November brings Shanghai’s annual art season once again, and this year it can be described as stable, with measured change. From November 13 to 16, the West Bund Art & Design fair will use its new diamond-shaped main venue for the first time, while ART021 remains at the Shanghai Exhibition Center. The 15th Shanghai Biennale, “Does the Flower Hear the Bee?,” arrives on schedule, and major museums across the city are rolling out large-scale exhibitions, radiating outward from the West Bund toward the Bund.
In November, new exhibitions are opening at the Long Museum West Bund, the Long Museum, Tank Shanghai, Fosun Foundation, Jiushi Art Museum, the Rockbund Art Museum, Yuz Museum, and other institutions. We have also noticed a shift in identity among collectors. Collectors once most visible at fairs and galleries have, in recent years, taken on new roles: founders of foundations, directors of art spaces and salons, producers of exhibitions, even curators.
For them, the cooling art market has only deepened the conviction that a love of art can outlast any cycle. At the West Bund fair grounds; Lin Tianmiao, “Nothing Happened! - Lin Tianmiao Solo Exhibition,” installation view, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2025. Meanwhile, after the West Bund gallery cluster was effectively dispersed, many of Shanghai’s galleries have turned up, singly or in loose groups, across the city: in the M50 district, in small houses in the plane-tree neighborhoods, in Suhe Haus at Suhewan, around Huqiu Road in Pudong, and even in the former site of a primary school in Huangpu District.
We have selected a list of essential stops for the season, a way of taking measure, in this still relatively mild winter, of where the art world now seems to be heading. “Allora & Calzadilla: Transplant (Phantom Tree),” installation view, Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, 2025-2026; photograph by Sebastiano Pellion di Persano; courtesy of the artists and Pinacoteca Agnelli. Power Station of Art, Shanghai: the 15th Shanghai Biennale, Does the Flower Hear the Bee?
Dates: November 8, 2025-March 31, 2026. On November 8, the 15th Shanghai Biennale, “Does the Flower Hear the Bee?,” opens as scheduled at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai. The exhibition brings together more than 250 works by 67 artists and groups from China and around the world. The title may sound abstract, but its point is concrete: just as flowers can be said to “hear” the beating wings of bees, we should consider nonhuman forms of intelligence, including A.I., alongside human intelligence, and explore the meeting points among different modes of thought.
Lin Tianmiao, “Nothing Happened! - Lin Tianmiao Solo Exhibition,” installation view, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, 2025. The museum is also presenting Lin Tianmiao’s largest solo exhibition to date, “Nothing Happened!” The show includes more than forty representative works and groups of works from different periods, tracing and restaging the artist’s career over more than three decades. Yang Bodu, At the Museum 10:19, 2025. Long Museum West Bund: Yang Bodu, Black Eagle, White Eagle. Dates: November 13, 2025-January 11, 2026. Yang Bodu’s latest solo exhibition, “Black Eagle, White Eagle,” curated by Cui Cancan, presents more than thirty paintings and installations.
This post-80s woman artist was born in Tianjin in 1986, received her B.A. from the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts in 2008, and her M.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2012. Painting is the central thread of her practice. She depicts architectural spaces in museums, art museums, and other cultural institutions, folding these man-made structures into natural imagery such as grottoes, caves, and jungles to construct abstract, spacious, idealized narratives of space.
Guan Yinfu, Present Continuous, 2024. Also opening concurrently are Guan Yinfu: 2718kg and a selection of notable works by artists from the 1910s to the 1960s, curated by director Wang Wei. The artist Wallace Chan’s newest monumental titanium sculpture series, Realm of Beings, includes Birth, a sculpture seven meters high, which will stand in the outdoor plaza of the Long Museum West Bund from November 7 for a limited ten-day display.
West Bund Museum: Accident! Fluxus! Dates: September 26, 2025-February 22, 2026. “Accident! Fluxus!” is part of the West Bund Museum’s five-year exhibition collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, and one of the year’s major museum shows. The first large-scale exhibition in China to survey Fluxus comprehensively and systematically, it draws on more than 200 works from the Pompidou’s collection to trace the movement in full, from its spiritual sources and development to its creative core, while placing it in distant dialogue with the work of many important Chinese contemporary artists.
The exhibition includes major works by key figures connected to Dada and Fluxus: Marcel Duchamp, often called the father of conceptual art; George Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus; Joseph Beuys, the theorist of “social sculpture”; Yoko Ono, a pioneer of feminist art; Man Ray, a forerunner of modern photography; La Monte Young, associated with minimalist music; and George Brecht, a central figure in event-based art. It also includes a number of works paying tribute to John Cage, the revolutionary of avant-garde music, as well as works by artists such as Lucio Fontana, founder of Spatialism, whose ideas resonated with Fluxus.
Xiao Jiang, Twilight Pine Woods at Dusk, 2025. Tank Shanghai: Xiao Jiang, The One Who Looks at Scenery; Jean-Marie Appriou, Cosmic Clock; Tang Yongxiang, A Group of People, A Tree, Some Feet. Dates: November 11, 2025-February 8, 2026. Tank Shanghai is opening three exhibitions at once. Some of the works in Xiao Jiang’s solo show, “The One Who Looks at Scenery,” grew out of his stay in the United States this year. Compared with the more generalized mountain views he had previously distilled from memory and photographs, these landscapes are more specific and closer to the immediacy of plein-air observation.
Tang Yongxiang, There Are Several Arms in the Middle, 2025. Tang’s exhibition also presents new works that continue his characteristic method of repeatedly painting over his own canvases: every day he enters the studio and, using a prescribed set of brushstrokes and colors, covers the painting at the point where it was “paused” the day before. The French artist Jean-Marie Appriou, a sculptor adept with aluminum, bronze, glass, clay, and wax, has created, beneath Tank Shanghai’s signature circular dome, a “celestial clock” composed of multiple sculptures.
Yuz Museum installation view, 2025. Yuz Museum: Choe U-Ram: Odyssey. Dates: November 15, 2025-March 1, 2026. This is the Korean artist Choe U-Ram’s first institutional exhibition in China, and it includes monumental mechanical installations. Focusing on more than thirty years of his career, the show centers on representative works in kinetic sculpture and mechanical aesthetics. Since holding his first solo exhibition in 1998, Choe has presented many solo shows in Korea, Japan, the United States, Turkey, and elsewhere.
Julio Anaya, Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Weeping Woman, 2023. Jiushi Art Museum: A Sudden Way of Seeing - Julio Anaya Solo Exhibition. Dates: November 13, 2025-February 22, 2026. Born in Malaga in 1987 and trained at the University of Malaga’s Faculty of Fine Arts, Julio Anaya is one of the more distinctive young figures in contemporary Spanish art. Rejecting costly traditional materials, he has long worked on discarded cardboard, old skateboards, broken plasterboard, and other everyday waste, using precise reconstruction and delicate brushwork to reinterpret canonical works by Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh, and others.
He remakes Picasso’s Weeping Woman on broken cardboard, letting the cracks in the material extend the painting’s emotional tension; he crumples the ordered plane of Malevich’s Red Square to question the permanence of form; and on the frame of Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait Dedicated to Gauguin, he carves exuberant flowers, drawing attention to the material boundary of the artwork itself. This exhibition presents more than fifty works and also includes new pieces made during his Shanghai residency in 2025.
Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks, launched in Kassel, Germany, in 1982. HOW Art Museum Shanghai: Beuys in China: 2013-2025 Retrospective. Dates: November 11, 2025-August 31, 2026. Joseph Beuys, 1921-1986, was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His ideas of “social sculpture” and “everyone is an artist” continue to reshape how art is understood, and in the 1980 generation of Chinese contemporary artists he became an important conceptual precursor.
HOW Art Museum was the first museum in China to collect, study, and promote Joseph Beuys systematically. It was also the museum that first presented a Beuys exhibition in China, in 2013. “Beuys in China: 2013-2025 Retrospective” traces the museum’s twelve-year relationship with Beuys, extending and renewing a cross-temporal dialogue with him. Pope.L, Du Bois Machine, 2013, courtesy of the Pope.L Estate and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai: The Great Camouflage; Peng Zuqiang: Some Refrains, Silences, and Opaque Voices. Dates: November 6, 2025-April 26, 2026. “The Great Camouflage” examines the material and aesthetic circulation of transnational Black radical thought and the boundaries of revolutionary politics.
The exhibition title is drawn from the Caribbean writer Suzanne Cesaire’s collection of the same name, The Great Camouflage.
“Some Refrains, Silences, and Opaque Voices” is the artist Peng Zuqiang’s first institutional solo exhibition in Asia. Its central work is a newly commissioned three-channel video installation, Scatter, 2025, inspired by the 8.75-millimeter film format that circulated only in China from the 1960s through the 1980s; another video installation, Qingyuan, 2022, touches on a clandestinely operated underground radio station in Malaya and the rumors surrounding it. Exterior of the West Bund International Convention and Exhibition Center, 2025. West Bund International Convention and Exhibition Center: 2025 West Bund Art & Design. Dates: November 13-16, 2025. This year’s fair will be held there from November 13 to 16.
The newest main venue, diamond-like in form, was designed by the American architectural firm SOM. Together with four other distinct sites, the West Bund Dome Art Center, the West Bund Art Center, GATE M West Bund Dream Center-Dream Hall, and the West Bund Spiral Heart, it will host the fair. Nearly 200 leading exhibitors, from 22 countries and 48 cities and regions, will present major works of contemporary art across generations.
Thirty galleries from Europe, Asia, and the Americas will participate for the first time. ART021, installation view from a previous edition, Shanghai Exhibition Center. ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. Dates: November 13-16, 2025. As in past years, ART021 returns to the Shanghai Exhibition Center from November 13 to 16, bringing together 141 galleries and projects from 22 countries and regions and 50 cities.
This year’s ART021 SHANGHAI is organized into five carefully planned sections: the Main Galleries sector, APPROACH, DETOUR, the BEYOND public sector, and Special Projects. One of the most notable works on view is Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Lover), presented at the fair by the Cc Foundation. Gonzalez-Torres lived from 1957 to 1996.
JR, Ballet, Looking at the Roof of the Palais Garnier, Paris, France, 2014; image courtesy of the artist and Perrotin. Perrotin Shanghai: JR, Ballets de la Vie. Dates: November 12-December 23, 2025. Perrotin’s Shanghai space will present a new solo exhibition by the well-known French artist JR, whose work spans photography and collage. The exhibition consists of a large photographic installation running through the gallery and twenty selected photographs made over the past decade.
Most of these works focus on ballet dancers: they leap out of the theater and appear in streets and alleys, pass through shipyards, and even walk across the Paris skyline.
“Resonance Paintings - Water Lilies: Normandy Impressionist Festival,” installation view, Rouen, France, May 23-July 21, 2024. Almine Rech Shanghai: Oliver Beer, Three Scenes of Water Lilies. Dates: November 12, 2025-January 10, 2026. Almine Rech’s Shanghai gallery will present its third solo exhibition of Oliver Beer. Here, Beer stages a dialogue across time with Monet.
After an ongoing eighteen-month experiment, his first triptych, Resonance Paintings - Water Lilies, emerged in 2024: sixteen resonant tones issue from speakers placed beneath a horizontal canvas, setting sixteen powdered pigments on its surface into a dance at once pure and endlessly variable. Sounds recorded at the lake surface from time to time, as if Monet’s aging hand still wished to hold the brush of the present, adding a natural disorder to the subtle order that Oliver summons through the canvas.
Zhao Gang, Empty Chair, 2025, courtesy of Zhao Gang and Lisson Gallery. Lisson Gallery Shanghai: Zhao Gang, The Basterd Gentry - Act I: Shadow. Dates: November 12, 2025-spring 2026. This November, Lisson Shanghai, the ASE Foundation, and the 185 Space at the Bund Art Center are jointly presenting Zhao Gang’s exhibition project “The Basterd Gentry.” Conceived by the independent curator Yuan Jiawei, the project extends Zhao’s persistent explorations of landscape, portraiture, and still life into a trilogy unfolding alongside Shanghai’s art season.
The first act, “Shadow,” is on view at Lisson Shanghai. Duan Jianwei, Crossing the River, 2025. Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghai: Duan Jianwei, The Third Narrator. Dates: November 12-December 16, 2025. Hive’s Shanghai space on the Bund is presenting Duan Jianwei’s solo exhibition “The Third Narrator,” which uses narrative as a thread to gather and reconsider more than ten new oil paintings from the past two years.
The paintings on view here are all marked by narrative qualities, much like Duan Jianwei’s earlier work. Artist Dong Bingqing in performance. Longlati Foundation: Dong Bingqing, Extra Episode. Dates: November 11-November 26, 2025. Dong Bingqing, an artist born in 1994, is presenting a two-week experimental painting-performance project, “Extra Episode,” at the Longlati Foundation during this year’s art season.
The project spans video, painting, and live making, with multiple threads unfolding at once to form a pre-narrative experiment for the artist’s later stage and moving-image work. At its center is the live production of the artist’s large-scale storyboard paintings, set in dialogue with the 2024 prologue film Don’t Talk to Paula. Its intense yet romantic visual language extends the private state of painting into a public field of action.
Zhang Fengyuan, Bubble, 2025. Capsule Shanghai: Zhang Fengyuan, Endless Temptation. Dates: November 8-December 24, 2025. Capsule Shanghai, on Anfu Road in the plane-tree district, is presenting “Endless Temptation,” a solo exhibition by the New York-based artist Miranda Fengyuan Zhang. The exhibition marks the first formal public presentation of her sculpture. In a series of ceramic works, a right foot with a shortened big toe is cast from the body of one of the artist’s former lovers; the human foot merges with a fishtail.
Floating blue bubbles link a sequence of textile works on the wall, each with a different appearance: small and muted, full and gleaming, pixelated or shattered into fragments. They recall the ending of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, when the little mermaid steps onto land in agony and is finally transformed into foam.
“Artists Treat,” opening view, 2025. Hole Hol and ShanghART project group exhibition: Artists Treat. Location: former Lagena Primary School site, at the intersection of Pu’an Road and Taicang Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai. Dates: November 6-18, 2025. For art week, Hole Hol and ShanghART have launched an unusually distinctive project, “Artists Treat.” Spread across five floors of the former school building, it consists of twelve independent exhibitions: “No More Seats,” “Notify the Gods,” “Painter 3,” “Boundary Line,” “Making Sentences With Not,” “Still Not Quite Right,” “Good Things,” “Hall Wind: Not True Calligraphy,” “Rolling,” “In the Wind,” “Between Sand and the Sound of Water,” and “Pulling Chestnuts From the Fire.”
Artists are no longer only makers; they can also be curators, organizers, founders of institutions, even catalysts for a broader cultural practice. DOKU, Creator DOKU - Twelve Links of Dependent Origination, 2025. BANK SOCIETY: group exhibition In Dreams; Olivia Jia, Nocturne. Dates: November 11-December 6, 2025. BANK SOCIETY, on the fifth floor of the white building in the former residence of Ho Tung, will present two exhibitions during the season: “In Dreams,” a group show featuring dozens of active young artists and organized around artistic practices related to dreams, and Olivia Jia’s solo exhibition, “Nocturne.”
Through the quiet, introspective atmosphere of nighttime, Olivia Jia explores the reconstruction and representation of memory. Born into a Chinese American family in the United States, Jia draws on the meeting of different cultures and on the collision between family memory and personal experience. In this group of works, she returns to a restrained nocturnal palette of blue, gray, and violet, like moonlight or dim artificial light, to describe subtle gradations between waking and dream.
In the group show, the electronic artist DOKU The Creator, along with Wang Rui, Wen Jue, Geng Yini, Gong Hengzhi, Laure Prouvost, Wang Yuyan, Michael Najjar, Jiang Cheng, Sun Yitian, Laurent Grasso, Zheng Qinghe, Gaston Bachelard, and Zhang Yibei, each interpret the unreality and mutability of dreams in their own way. Radyi Chyuchman, Endless Light of Care, 2025. Antenna Space: Radyi Chyuchman, Wood Snake. Dates: November 12, 2025-January 10, 2026. Antenna Space is presenting Chyuchman’s first solo exhibition in China, “Wood Snake,” inviting viewers into an unseen ecology.
The idea asks us to understand, from a wider and more humble vantage, the nature of our interconnection with countless systems, and to reckon with the complexity and unseen variety within them. Through seventeen new paintings and a sequence of ever-changing sculptures, the artist both resists forms of human experience increasingly shaped by urbanization and works within a threshold space between direct perception and multiple relative experiences.
In Chinese zodiac cosmology, the Wood Snake signifies transformation and growth; it carries qualities of creativity and precision, supple and mysterious. “As I did when I was a child, I drew sticks as snakes. Later, when I learned that this year is the year of the Wood Snake, I suddenly felt it was an ultimate form of representation: they poke their heads from holes and appear without end amid the world’s ten thousand things,” the artist said. Sun Yitian, Bullfight, 2020. totalab + ZiWU: NOV. 10, 2001, the twenty-sixth day of the ninth lunar month in the year of Xinsi. Dates: November 10-December 7, 2025. The exhibition NOV. 10, 2001 is produced by the young collector Ren Xiang and curated by Yuan Jiawei.
Using works by artists from China’s Generation Z as case studies, the exhibition revisits the decisive historical moment of November 10, 2001, when China entered the W.T.O., as a way of entering the layered texture of China’s modernization and its dialectical entanglement with modernity itself. At the same time, it reveals the turbulent vitality of Chinese artists born from 1980 through the 1990s under the overlapping pressure of old and new local and global orders.
The producer, Ren Xiang, or Charles Ren, is known in the field as a highly active young collector born after 1995. As a member of the UCCA Young Patrons Committee, he supports emerging work by local artists and the development of their careers. He also collects Western contemporary art and extends his collection across dialogues that move through time and civilization, emphasizing art as a cognitive medium of deterritorialization.
Zhao Gang, Split, 2025, courtesy of Zhao Gang and Lisson Gallery. ASE Foundation: group exhibition Navigations in the Flesh; Zhao Gang, The Basterd Gentry. Dates: November 9, 2025-March 27, 2026. The ASE Foundation was established by the collector Joan. As she put it, “A cooler, more rational art market is not a bad thing for artists. It lets people look inward, instead of being pushed along by the market.” During the season, the foundation is presenting both the group exhibition “Navigations in the Flesh” and the second act of Zhao Gang’s “The Basterd Gentry,” titled “Flesh,” two exhibitions that approach enduring questions of the body, time, trace, and existence from different angles.
“Post-Global Newcomers: Practice Report of a Three-Person Art Group,” installation view, 2025. SumSum Connects: Post-Global Newcomers: Practice Report of a Three-Person Art Group. Dates: October 18-November 30, 2025. SumSum Connects was founded by the young artist Jing Yu and the collector Wang Yidan as an integrated art space centered on exchange and interaction. It includes a salon area and an exhibition area, and behind the gallery there is even an artist’s studio.
Wang Yidan told us that this grew out of her hope that an art space would not be constrained by any fixed boundary, and that within it many stories related to art might unfold. The exhibition staged alongside the season brings together Ni Weihua, Jing Yu, and Chen Zhu, artists of different generations. Using new materials as a point of entry, it explores the possibilities and experimental narrative expansion of painting after contemporary art, while combining painterly experiments with nontraditional materials to keep blurring and reconstructing the boundaries of painting itself.
J7 ART exhibition notice. J7 ART: Meme to Jam 2.0. Dates: November 12, 2025-May 12, 2026. J7 ART was also founded by a collector. Its exhibition “Meme to Jam 2.0” includes nearly 200 artists, and its introductory text is written in highly abstract terms: “The two poles of visible light, red and blue. Green, the hour of green light. Artificial intelligence transmits images to the artist; how do red and blue pixels form meaningful relations in your space? That is your nonlinear mapping.”
“Taking up the red-blue meme, the generative pre-trained transformer appears, green light superdream.” The accompanying video also seems to have been A.I.-generated, and faintly echoes the text. Fei Chi Zhong Collectors Club, 2025. Fei Chi Zhong Collectors Club: Jiang Quyang, Is and Is Not; group exhibition Absolute Abstraction. Dates: November 12, 2025-January-February 2026. Vivian Chen, the collector Chen Xiaoyu, who has been active on social media, opened an art salon during last year’s art season.
This year that salon has been fully upgraded into the “Fei Chi Zhong Collectors Club.” She told us, “No matter whether the market is good or bad, the work that needs doing still has to be done. If you work in art, you have to stir things up.” This season it is presenting two exhibitions. “Is and Is Not,” organized with Blank, brings together Jiang Quyang’s latest work. Borrowing the motif of the “plant,” he slowly speaks outward, in a classical mode, of a quiet inward self-examination. The works carry everything from the outside world that he knows intimately, rendered through a delicate, inward sensibility.
“Absolute Abstraction” is presented by the space in collaboration with Matthew Liu Fine Art and includes representative works by important contemporary artists including Renato Nicolodi, Alberto Peral, Feng Lianghong, and Shi Zhiying. In the Fei Chi Zhong Collectors Club she founded, Chen Xiaoyu continues to build a place of her own.