseparable bond with nature, and the exhibition will also include improvised performances.
Powerlong Museum André Evard Solo Exhibition Dates: June 2026-September 2026 André Evard solo exhibition, Messmer Foundation, Riegel, 2022 André Evard (1876-1972) was one of Switzerland’s earliest concrete artists. He is regarded as a pioneer of Constructivist art and also as an early representative of Surrealism.
His work is noted for its versatility, strong use of color, and clearly geometric forms. In 2026, which marks the 150th anniversary of Evard’s birth, the exhibition will present more than one hundred works surveying the full richness of his life’s work. Shen Ling Solo Exhibition Dates: November 2026-December 2026 Shen Ling, Dusk, 2021 Shen Ling is one of the best-known women artists in Chinese contemporary art.
She excels at using intense color and brings to everyday life an almost obsessive attentiveness. Whether in the ardor of the body or the pleasures of the heart, she is able to convey feeling through pure color with unabashed force; every detail and passing moment seems to glow with imaginative energy and expressive desire. This exhibition will be Shen Ling’s first museum-scale solo show in many years, curated by Cui Cancan. Shen Ling is attentive to the observation and understanding of life and the processes of living, using art to express life and to express love.
In this exhibition, Shen Ling will bring her freedom and radiance to Shanghai through a series of works. Fosun Foundation Shanghai Shen Chen Solo Exhibition Dates: May 14, 2026-June 20, 2026 “Shen Chen: Recent Works,” installation view, de Sarthe, 2026 Shen Chen, born in Shanghai in 1955, is one of the important early figures in abstract painting and experimental ink in China in the 1980s, and a representative artist in the deep fusion of Eastern aesthetics and Western contemporary form.
He went to the United States for further study in the 1980s, and since the 1990s has worked between New York and Shanghai, using a cross-cultural perspective to explore the relationship among material, time, and the act of painting. He is one of the Chinese artists with the most sustained influence in contemporary abstract art. Shen Chen’s work is known for the “repetition of brushstrokes,” the “layering of color fields,” and the “fluidity of time.” From his early experimental ink works to his later restrained abstract constructions in acrylic on canvas, he has continuously transformed the spirit of traditional ink painting into a new contemporary visual language.
Eddie Martinez Solo Exhibition Dates: November 2026-December 2026 Eddie Martinez, “To Be Continued,” installation view, Space K, Seoul, South Korea, 2024 Born in 1977, Eddie Martinez is a contemporary artist active in Brooklyn, New York, known for combining the energy of street culture with the tradition of Abstract Expressionism. Drawing inspiration from graffiti vocabularies, everyday symbols, and figurative imagery, he builds a distinct visual language on canvas through brushwork that is fast, direct, and forceful, and is one of the most closely watched rising figures in international contemporary painting.
Martinez’s work is known for strong color, rough lines, and the layering of multiple media, juxtaposing oil paint, spray paint, acrylic, and drawing to create a tensile structure between abstraction and figuration. He is an artist of focused interest to galleries and museums around the world and commands intense attention on the international market. UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Carsten Höller Solo Exhibition Dates: June 6, 2026-October 11, 2026 Carsten Höller and Attilio Maranzano, Torrevada. One Foot in the Door, 2011 Carsten Höller, who holds a doctorate in agricultural science, often approaches art with the cast of mind of a scientist, turning the exhibition space into what he calls a “laboratory of doubt.”
In his work, he combines the rigor of scientific experiment with interactive forms that are playful or disquieting, prompting viewers to reconsider how they perceive the world, themselves, and others. Whether through slides spiraling through exhibition halls, goggles that invert visual orientation, or immersive environments manipulating light, sound, and space, his works often produce experiences that are surprising, pleasurable, even dizzying. These experiences break with habitual patterns of perception, creating openings for reflection on human behavior and consciousness, and laying down a subtle tension between belief and doubt.
The UCCA exhibition will present a series of Höller’s representative works, including new pieces created especially for the Beijing venue. Duan Jianyu Solo Exhibition Dates: May 1, 2026-August 30, 2026 Duan Jianyu, A Good Fellow, 2017 Duan Jianyu is a representative painter of China’s middle generation of contemporary artists. Her painting has a singular character, testing the complexities of aesthetics through an easy touch and color.
Her work often begins from a grassroots perspective, carrying an optimistic spirit and a comic imagination into the work of undoing a complex and heavy reality. Through narrative, she disrupts the established and stable order between discourse and image, exploring the encounters and interactions among pictorial elements across different times and spaces, and using wit to handle the visual and cultural symbols distinctive to the collective memory of several generations. This exhibition will be Duan Jianyu’s first institutional solo show in Beijing, surveying important series from the past decade and presenting multiple new works.
John Baldessari Solo Exhibition Dates: September 19, 2026-January 3, 2027 John Baldessari, Studio, 1987, image courtesy of the John Baldessari Estate Born in 1931, John Baldessari was a leading figure in American Conceptual art. Over the course of his life’s work, he continuously explored the relationships among image and text, narrative and meaning, profoundly reshaping the possibilities of contemporary art.
Trained first as a painter, he burned most of his early paintings in 1970 in The Cremation Project, turning from the practice of traditional painting toward more conceptual paths involving photography, film stills, video, performance, and collaboration. As a pioneering teacher at the California Institute of the Arts, he exerted deep influence on several generations of artists through his course “Post-Studio Art.”
This exhibition will be Baldessari’s first major solo show in China, comprehensively surveying fifty years of artistic practice: from early experiments with text and image and the playfully minded video works of the 1970s to the film-image collages of the 1980s, his psychological explorations of perception, and the late wall works that returned to color, blankness, and space. Red Brick Art Museum Fu Rao Solo Exhibition Dates: March 21, 2026-June 21, 2026 Fu Rao, The River of Long Life, 2025-2026 The Germany-based artist Fu Rao was born in Beijing in 1978. After suspending his studies at the Academy of Arts & Design of Tsinghua University in 2000, he went on to study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in Germany. That choice began an artistic journey shaped by reflection across Eastern and Western cultures, and established the enduring tension within his work: reason and feeling, order and freedom, structure and poetry. Painting became his way of responding to the world, and also the point of departure from which, in continual movement and reflection, he sought a spiritual place of dwelling for himself.
This large solo exhibition at Red Brick Art Museum will present more than seventy works made since 2006, including Fu Rao’s large triptych series “Ten-Part Composition,” inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin’s phrase “to dwell poetically upon the earth,” using visual language to explore the inner connections among human beings and the world, matter and spirit, life and death. Tesfaye Urgessa Solo Exhibition Dates: March 21, 2026-June 21, 2026 Tesfaye Urgessa, Mother 2, 2025 Tesfaye Urgessa was born in Ethiopia in 1983 and now lives and works between Addis Ababa and Europe.
The exhibition surveys his practice since 2020 and includes more than sixty works. It is Urgessa’s first exhibition in Asia and also his first major international solo exhibition since representing Ethiopia at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Bringing together the artist’s deep reflections on individual and collective memory, the experience of migration, and questions of identity, it also includes paintings that confront the realities of conflict and displacement.
Urgessa’s themes respond to the tangled relations between questions of race and the politics of identity. SONG Art Museum Qin Qi Solo Exhibition Date: March 2026 Qin Qi, Queen of the Night, 2018 SONG Art Museum will welcome a solo exhibition by Qin Qi in March. Qin Qi’s work carries a feeling in which the real and the absurd intersect, like a series of stories full of implication and humor. As Wang Min’an has written: “The figures in these paintings are not placed within a rational, finite, realistic scene, but within an infinite surreal scene, a dreamlike space, and that space further intensifies the sense that the figures are performing.”
“The figures themselves and the surrounding space are joined in a strangely heterogeneous graft.” Yang Maoyuan Solo Exhibition Date: March 2026 Yang Maoyuan, 1999 No.3, 1999 In June, SONG Art Museum will present a solo exhibition by Yang Maoyuan. One of the most representative artists in Chinese contemporary art, Yang Maoyuan works across sculpture, installation, painting, photography, and video.
“Xinjiang” is a label that never quite leaves his work, but his art is not only about Xinjiang; it is more like a nomadic passage through ancient civilization. Zhou Chunya Solo Exhibition Date: March 2026 Zhou Chunya, Brocade Clouds Across a Thousand Miles, 2012 The next major exhibition, in September, will present work by Zhou Chunya. It will also be one of Zhou Chunya’s largest museum solo exhibitions in recent years, and is well worth anticipating. Yitiao Art Center (Hangzhou) Wang Yuping: Late-Morning Sleep-2026 Dates: March 5, 2026-June 30, 2026 “Wang Yuping 2024,” installation view, Shanghai Powerlong Museum, 2024 Wang Yuping, born in Beijing in 1962, graduated in 1989 from the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He now lives and works in Beijing, where he is both a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and a professional artist.
Wang Yuping draws inspiration from everyday life, using sketching to attend to the minor matters of ordinary people and depicting life in a plainspoken, grounded idiom. His work may at first seem loose and casual, yet it renders things with vividness and vitality, full of the atmosphere of lived experience. The exhibition will present representative works from Wang Yuping’s past as well as new paintings made on the streets of Shanghai in 2025. HE ART MUSEUM (Shunde) Yan Pei-Ming Solo Exhibition Dates: first half of 2026 Yan Pei-Ming, Triple Self-Portrait, 2020, “Confronting Gaze,” installation view, 2025 Yan Pei-Ming is a noted French Chinese contemporary artist.
He now lives and works in Dijon and Paris, France. Yan Pei-Ming is known for expressive large-scale portrait paintings. His works generally use black or red as a monochrome dominant tone, with rough, bold brushwork, and he has been described as “one of the Chinese portrait painters with the greatest international influence.” Yan Pei-Ming was the first living contemporary artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Louvre, and his work is in the permanent collections of major institutions including the Louvre Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong’s M+. Per Kirkeby Solo Exhibition Dates: first half of 2026 Per Kirkeby, The Advance in the Harbor, 2005 Per Kirkeby solo exhibition Per Kirkeby, born in Copenhagen in 1938, was one of the most outstanding artists of the contemporary era.
Kirkeby was not only a painter, sculptor, and filmmaker, but also a writer, and these gifts shaped the richness and singularity of his art. During his participation in the Fluxus movement and his studies at the Experimental Art School in Copenhagen, Kirkeby studied geology and was deeply influenced by expeditions to Greenland and Mexico, experiences that placed nature at the core of his work. His art revolves around themes such as landscape, sediment, and strata, establishing a dialogue between nature and abstraction, landscape and architecture.
Guangdong Times Museum Rebecca Horn: Here and Now, Not Yet Dates: March 21, 2026-August 9, 2026 “Butterfly Shadow: In Memory of Rebecca Horn,” installation view, Chuishe YUNJI, 2024-25 On September 6, 2024, Rebecca Horn died in Bad König, Germany, at the age of eighty. Through a lifetime of sustained work, this global artist revealed the intricate connections between “body sculpture” and the cultural field, and carried out subtle, careful dissections of the grand and minute narratives of contemporary art history.
Horn was an important figure in the first postwar wave of new art in Germany. Across a career spanning four decades, from the 1970s to the mid-2010s, she offered a distinct response, from a woman’s perspective, to Surrealism and Conceptual art, placing her work in relation to poetry, theater, film, music, space, architecture, and a broad range of other artistic forms, with profound consequences for the art world of the present and the future. The exhibition presents works from different periods, including documentation of early performance art, films, sculptures, and other cross-media creations.
At the core of the exhibition is performativity, both as a method of making and as a mode of perception. UCCA Dune Art Museum, Beidaihe Yang Xinguang Solo Exhibition Dates: April 19, 2026-October 11, 2026 Yang Xinguang, detail from the “Warrior” series, 2023 Yang Xinguang’s work draws inspiration from a sustained attention to earth and withered plants. He often intervenes in these natural materials, on the verge of “disappearing,” with artificial materials such as steel bars and paint, deliberately interrupting their natural processes of decay and life cycle, and thus generating a new kind of landscape.
This new landscape is like a distilled contemporary fable of human action upon the natural world, and also like a posthuman specimen preserving nature’s present tense. The exhibition will present the main threads of Yang Xinguang’s recent practice, focusing on series centered on earth and plants, extending and advancing experiments from works such as “Above the Soil,” “Spring Wind,” and “Warrior” across different spaces, while also showing several newly created works. Katie Paterson Solo Exhibition Dates: October 25, 2026-April 11, 2027 Katie Paterson, Vatnajokull (the sound of), 2007-08 Born in 1981, Katie Paterson is a Scottish artist known for an interdisciplinary, conceptually driven practice focused on nature, ecology, geology, and cosmology.
Working with scientists, she uses precise technologies to carry out poetic, philosophical experiments in art, exploring humanity’s place within geological time and on the scale of the cosmos. Katie Paterson has broadcast the sound of melting glaciers live, mapped all dead stars, assembled a slide archive of dark matter from deep space, made light bulbs that simulate the experience of moonlight, and even sent a recast meteorite back into space. Paterson’s work evokes an emotion akin to the Romantic sublime: humility, wonder, and a deep melancholy, modest in manner yet vast in implication.
This exhibition will be the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in China, presenting 16 installation works and 2 performance works by Katie Paterson. In addition, she will create a water-mist kinetic installation specifically for Gallery 7 of UCCA Dune Art Museum, tracing, in its movements, the primal rhythms of flow, condensation, and dispersal.