From wood-grain negatives and make-believe tchotchkes to Wuhan punks and haunted islands, Ophelia Lai highlights the 7 best exhibitions in the Chinese capital.

The 7th edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing, which opened a series of exhibitions that run as late as September, takes “Visibility” as its main theme, reflecting the organizers’ ambitions to raise the profile of Chinese contemporary artists and burnish the city’s reputation as a global cultural hub. Among the forty participating galleries and non-profit institutions, however, the most compelling exhibitions are really about invisibility, undertaking nuanced investigations of perception, occlusion, and arcane history.

Qin Yifeng takes a literal approach to this subject in “[10] [3] [7] [3],” a presentation of photographic negatives at Magician Space in the 798 Art Zone in the capital’s northeast. Arranged in groups of ten, three, seven, and three, the 8 x 10 negatives are displayed on raised lightboxes at the center of the darkened venue. Viewed through the magnifying loupes provided, some of the negatives reveal thin ridges and crevasses, like mountains in miniature, while others merely appear as gray blurs. Shot with a large-format camera, the images are in fact close-ups of Ming-style wooden furniture, which is known for a restrained approach to decoration that emphasizes the natural qualities of its material. Paradoxically, Qin seeks to erase the fine wood grain, experimenting with exposure to minimize contrast and depth. The negatives that came closest to the artist’s ideal of “radical flatness” – charcoal-colored planes with barely perceptible lines and smudges – were printed and hung on the gallery walls.

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At Galerie Urs Meile, Zhang Xuerui similarly engages with opticality in “Still Life · Chest” (2022–23), a series of acrylic paintings of identical open boxes set against soft-gradient backgrounds. For Zhang, the empty container symbolizes a family history of loss that is palpable in Still Life · Chest L3 (2023), in which the central motif dissipates into a flaxen haze. Conversely, Still Life · Chest XL1 (2023) uses contrasting shades of pastel pink, blue, and cornsilk to differentiate vessel and ground. Although the gradations of color appear to meld seamlessly from afar – an effect enhanced by the beige curtains that diffuse light in the gallery – they are the result of a rigid methodology, whereby the artist assigns three main hues to sections of a gridded canvas, then blends them square by square. Zhang’s series represents a partial and illusory restoration, a memory of dispossession locked in the logic of the grid.

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At Beijing Commune, Ma Qiusha’s installation of a packed antique shop is an intriguing foil to Zhang’s empty box. No. 52 Liulichang East Street (2021–23) is a recreation of a red-painted storefront at the titular address, where once-flourishing small businesses are threatened by gentrification. Behind the shop window, shelves are filled with faded photographs from Ma’s family albums, along with silk dolls, carved-jade animals, and other tchotchkes sourced from international dealers and online auctions. An accompanying catalogue exposes many of the terra-cotta figurines as faux Han or Tang crafts, while kitschy butterfly ornaments and glass flowers are dated to the Chuanghui period (1949–66), when the People’s Republic of China ramped up the manufacture of “Chinese-style” souvenirs for export in a bid to earn foreign currency. Ma herself fabricated some objects too: copper-plate etchings of the artist in Manchurian dress. Complicating this impression of calculated fakery is a selection of the artist’s writings in the catalogue regarding her family history and personal recollections of treasured objects, from a stolen jewelry box to a dumpling plate used at New Year gatherings. Ma’s objects are less significant for what they are than the intersecting stories they hold about desire, nostalgia, and the commodification of “national” culture.

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Two solo shows at the non-profit Macalline Art Center – Chris Zhongtian Yuan’s “No Door, One Window, Only Light” and Hu Wei’s “Touching a Fabric Full of Holes” – likewise engage in acts of speculative reconstruction. On the first floor, Yuan’s film Wuhan Punk (2020) combines aerial footage of roads and skyscrapers with apocalyptic, computer-generated scenes of smog-choked sites, as the narrator recounts the concomitant rises of the city’s punk scene and its industrial base in the 1990s. The film’s plot is propelled by the mysterious disappearance of a local punk legend, who appears briefly in grainy, archival footage. Elsewhere, No Door, One Window, Only Light (2023) ensconces the viewer within a triangle of projector screens. Flashes of indistinct figures, 3D-printed architecture, and messages addressed to a deceased friend of the artist are accompanied by a cacophonous soundtrack, evoking the disorientation of grief. The frenzied visuals of Yuan’s moving-image works contrast with a series of neat drawings that reduce personal memories to esoteric symbols and diagrams. For example, Fraught Relations #2 (2023) is a lined sheet notated with squares and squiggles that, according to the wall text, represent the artist’s experience of being defrauded on a freelance project.

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On the second floor, Hu’s film Long Time Between Sunsets and Underground Waves (2020–21) alternates between the perspectives of a marine spirit and a migrant laborer on an island in Sabah, Malaysia, gradually unfurling a narrative of ethnic conflict, exploitation, and environmental destruction. Shots of the man traipsing alone in the forest are suffused with a sense of alienation and tension that is heightened by voiceover accounts of supernatural beings that haunt the island. Strewn on the floor in front of the screen are glowing glass sculptures that evoke deformed shells and sea creatures that have washed ashore (Aquatic Invasion No. 1–No. 6, 2021).

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In the Visiting Sector, meanwhile, Galerie Chantal Crousel has a focused selection of Mimosa Echard’s works on mutation and hybridity, continuing a project undertaken for her 2022 show at Palais de Tokyo. Sporal (DNA) (2023) is a two-and-a-half-meter-high canvas laden with beads, capsules, and fiber-optic cables, along with organic matter like dried flowers and twigs. Pasted on with white goo, artificial pistils and a plastic egg nested at the center of the composition point to an improbable fusion of the natural and the manmade. A video installation titled Sporal (2022), consisting of droll texts, animated dots, and clips from an online game designed by the artist, imagines the biological processes within a single-celled myxomycete, or slime mold. The video is projected onto a patchwork of sheer fabrics printed with photographs of a field and the artist’s childhood home, as well as painted flowers and biomorphic patterns. Segments of the layered imagery are obscured or revealed by changes in the brightness of the projection and ripples in the fabric. 

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On my final day at Gallery Weekend, I visited Zhai Liang’s marvelous exhibition “What I Don’t Understand Is What I Understand” at White Space Shunyi, on the ground floor of Blanc Art Group’s tax-free gallery hub in the Free Trade Zone north of 798. In Zhai’s oil paintings, subtle art-historical, literary, and cinematic references are refracted through the prism of personal memory. Negative and Positive (2022) portrays two figures in a tight embrace reminiscent of classical depictions of Apollo and Daphne, yet the glasses and pink slippers respectively worn by the man and woman suggest the artist and his wife, transforming a scene of predation into one of tenderness. Zhai’s subjects are characterized by their unusual coloring and distorted proportions, with features like lime-green skin and elongated limbs, while warped, curving forms create the impression of gazing at the compositions through a fishbowl. Zhai’s exhibition felt like a fitting conclusion to this exploration of visibility, beautifully encapsulating the manipulations that shape what we see, and the joys of discovering what we don’t.

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OPHELIA LAI is a writer and editor based in Hong Kong.