Moving Image Archive

All Films

37 films

Yuja Wang: Short dresses. Fearless playing. | Art with Xirui

Film

Yuja Wang: Short Dresses, Fearless Playing—Who Decides What a Pianist Should Be?

Short dresses, towering heels, and dazzling technique may be what first draws people to Yuja Wang. But there is much more to hear beyond the headlines. From stepping in for Martha Argerich as a young pianist to her Rachmaninoff marathon at Carnegie Hall, Wang’s career has been a story of extraordinary challenges and constant evolution. In this video, I explore her breakthrough, the scrutiny surrounding her stage image, and what I hear as a growing freedom and emotional depth in her playing. It is also a reflection on a woman defining herself on a stage crowded with expectations. Beyond what Yuja Wang wears, what does her music have to say?

10/24/20264:31

Film

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

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

10/30/20253:54

Film

Aichi Triennale Returns with Art Rooted in Place

A post-apocalyptic vision in an abandoned school, artworks in a bathhouse, and a monumental installation in a clay-mining warehouse—alongside works by Hiroshi Sugimoto, Simone Leigh, Izumi Kato, and Osamu Tezuka. The sixth Aichi Triennale opens September 14, 2025, across Nagoya and Seto.

9/26/20254:33

Film

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

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

5/12/20254:15

Film

A Chinese Designer's New Milan Exhibition Carries a Sincere Eastern Sensibility

At Milan Design Week in April 2025, designer Chen Yaoguang unveiled Gift, a large-scale installation in the central courtyard of the University of Milan. Sponsored by KUKA Home, the 24-meter-wide work spread across more than 3,000 square meters like a field of golden spring flowers. Seen from above, it resembled both a cake and a pizza, with one slice intentionally cut away as an offering from the East.

4/19/20254:33

Film

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

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

4/14/20255:41

Film

From Day to Night: Seeing Another Kind of Hong Kong Through Art

During Hong Kong Art Week 2025, this film follows Lulu Fong through the city's three headline art fairs, meals at art-filled restaurants, and conversations with gallerists, arti...

4/8/20254:39

Film

Art Basel Hong Kong, Day One: Buying Returns, and Different Generations of Collectors Find Their Way

As Art Basel Hong Kong opened its 2025 VIP day, early lines and brisk sales suggested a rebound in appetite. Conversations with the fair’s director, Angelle Siyang-Le, and three collectors of different generations offered a portrait of what felt newly urgent this year.

3/28/20253:20

Film

The Artist Who Made Bad Painting Good

Werner Büttner, one of postwar Germany’s most important contemporary artists, has spent more than 45 years making art on his own terms. Trained as a lawyer and never enrolled in art school, he became an advocate of “bad painting.” In the 1990s, nearly every Chinese painter seemed to own one of his books. After more than 30 years teaching at Hamburg’s Academy of Fine Arts, Büttner retired last year.

3/27/20253:12

Film

Hong Kong Art Week Through Picasso, Cezanne, Renoir, and Other Masters

In March 2025, Hong Kong was dense with major exhibitions. Moving through four art spaces at M+, the Hong Kong Palace Museum, the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and Phillips Asia head...

3/25/20255:09

Film

Wei Jia's Largest Solo Show Yet: The Hardest Part Is Facing the Blank Canvas

Wei Jia, born in the 1970s, occupies a singular place among his generation of Chinese artists. Trained in lithography at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he returned to his hometown of Chengdu after graduating in 1999 and has taught in the printmaking department at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute ever since.

12/16/20244:29

Film

Beeple’s Record-Breaking Work Arrives in Nanjing for Its First Global Exhibition

Beeple, the world’s “most expensive” digital artist, brings more than two decades of work—including Everydays: The First 5000 Days, Human One, and S.2122—to the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing.

11/20/20244:47

Film

After Eight Years, Nearly Fifty Rodin Originals Make Their Shanghai Debut

Auguste Rodin, one of the foundational figures in sculpture’s passage to modernity, broke with the sweetness and finish of traditional sculpture, bringing complex human feeling and movement into the form. On September 27, the new Rodin Art Center opened in Shanghai’s Pudong district with 106 works, including nearly fifty originals by Rodin and six French national treasures.

10/9/20244:30

Film

How a Young Private Museum Built a Run of Remarkable Shows

Nearly two years after opening on Shanghai’s West Bund in 2022, START Museum has reached the third installment of its four-part inaugural exhibition series, moving from “START” to “Narrating the Instant” to the current “Boundaries,” with a notably strong selection of works each time.

9/26/20242:57

Film

What Happens When Shanghai Opera Meets Disney?

What kind of spark flies when traditional Shanghai opera meets a Disney stage performance? For the Mid-Autumn Festival, Shanghai Disney Resort collaborated with the Shanghai Huju Opera Theatre on a special edition of Duffy and Friends' moon-viewing celebration. From rewritten Shanghainese lyrics and the fusion of Huju melodies with Disney music to the costumes and performances of young opera actors, the project offered a rare look inside this imaginative collaboration.

9/12/20245:13

Film

The First Great Celebration of Asia’s Art Season: Frieze Seoul’s Biggest Showing in Three Years

From September 4 to September 7, 2024, the third edition of Frieze Seoul brought an unmistakable sense of energy to the city. As Frieze’s only Asian outpost, the fair drew familiar Chinese collectors, gallerists, and artists into its halls, galleries, and museums. Their consensus was clear: this was the largest, most orderly, and most engaging edition yet.

9/6/20242:36

Film

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

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

8/7/20242:53

Film

A Nude Painting Sold for RMB 270 Million. She Made It Possible

Sanyu is widely regarded as one of the most important Chinese artists of the twentieth century and the only member of his generation of Paris-trained Chinese artists to truly enter the core of the Western art world. Today, demand for his work is intense, and his auction record surpassed RMB 270 million in 2019. Behind that rise stands more than thirty years of research and advocacy by Yi Shufan, whose work has been essential to Sanyu's rediscovery.

7/15/20243:47

Film

Nineteen Years of Living With Art

The architect and collector Grace Cheung has spent nearly two decades acquiring works she wants close at hand, not sealed away in storage, and supporting younger artists whose experiments keep art tied to life.

6/12/20243:57

Film

Collector Zhang Guo Would Rather Spend on Art Than Luxury Goods

In 2003, only three years into her career, Zhang Guo bought her first artwork with just a few tens of thousands of renminbi. She often jokes that she has never been willing to splurge on luxury goods and would rather spend money on what she truly loves. Over two decades, that instinct has grown into a collection of more than two hundred works, many by women artists across different generations.

5/24/20244:10

Film

The Son of a Former French Prime Minister: I Feel a Deep Connection to China

Arthur de Villepin, the son of former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin, grew up moving between countries with his diplomat father and spent long periods living in the United States, India, France, and the United Kingdom. Along the way he came to know artists such as Zao Wou-Ki, Anselm Kiefer, Pierre Soulages, and Kim Tschang-Yeul. Four years ago, he and his father founded a gallery together, and he now speaks of Chinese landscape traditions as a lasting source of calm and strength.

4/28/20245:16

Film

104 Treasures, and a Yuanmingyuan You've Never Seen

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

4/22/20243:20

Film

The Most Surprising Show of Art Week: More Than 170 Masters Painting With Light

At M+, “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography” uses nothing more than black and white to stage a lucid, far-reaching history of the medium.

4/7/20243:11

Film

At Art Basel Hong Kong, Plenty of Trophy Works, but a More Measured Buyer

At the end of March, Hong Kong Art Week opened. On the first VIP day of Art Basel Hong Kong, a long line had formed outside the halls before noon. This year’s fair brings together 243 galleries from 40 countries and territories, including 25 first-time exhibitors, an expansion of 37 percent over last year.

3/27/20243:23

Film

The Swiss Artist Who Fell for Ink and Chinese Landscapes

Born in 1993, the Swiss artist Rebekka Steiger is one of the most sought-after young artists working today. Though born and raised in the traditional “European soil,” she makes work deeply connected to Chinese culture, landscape, literature, and ink. During a 2018–19 residency in Beijing, she taught herself Mandarin and Cantonese and chose an authentic Chinese name.

3/12/20242:58

Film

At Ninety, He Mounted Eight Exhibitions in One Year: “I’m Still Young”

Michelangelo Pistoletto, the only surviving founder of Arte Povera, continues to travel and work with remarkable energy, bringing six decades of questions about art, society, and coexistence to eight exhibition spaces around the world.

3/11/20242:28

Film

After a Three-Year Wait, a Free International Sculpture Show Opens in the Heart of Shanghai

The Jing'an International Sculpture Project is China's first sustained experiment in public art. Since its debut in 2010, it has run for nearly fourteen years, witnessing the country's public art scene grow from nothing, through a halting, difficult start, to the accelerated pace it enjoys today.

2/24/20242:26

Film

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

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

2/21/20242:18

Film

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

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

5/8/20236:18

Film

Collector Tang Ju and the Private Museum He Built in Beijing’s Suburbs

Tang Ju has been collecting for nearly thirty years, amassing more than 1,000 works. In his holdings, artists born in the 1950s and 1960s form a clear lineage: Luo Zhongli, Leng Jun, Chen Danqing, He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, Cao Li, Liu Xiaodong, Mao Yan, Yu Hong, and others.

4/20/20234:46

Film

Karena Lam Doesn’t Want to Be Called a Ceramicist

In a compact pottery studio in Hong Kong, the actress talks about clay, photography, curating, motherhood, and why she resists every label but her own.

2/7/20235:22

Film

Ulay’s First Asian Exhibition Opens in Beijing

At Spike Gallery in Beijing, “An Unmeasurable Thing,” organized with the Ulay Foundation, traces the artist’s deep ties to China, from the Great Wall to the late work that returned, with unusual calm, to questions of love, mortality, and artistic survival.

9/15/20227:07

Film

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

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

5/13/20215:26

Film

Poet-Photographer Yan Ming: Adult Is a Wrinkled Child

Born in Dingyuan, Anhui in the 1970s, Yan Ming is widely known as a poet-photographer. Over more than a decade, he has traveled across China, photographing countless ordinary lives. Also a best-selling author, he published Adult Is a Wrinkled Child this year. We visited him in his hometown, where he told us: there are no adults in the world, only children who have grown wrinkles.

9/18/20195:20

Film

Art | Julian Opie: The Artist Who Loves Drawing Pole Dancers

Julian Opie is one of Britain's most popular artists. He likes to observe things in the simplest possible way and render them as such. In his works, people are often reduced to little more than a few lines and dots. He once asked a pole dancer to draw one hundred different poses; on the page, the dancer became nothing more than a handful of elegant curves.

5/12/20172:47

Film

Zhou Yinghua, the Legendary Collector Who Had Every Star Paint His Portrait

At eighty-three, Zhou Yinghua looks back on a life spanning art, design, film, restaurants, and collecting—and returns to the artistic calling that never left him.

8/31/20155:35

Film

Ding Yi: Twenty Years of Painting With One Vertical and One Horizontal Stroke

For twenty years, Ding Yi has returned to an elemental visual language built from one horizontal line and one vertical stroke, turning repetition and discipline into a signature form.

7/24/20155:28