Upcoming exhibitions

UCCA Center for Contemporary Art is delighted to announce its 2022 exhibition program for all three venues in its museum network: UCCA Beijing, UCCA Edge (Shanghai), and UCCA Dune (Beidaihe). The program includes a total of fourteen exhibitions, featuring comprehensive solo exhibitions of international artists showing in (mainland) China for the first time, as well as solo exhibitions by leading and emerging contemporary Chinese artists and group shows highlighting a diversity of contemporary and global perspectives addressing our historical present.

In 2022, UCCA will mount the largest solo exhibition by Henri Matisse in mainland China to date, first at UCCA Beijing (March 26–June 26) and subsequently traveling to UCCA Edge (July 16–October 16). Presented in collaboration with Musée Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Matisse by Matisse will feature works from the museum collection, covering Matisse’s entire career and range, as well as an additional section that will highlight the influence of Matisse and Fauvism on the modern painting movement in China during the 1920s to 1940s such as the works by Ding Yanyong, Guan Liang, and Sanyu.

Thomas Demand: The Stutter of History (April 2–June 19, UCCA Edge) will be Thomas Demand’s first comprehensive survey in China, curated by Douglas Fogle for the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis/Paris/Lausanne. Featuring works from all creative periods of Maria Lassnig’s groundbreaking and varied career, the first significant presentation of Maria Lassnig’s work in China (August 20–November 27, UCCA Beijing) will be co-curated by UCCA Curator-at-Large Peter Eleey and Antonia Hoerschelmann,  curator of modern and contemporary art at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, in collaboration with the Maria Lassnig Foundation.

Geoff Oppenheimer: People in Reverse (April 30–July 31, UCCA Beijing) features new work commissioned by UCCA and the Diriyah Biennale Foundation. Monira Al Qadiri (July 3–October 9, UCCA Dune) will have a comprehensive presentation of her practice curated by UCCA Curator Luan Shixuan, investigating petrocultures and their impact on human lives and perspectives as mediated by art. Both artists will be represented at the first Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari).

UCCA continues to develop its program of Chinese contemporary artists throughout the year. For his most comprehensive institutional exhibition to date and his first in Beijing, groundbreaking contemporary video artist Yang Fudong (November 26–February 26, 2023, UCCA Beijing) will present the first installment of his Library Film Project, a follow-up to his monumental cycle Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest completed in 2007. Synthesizing a network of tensions between natural and human-made objects in her post-apocalyptic installation and sculpture practice, emerging sculptor Zhang Ruyi (April 30–July 31, UCCA Beijing) will have her largest institutional solo exhibition in recent years, with a series of works commissioned by UCCA. A selection of works by pioneering Chinese realist painter Liu Xiaodong from his 2021 solo exhibition Liu Xiaodong: Your Friends at UCCA Edge will reprise in Beijing (January 15–April 10, UCCA Beijing).

Five group shows seek to elucidate new perspectives on our art historical, socio-cultural, and ecological past and present. Curated by Carlo McCormick and Peter Eleey, Somewhere Downtown (July 30–October 23, UCCA Beijing) looks back on the impact and experimentation of a group of important avant-garde artists active in downtown New York City in the 1980s. UCCA Curator Holly Roussell will present Slide / Show (December 17–March 5, 2023, UCCA Beijing) on the role of projected photography in the development of Chinese contemporary art and the impactful medium’s socio-cultural history in post-Mao China. Foregrounding feminist and queer perspectives, Sailing Through the Constellations (November 12–February 12, 2023, UCCA Edge), curated by UCCA Curator Ara Qiu, will showcase young Chinese artists in an in-depth dialogue engaging the present and emergent moods and preoccupations in their practice. 

Liquid Ground (March 20–June 12, UCCA Dune), the result of a collaboration with Para Site in Hong Kong and curated by Alvin Li and Junyuan Feng, gathers an array of artists and artist groups to interrogate connections between materiality, spirituality, and ecology. Finally, Undercurrents (October 30–March 12, 2023, UCCA Dune), curated by UCCA Publications Editor Simon Frank, takes inspiration from the geography of the museum on the seashore to explore the liquid properties of sound and the ocean as a medium for cultural transmission.