F2 Gallery (Caochangdi)

Born in Manchuria in 1948 and raised in Beijing, Hung Liu grew up among the city's Communist elite, attending the same prestigious girls' boarding school as Mao's daughters. As a young woman, Hung studied art at the Central Academy of Fine Art, trained in Socialist ... Read more »

Beyond Cartoon

For all of May, a titanic pair of fiberglass breasts sprouting from a tiny girl greeted visitors to 798-a cheap thrill that requires little explanation but begs the question: Purposeful vacuity or lazy artmaking?

Beyond Cartoon is a good introduction to lowbrow Asian art outside Japan inspired by ... Read more »

Ian Teh’s Undercurrents

When documentary photography enters the jurisdictions of fine art, composition, color and mood become far more crucial than gaining access to the faces and landscapes pertinent to current events. British photojournalist Ian Teh's current exhibition, Undercurrents, recognizes both the artistic and social dimensions of his ... Read more »

Community of Tastes

The Iberia Center of Contemporary Art opened April 15 with a group exhibition of sculpture, painting, video and installation that featured an all-star lineup of Chinese artists including Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei, Zhou Tiehai and Liu Wei. The show mostly consists of veterans from the game, but ... Read more »

The Tao of the Line

The opening exhibition of Gallery 49 features artists Chinese, foreign and "both." There are prints of puffy-haired girls hanging themselves among vegetation and graffiti from New York's Mint and Serf duo, as well as double happiness symbols re-shaped to form bombs by Zheng Lu ... Read more »

Time to Op Out

The two main groups of work featured in Nanjing-based artist Wang Qiang's solo exhibition seem at odds with each other: The bold-hued and geometric line paintings recall the abstract and op art movements while the intricate polystyrene structural installations populated by toy figurines are part ... Read more »

Caochangdi | Qiu Xiaofei

A green metal door pasted with cartoon stickers, the chemical blue of mosquito lights, a tower of building blocks never owned but surely glimpsed once in a catalog or in a friend's attic toy chest: Qiu Xiaofei's show is a study of psychology and recall ... Read more »

798 Dashanzi | Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery

Chengdu-based artist Yang Yi’s “Uprooted” series imagines his hometown in 2009, in the wake of being flooded by the final phase of construction on the Three Gorges Dam, a controversial project that will result in the relocation of an estimated one to two million ... Read more »

Masters and Dunhuang

At the National Art Museum of China’s current exhibition, “Inspired by the Murals – Masters and Dunhuang,” visitors not once lay eyes on a centimeter of Dunhuang's more than 45,000 sq. meters of fresco. Instead, the exhibition is as much a celebration of the tradition ... Read more »

Zhu Fadong rocked the art scene in the 1990’s with a series of performance pieces. He posted missing person fliers of himself and strolled the streets as a person for sale. In “Lifestyle,” he spent a hundred days contracted out to different employers, ranging from government to friends. He ... Read more »

798 | Yan Club Art Center

Beijing-based artist Hu Youben’s abstract works redefine the textural relationship of two traditional media–ink and paper–by scratching and folding ink-stained paper so that the form of the paper, rather than the outline of ink, creates depth and feeling. Paintings from “Beyond the ... Read more »