As winter settles over Beijing, six compelling exhibitions navigate the full spectrum between material transformation and technological meditation. Spread across the city’s galleries and institutions, these shows demonstrate Beijing’s vibrant artistic pulse.

Hong Hao
‘Light’
Beijing Commune
Until February 8, 2025

Hong Hao’s ‘Light’ at Beijing Commune delves into a realm where everyday items adopt paradoxical forms, encouraging audiences to think again. Bricks, towels, and ceramics, while familiar in shape, are transformed into entirely different entities, becoming part of a playful riddle. Through repetition and texture, Hong subtly disrupts our perceptions, prompting reflection on what occurs when materiality merges with meaning, with each piece urging us to consider the boundary between the mundane and the extraordinary. Hong neither poses questions nor provides straightforward answers but instead guides the viewer on a stimulating visual journey.

Fu Jingyan
‘Wild ∗ Among Blossoms’
Mocube
Until February 9, 2025

Fu Jingyan’s ‘Wild ∗ Among Blossoms’ at Mocube reimagines everyday experiences, exploring a combination of the real and surreal. Fu utilizes recurrent symbols like the rabbit, which act as both a connector and a barrier, while his distinctive depiction of eyes captures fleeting emotional expressions. The artist’s hands-on approach with found objects – wood, feathers, magnets – imbues the items with new significance, reflecting the delicate vitality of life. Fu creates pieces of personal relevance by merging painting with these materials, encouraging viewers to explore the subtle interactions between emotion, perception, and the physical world.

Trevor Yeung
‘Not a Fighter, But a Lover’
Magician Space
Until February 15, 2025

Trevor Yeung’s works unfold like quiet invitations, drawing viewers into the subtle intersections of human and non-human lives, all mediated through constructed environments. In The Unentertaining Circle (2024), fish tanks form a ring, their reflective surfaces creating a disorienting loop where viewers confront their own image at every turn. Fluorescent lighting enhances the aquarium-like atmosphere, framing the audience as both spectators and inhabitants, caught in a cycle of observation and self-recognition. Similarly, This is our world (2024) transforms a gallery space into a factory-like landscape, where thousands of tightly packed Betta fish bottles recreate the oppressive conditions of industrial aquaculture. Yeung’s work quietly dismantles the boundaries between species, situating humans within systems of vulnerability and control, thereby creating space for reflection and self-awareness.

Liu Shangying
‘Painting, Wandering’
Future Land Art Center
Until February 26, 2025

Liu Shangying’s paintings are inspired by environments: the deserts of the Ejin Banner, the foothills of the East Tian Shan Mountains, Lop Nur, and the Altyn Mountains. His works emulate this wilderness' aura, with brushstrokes resembling tentative footsteps dotted across unfamiliar terrain. Stars (2024) bridges the material and the celestial, the moment and the monumental; it was initially created on a mountainside, and now is composed of suspended stone fragments forming a starry sky. The exhibition contains various landscapes where viewers can wander, experiencing time not as a fixed line, but as something vibrant, moving toward, meeting, and holding us.

Zhang Peili
Red Brick Art Museum
Until March 2, 2025

Zhang Peili’s machines hum, click, and whir – alive yet indifferent. Their logic is unyielding, their presence inescapable. This exhibition focuses on new works from 2024, which extend the artist’s sustained inquiry into repetition, control, and unease. In Constant Rotation (2024), gas cylinders hurtle around violently, propelled by rotational and vertical forces, creating a tense, ceaseless rhythm embedded in time. Array of Propane Tanks (2024) transforms rows of spinning containers into infinite ripples, endlessly refracted through mirrors at the sides. Then there is Portrait of 2024 (2024): a video showing an enormous face, the image flickering to disquieting effect. Last fall, the city’s Taikang Art Museum exhibited Zhang’s early works and archives, tracing his inquiries back to 1984. Here, however, it is the machines that dominate.

Liang Shaoji, Li Shan, Lynn Hershman Leeson
‘Future in the Mirror’
ShanghART
Until February 22, 2025

‘Future in the Mirror’ gathers three visionary artists born in the 1940s, and engages with the dualities of material and digital realms. Liang Shaoji’s Ice-Bed (2022-2023) transforms silk and glass into a meditation on mortality, evoking ancient and future lifelines – perhaps remnants of both the Ice Age and the digital age. Li Shan’s ‘BioArt’, a project initiated by the artist in the 1990s in China, explores the porous boundaries of identity, offering a vision of life as an interpretive act, with pieces such as Restructing (1996-) and portraits like Reading (2020). Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Logic Paralyzes the Heart (2021) commemorates the 60th anniversary of the cyborg. In this video installation, Joan Chen portrays the first cyborg, merging AI’s evolution with human vulnerability, echoing the artist’s earlier Seduction of a Cyborg (1994).