But back in the country’s capital city, at the historic 798 Art District, it was business as usual with the launch of the eighth edition of Gallery Weekend Beijing. Running from May 28 to June 2, 2024, with a VIP preview in the days before the event’s opening, Gallery Weekend Beijing this year included 27 participating galleries and nonprofit institutions in the main sector, and 8 galleries from locales beyond the city in the visiting sector, plus “The inner side of the wind,” a show curated by Yuan Jiawei.

This year, Gallery Weekend Beijing, as well as the city’s two major art fairs, Beijing Dangdai and Jingart, all held their openings at the same time, drawing a larger crowd to the city in the hopes of reigniting flagging excitement surrounding Beijing’s art scene, according to industry insiders.

The main theme for this year’s Gallery Weekend Beijing, or GWBJ as it’s known for short, was “Drift to Re-Turn.” It encapsulated the international artistic connections that participating galleries, institutions, and curated projects aimed to create through the annual showcase.  

Speaking to ARTnews, GWBJ program director Yang Jialin said, “On a deeper level, GWBJ, as a platform for contemporary art exchange, hopes to help the outstanding artists and their work ‘drift’ out to the world, allowing the voices from Beijing to reach the international stage; and to let excellent international art content ‘return’ to the local art scene, presenting it to the Chinese audience.”

Victor Wang, chief curator and artistic director of M Woods, a private museum at 798 Art District, said, “Unlike Hong Kong and Shanghai, Beijing’s art ecology operates uniquely through a mix of connections and disconnections with the outside world.”

The city’s scale, legacy, and structure provide the opportunity for some galleries and institutions to thrive in isolation, building frameworks that benefit from this separateness. Meanwhile, others continue to actively seek connections with the global art scene, striving to create bridges and establish networks beyond Beijing.

“I’m personally uplifted whenever I see marginalized voices and radical thinkers presented in Beijing, in dialogue with this local cultural context, especially those perspectives we might not be able to showcase or engage with often locally,” Wang added.

One such exhibition was tucked away in a small private room at Magician Space. The quietly provocative show is paradoxically titled “Room of Boundlessness” and is curated by Liu Ding, one of the artistic directors of Yokohama Triennale 2023. Upon first look, there seemed to be nothing contentious: viewers were greeted by nothing much at all, with the artworks left facedown on the floor or propped against the wall. That, it turned out, was just the beginning of the show. Visitors were invited to pick up the works, by the likes of Hu Shangzong and Feng Guodong, and hang the pieces themselves.

“Our objective is to offer both local and international audiences the opportunity to engage with diverse forms of art and contribute to the overall artistic ecosystem,” said Pojan Huang, researcher at Magician Space. By way of example, Huang cited the dedicated project called the Antechamber, which was designed specifically for experimental art.

Magician Space also presented a solo exhibition running till July by New York–based artist Timur Si-Qin. The show, which explores the relationship between humans and nature from different perspectives, including a spiritual one, proved particularly popular.

Some quality exhibitions, stunning artist studios, and frenetic programming aside, there were still concerns regarding the volatile climate of geopolitics and fiscal uncertainties in China and beyond.

“In the current global landscape, the first layer of meaning of the theme of GWBJ is its literal sense: we are always in an unstable state, with an uncertain future,” said Jialin.

Just a few months ago, Bloomberg reported that China faced a series of challenges from shrinking population to record property downturn to rising trade tensions. Amid conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, and with trade wars ongoing, the global economy looks precarious, and China is not an exception. In fact, as tensions with the US ratchet up, Chinese businesses are reportedly looking toward countries such as Mexico and Vietnam.

“The art market is not optimistic in light of the ongoing deterioration of geopolitics and the decline of the global economic situation,” Huang said. “A cold wave is approaching not only China, but also the global gallery industry, making future prospects for the art business increasingly challenging.”

“Certainly, the days of quick sales and waiting lists are waning,” said Mathieu Borysevicz, founder and director of BANK, a Shanghai gallery that participated in GWBJ. “Right now, everybody has sobered up and is working a lot harder to make each sale. China is still the second-largest art market in the world, and the economy is resilient, but it has created a widespread sense of precarity. In fact, I must say that in my 20-plus years of coming to China, this is the first time I have witnessed widespread pessimism.”

Yet there remains cause for some optimism—or at least artistic resilience.

“Usually, when the economy isn’t so great, art tends to get more interesting,” Borysevicz added. “For too long, the emphasis was disproportionately on the market at the expense of criticality. I hope the shift away from the market will help vitalize the work.”

Huang agreed, saying, “When Magician Space was established in 2008, it coincided with the economic crisis, and the exhibition was not conceived for commercial purposes, thus our objectives extend beyond business. It has been a source of great satisfaction to continue delving deeply into the work of our favourite artists and to persevere.”

Meanwhile, other industry leaders are paying more attention to their regional counterparts.

“Connecting local artists and the Beijing art scene with international communities is crucial—especially now, given the growing skepticism toward globalization and the current economic and geopolitical climate,” Wang said. “It’s awesome to see our colleagues and communities from South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and other countries perambulating 798, experiencing firsthand our institutions and galleries, and seeing what Beijing has to offer.”

In a sign that some things just may be returning to normal, Gallery Weekend Beijing is returning to its standard March slot for 2021—from the 23rd to the 28th, with a VIP preview for the two days before opening. On Friday, its team revealed that visitors will encounter a new format.

Instead of being dedicated to Beijing’s gallery-filled 798 Art Zone, the event will span that area and five other locations. In total, 31 galleries from the capital city will participate, and five will come from elsewhere: Thousand Plateaus Art Space (of Chengdu, China), AYE Gallery (Beijing and Hong Kong), Canton Gallery (Guangzhou, China), Edouard Malingue Gallery (Hong Kong/Shanghai), and Pilar Corrias (London). That visiting sector had previously been a collaboration with Zurich Art Weekend.

“Under the impact of the pandemic, we will be particularly active this year to develop contacts with domestic art museum institutions,” GWBJ’s director, Amber Yifei Wang, told ARTnews, “and at the same time ensure that those who cannot visit internationally can learn about our projects in time through online channels and maintain interaction with us.”

Indeed, even in the most optimistic scenarios now being floated for vaccine distribution, widespread international travel to Beijing is unlikely to occur, and so Gallery Weekend Beijing organizers are planning a robust digital program, streaming live events via its website and app. There will also be a viewing room—as is now expected for any art event these days.

While the March date of Gallery Weekend Beijing had previously allowed far-flung art travelers to link a visit with Art Basel Hong Kong, this year will be different, as the fair has moved to May for 2021.

Below, the complete gallery lineup for the event.

Main Sector

Galleries
Asia Art Center
Beijing Commune
CLC Gallery Venture
Galerie Urs Meile
Galleria Continua
Ginkgo Space
Hive Center for Contemporary Art
Hua International
Hunsand Space
Linda Gallery
Long March Space
Magician Space
N3 Contemporary Art
PIFO Gallery
Platform China Contemporary Art Institute
ShanghART Gallery
Soka Art
SPURS Gallery
Star Gallery
Tabula Rasa Gallery
Tang Contemporary Art
Tokyo Gallery + BTAP
Triumph Gallery
White Space Beijing
Non-Profit Institutions
Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum
CAFA Art Museum
Faurschou Foundation
M Woods
Taikang Space
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

Independent Art Institution 
Shixiang Space

Visiting Sector Galleries
A Thousand Plateaus Art Space (Chengdu)
AYE Gallery (Beijing, Hong Kong)
Canton Gallery (Guangzhou)
Edouard Malingue Gallery (Hong Kong, Shanghai)
Pilar Corrias (London)

The Market

With exhibitions around the world canceled or postponed, a report by the Times examines “whether the biennial model still makes sense in a post-pandemic world.” [The New York Times]

Though Gallery Weekend Beijing is scheduled to take place from May 22–31, international travel restrictions amid the pandemic remain in place. [The Art Newspaper]

In June, Sotheby’s will offer Roy Lichtenstein’s 1965 painting White Brushstroke I. The work is estimated to sell for $20 million to $30 million. [Art Market Monitor]

Legal Matters

After Howardena Pindell filed a lawsuit against her former gallery for providing “misleading and inaccurate” information about sales of her work, James Little and Richard Mayhew, two other artists who previously exhibited with the same enterprise, discussed their experiences with the N’Namdi Gallery. [The New York Times]

Pindell is seeking at least $500,000 in damages and the return of various artworks in the suit filed in January in the Southern District Court of New York. The lawsuit claims that the N’Namdi Gallery “took advantage” of Pindell and her African-American colleagues who showed at the enterprise. [ARTnews]

Billionaire Sean Parker, who served as the first president of Facebook, purchased a Peter Paul Rubens painting for $6 million at Christie’s in 2018. He’s now reportedly involved in a dispute with the work’s seller, who wants the piece back. [New York Post]

Museums

The National Portrait Gallery in London said that, for the first time since 1997, the oil company BP will not be involved in judging its portrait award this year. The joint decision follows calls made by artists and activist groups for the institution to sever ties with BP. [The Guardian]

Film & Books

The new documentary Spit Earth: Who Is Jordan Wolfson?, which is available on Vimeo, explores whether the artist’s work is as transgressive as some have perceived it to be. [ARTnews]

A book titled Judson: Innovation in Stained Glass looks at the history of the oldest family-run stained glass studio in the United States. The L.A.-based operation was recently forced to lay off its whole staff. [Los Angeles Times]

Circles and Squares, Caroline Maclean’s biography of sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, painter Ben Nicholson, and other artists working in England in the 1930s, chronicles “a pivotal moment for British modernism,” Catherine Taylor writes. [Financial Times]

[See a complete guide to Coronavirus-related closures at major museums around the world.]

On March 11, the World Health Organization declared the new coronavirus (Covid-19) a global pandemic.

Last updated: March 14, 2020, 3:20 p.m.

Argentina

ArteBA, which was slated to take place in the country’s capital city from April 16–19, postponed its upcoming edition after the government of Buenos Aires suspended all major gatherings. The fair was also forced to postpone its satellite event titled “Utopia 2020.” ArteBA did not immediately provide new dates for its event, but said in a statement that it would be decided with “special consideration” of the “opinions and interests” of the participating exhibitors, sponsors, and other contributors.

Austria

Several museums in Austria have closed, and others have said they would allow only 100 people at any given time. The Albertina, the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, the Kunsthaus Wien, the Leopold Museum, and all three locations managed by the Belvedere said on March 11 that they would remain closed until further notice. The Museum der Moderne Salzburg and the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna said they would stay open and admit only 100 visitors at a time in accordance with the government’s ban of indoor gatherings of more than 100 people.

Brazil

While coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the country, no major museums or fairs have altered their programming. The SP-Arte fair has confirmed that it will go on as planned, running from April 1–5.

China

China, where the coronavirus was first recognized, has been among the countries most deeply affected by the outbreak. Museums, biennials, and fairs took prompt action, closing their doors within days after it became clear that it was becoming difficult to contain the pathogen.

The National Art Museum of China in Beijing, the Guangdong Art Museum in Guangzhou, and the Union Art Museum in Wuhan are among the institutions that have closed their doors indefinitely. China’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art was forced to postpone three exhibitions as a result of officials’ recommendations. The He Art Museum, a new private museum located in the Shunde district of Foshan, in Guangdong Province, also said it will postpone its grand opening, originally set for March 21.

Gallery Weekend Beijing, which was scheduled for this month, decided it would delay its 2020 edition, with tentative plans to hold it in mid-April—and to potentially cancel altogether, if conditions have not improved by mid-March. Meanwhile, the March opening of Beijing’s X Museum, a 26,000-square-foot private museum from collector Michael Xufu Huang and businesswoman Theresa Tse, was postponed. And the inaugural edition of CAFAM Techne Triennial, which had been slated to open February 20 at the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, was postponed last month, with no new opening date announced. The Design Shanghai fair, which was slated for March, has been moved to late May.

France

French president Emmanuel Macron has warned that the outbreak of the coronavirus in his country “will last weeks and perhaps months.” In response, the government has banned all gatherings of more than 5,000 people. Though that does not apply to museums, one of the world’s biggest museums briefly closed: the Louvre in Paris, whose staff made the decision to shutter the museum for several days to discuss how best to respond to the coronavirus’s spread. The museum reopened after France’s Minister of Culture and Ministry of Health assured staff that is safe to continue to run business as usual, though it said on March 4 that it would no longer accept cash for tickets so as to prevent the virus from spreading within its staff. On March 9, the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay said they would stay open, but their workers would limit the amount of people who could visit at a given time.

On March 14, the Louvre in Paris announced that it would close indefinitely. The Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie are among the other major institutions that have also closed.

Denmark

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek will be closed through March 27, and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen will be shuttered until at least March 30. The number of cases in Denmark rose over 300 on March 11.

Germany

Art Cologne, the oldest art fair in the world, announced that it would postpone this year’s edition until November. It had been set to take place from April 23 to 26, with some 170 galleries participating. Berlin’s state-run museums also announced closures.

The Berlin State Museums—a group that includes the Altes Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Pergamonmuseum, Neue Nationalgalerie, and Museum für Fotografie—said that they would be closed from March 14 onwards. The Jewish Museum and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin have also announced closures.

The Haus der Kunst in Munich will be closed until April 20, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne will be shuttered through April 19.

Hong Kong 

In what some have said could be a boon for business in the territory, Art Basel Hong Kong canceled its 2020 edition entirely. The fair instead offered some galleries the opportunity to sell their wares via an online viewing room, where sales will be live from March 20 to 25 with preview days on March 18 and 19. Public museums in Hong Kong were among the first to be forced to close in January. In response to the crisis, Sotheby’s has relocated its modern and contemporary Hong Kong sales to New York in April.

On March 11, several public museums—including Hong Kong Museum of Art and Hong Kong Heritage Museum—partially reopened.

Ireland

The Irish Museum of Modern Art said that after, the museum closed to visitors on March 12, it would remain shuttered through at least March 15.

Italy

Museums in northern Italy experienced closures in February but began reopening in early March. Affected institutions included the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and ARTnews Top 200 collector François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi, both in Venice; the Fondazione Prada in Milan; and the Castello di Rivoli in Turin. The Duomo di Milano also closed temporarily, and the Venice galleries Alma Zevi and Victoria Miro were impacted as well. The Venice Architecture Biennale announced on March 4 that it would postpone its 2020 edition, originally scheduled to open in May, until August. After some museums in Italy’s Lombardy region briefly reopened in early March, they shuttered once again, as part of an order from the country’s government to close all institutions. Among the institutions to close was Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale, which was opened a blockbuster Raphael show in early March, only to shutter it days later. Many galleries in the country’s northern region—including Cassina Projects, Massimo De Carlo, and Monica de Cardenas—were forced to close. Monitor, which has spaces in Rome and Pereto, closed its locations and had to delay the opening of an exhibition at its Lisbon location. 

Japan

Institutions across Japan have said they would be closed until mid-March. Among them are the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the Kyoto National Museum, and the National Museum of Art in Osaka. Blum & Poe gallery was forced to postpone several exhibitions in its Tokyo space and adjust its hours of operation. Tokyo’s National Museum of Western Art, which will remain closed through March 16, was set to open an exhibition of major loans from the National Gallery in London on March 3. 

Netherlands

The European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht had said that it would go on as planned from March 7 to 15, even after three exhibitors—Wildenstein and Co. (of New York), Fergus McCaffrey (New York), and Galerie Monbrison (Paris)—dropped out. The fair, which convened some 280 galleries, said in a statement that it would increase “precautionary measures, such as additional all-day cleaning services and distribution and placement of hand sanitizers at the fair.” On March 11, after the Art Newspaper reported that an exhibitor tested positive for the virus, the fair closed several days early.

On March 12, major museums in the Netherlands announced temporary closures. The Rijksmuseum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam said they would remain closed until March 31. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague will also be shuttered through the end of March.

South Korea

In response to what South Korean president Moon Jae-in has called “a grave turning point” for the country, the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, and the National Museum of Korea, all of them located in Seoul, have been closed until further notice. Gyeongbokgung Palace, one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions, has suspended all official guided tours “until further notice,” according to the palace’s website.

Spain

Spain’s Ministry of Culture and Sports ordered 13 national museums—including the Prado, Reina Sofía, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid—to close on March 12. These institutions, however, are providing some online offers for visitors. The Thyssen-Bornemisza created a virtual tour of its  exhibition “Rembrandt and Portraiture in Amsterdam, 1590–1670” that can be accessed online, and the Prado posted a 20-minute talk, given by its director, Miguel Falomir, on Tintoretto’s Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet.

United Arab Emirates

Art Dubai has postponed its 2020 fair, which was originally scheduled for late March. A new opening date has not been set, though the fair has announced it will organize a program in the city during the event’s planned dates. The Sharjah Art Foundation will postpone an arts summit slated to run from March 21–23 until further notice; its exhibition spaces will continue to remain open during regular public hours. Other Emirati arts organizations, including the Jameel Arts Centre, the Alserkal Avenue organization, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi, have not yet announced any plans to close or cancel events.

United States

No major American institutions have temporarily shuttered yet in response to the coronavirus, though many are beginning to take precautions. Nearly a dozen New York museums reached by ARTnews—including the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, and the Frick Collection—said that they are monitoring the situation closely. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Getty Trust has formed a coronavirus task force to keep its employees, volunteers, and visitors safe; the institution has also canceled all employee travel to Italy, China, and South Korea. The city’s Museum of Contemporary Art has established a task force as well, and the Art Institute of Chicago has limited staff travel. Meanwhile, the fairs held in New York during Armory Week—the ADAA Art Show, the Armory Show, the Independent, and the Spring/Break Art Show—went on as planned, albeit with more sanitizer than usual.

In mid-March, news of the first major exhibition postponements starting coming in. Gagosian and Pace Gallery, both in New York, indefinitely delayed their planned exhibitions of works from the Donald Marron collection, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. said a blockbuster with work by Genoese Baroque artists would not happen in May as planned.

On Mach 11, the L.A. Art Book Fair, which was scheduled to take place at the Geffen Contemporary space of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art from April 3 to 5, was canceled. That same day, Paris Photo New York, which had been set to run from April 2 to 5 at Pier 94, announced that it would would be postponed, with new dates to be announced as soon as possible.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art became the first major New York institution to announce that it would close temporarily in an attempt to mitigate the spread of the virus. Starting on Friday, March 13, the museum will close all three of its locations. At the time the news broke, the museum had not announced a reopening date. The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Jewish Museum, and the New Museum were also among those who announced closures. In Boston, four museums—the Harvard Art Museums, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts—also announced that they would indefinitely close.

Three mega-galleries also said they would temporarily close some American locations. David Zwirner has plans to close two out of three of its New York spaces, Hauser & Wirth will close its New York and Los Angeles galleries, and Pace Gallery will shutter its New York flagship.

The Dallas Art Fair in Texas said that it would postpone its 2020 edition, which had been scheduled from April 16–19. It plans to take place from October 1–4, honoring tickets purchased for the April dates.

The Getty Museum and Getty Villa in Los Angeles announced that they would be closed beginning March 14. The museum said in a statement issued on March 12 that “given the fluidity and uncertainty of the current crisis, Getty cannot determine the duration of the closure at this time.”

On March 18, Frieze New York announced that it would cancel its 2020 edition, scheduled for early May, and that it would begin work on its 2021 edition.

On Wednesday, Gallery Weekend Beijing, an event that was scheduled for March, said it would delay its 2020 edition in compliance with safety recommendations from officials in China. If conditions improve, the event will now be held in mid-April. If they do not, the event’s organizers said, Gallery Weekend Beijing will be canceled for this year. A final decision on when—and whether—Gallery Weekend Beijing will transpire this year will come by March 15.

“In order to prevent the spread of the virus, the Gallery Weekend Beijing team has been working remotely as of 1 February,” a statement put out by the event reads. “Facing this major threat to public health, all members of the team will fully cooperate with prevention and control measures while still working online with the utmost efficiency.”

The news comes after one of Gallery Weekend Beijing ‘s major attractions—the opening of the X Museum, a new private museum in Beijing from collector Michael Xufu Huang and businesswoman Theresa Tse—delayed its March opening.

Gallery Weekend Beijing is the biggest art event so far to be called off because of the coronavirus. Many are currently awaiting word about the 2020 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, which is currently set to run from March 19 to 21. Although some gallerists have called on the fair to cancel this year’s edition, a few Hong Kong spaces have voiced support for holding the event in spite of the coronavirus and the ongoing protests.

Beyond Beijing, other galleries, museums, and art events have also postponed shows and openings amid the coronavirus scare. The inaugural edition of February’s CAFAM Techne Triennial was postponed last month, with no new opening date immediately announced. The He Art Museum, a new private museum in Foshan, also said it would no longer open in March, and David Zwirner revealed that a planned Luc Tuymans show that was originally going to appear at its Hong Kong space would be headed to a different one of its galleries instead. The Design Shanghai fair, which was slated for March, was moved to late May as well.

“We would like to warmly remind friends, colleagues, and visitors to stay safe, wear masks, and wash your hands frequently to protect your own health and that of your family,” Gallery Weekend Beijing said in its statement. “Thank you for supporting Gallery Weekend Beijing and for your anticipation of our program. We will continue to present the most compelling exhibitions and events in Beijing when the epidemic ends.”

In keeping with this internationalism, Western works were shown at many of the participating spaces: paintings by five German artists at Boers-Li, installations and videos by Carsten Höller at Galleria Continua, videos by Paul McCarthy at M Woods, steel sculptures by Richard Deacon at Beijing Commune, bright mural-size paintings (some representational, some abstract) and films by Sarah Morris at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Other venues offered an even-handed mix, such as the matchup of abstract painters John McLean (b. 1939, United Kingdom) and Wang Jian (b. 1972, China) at PIFO Gallery.

Group exhibitions emphasized new media and current critical issues. At Hyundai Motorstudio, “A Precarious Universe” comprised works exploring the theme of physical and social mobility, such as Dachal Choi’s large color photographs of young people who gig themselves out on an hourly basis through social media. “Genders Engender,” at Taikang Space, presented fashionably casual installations and texts scrutinizing contemporary female identity: What is it? How is it constructed? Who can play?

Yet GWBJ’s cosmopolitanism is only half the story. The current art scene in the People’s Republic is a house deeply, though so far peacefully, divided. Shifting, moment to moment, between the two halves of this bicameral culture is more taxing than the fourteen-hour flight from New York, more disconcerting than the noon-is-midnight jetlag.

At a dinner and studio visit unconnected with GWBJ, the party secretary of the Chinese Artists Association, Xu Li, told me that membership in this elite group of approximately seven thousand is open only to artists who have won prizes in the official salon exhibitions. With acceptance comes the likelihood of lucrative commissions, subsidized studio space, and a highly esteemed teaching position. Many collectors will buy only from CAA-certified artists. The transnational Chinese art-stars that foreigners regard as independent (Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang, etc.) are in fact association members, though they may not highlight that credential abroad. Favored practices include calligraphy, landscapes, caricature, bird and flower studies, and academic (an honorific term in China) still-life painting and figuration. Animating the organization, whose “true Chinese” aesthetic is widely endorsed by the public, are the dual convictions that contemporary experimental art is inept and tasteless, and that, rather than doggedly follow Western trends, Chinese artists should strive to preserve the country’s timeless cultural essence and refined artistic skills. All the while cunningly assimilating a modern inflection, of course. “Let the past serve the present,” as Mao Zedong advocated, “and foreign things serve China.”

This doctrine explicitly shaped the Chinese pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The exhibition there was curated by the often experimental artist/professor Qiu Zhijie but displayed, in accordance with current government policy, ink painting, cut-paper works, embroidery, and shadow puppetry. Such neo-traditionalism now affects many formerly radical midcareer artists and ambitious newcomers alike, along with numerous young curators and critics weaned on experimentalism but lately conscience-bound to weigh the “Chinese-ness” of all they do. The return of the repressed can be fierce when a country has seen its cultural legacy internally squelched for nearly thirty years (1949–76, under Mao) and threatened thereafter with a friendly inundation of foreign products, styles, and ideas. Even GWBJ bore traces of the reclamation impulse, which has burgeoned since Xi Jinping took power five years ago.

At Ink Studio, Zheng Chongbin presented blocky black-and-white abstractions, two-dimensional and sculptural, of a quasi-Western variety. As the 2013 show “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China” at the Metropolitan Museum in New York demonstrated, the term “new ink” can be applied to virtually any recent artwork that employs so much as a single dab of China’s most revered traditional medium—or none at all, if a given sculpture, video, photograph, oil painting, or performance can be construed as reflecting the “spirit” of the Chinese old masters. Thus, work like Zheng’s—which dizzyingly echoes Pollock, Tobey, and Kline echoing classic chi-driven Eastern influences—adds a tinge of round-robin globalism to today’s massive resurgence of nativist forms and sentiments in the PRC.

Even Galerie Urs Meile, long a bastion of avant-garde work both Chinese and foreign, sometimes defers to the now prevailing temperament, as it did with its Shao Fan exhibition, which featured the artist’s stylized wooden sculptures that allude to antique Chinese furniture, and his spooky-funny animal portraits in ink on superimposed layers of rice paper.

Overall, though, contemporary-style practice held sway among GWBJ’s sixty artists and four hundred works. The cavernous Long March Space was almost overwhelmed by Liu Wei’s metal sculptures spay-painted with false shadows and his large cement spheres moving ominously overhead. Implying a critique of cultural infrastructure, Yunyu Ayo Shih dug up portions of ShanghART’s concrete floor to expose, and clean, the gallery’s heating pipes. At Tang Contemporary Art, Zhu Jinshi, a veteran of the groundbreaking late-’70s Stars group, offered two enormous, thick-walled, horizontally hung tubes composed of seven thousand pieces of layered rice paper each. Wang Haiyang used one gallery at White Space for bright, high-energy gestural paintings and the other for “texts” composed of dead mosquitos on paper and videos showing such bizarre delights as chatty wads of gum perched on beach chairs and symmetrically mirrored heads, each of which seems to deeply kiss its double narcissistically.

Zhang Yue’s solo show at Gallery Yang was chosen as the best presentation at GWBJ. The sprawling installation focused on gun use, private and military, a topic that the artist—who spent four years in prison for killing a man in a fight—has been researching since 2013. Zhang interviewed rifle-range enthusiasts, criminals, cops, soldiers, and refugees, commemorating their experiences with paper targets, competition tally sheets, old gun permits, maps, diagrams, and other ephemera. For citizens of China, who are not allowed to possess private firearms (except for the tightly regulated purpose of hunting), the effect must have been startling. For an American, not so much. Any single table at a US cash-and-carry gun show would, so to speak, blow Zhang’s work away—with the glamour of real weaponry and its portent of breaking-news carnage.

That cultural contrast was yet another reminder of the importance of context. Theoretically, it may be easy to dismiss Chinese artistic conservatism out of hand. But is it prudent, or intellectually valid, to do so when the PRC’s neo-traditionalism represents the majority taste of one fifth of humanity, the commercial core of the world’s second-largest art market, the cultural policy of Asia’s ascendant geopolitical power, and the persistent “other” frame of reference for even the hippest young Chinese artists and critics? The times don’t always change in the manner we wish.

Yin Xiuzhen’s Trojan figure, braced for in-flight turbulence or an emergency landing, shared Pace’s galleries with Xiao Yu’s minimal, elegantly bent bamboo works—an exercise in formal virtuosity by an artist once notorious, two decades ago during the emergence of China’s avant-garde, for monstrous hybrid creatures (a winged rabbit, a fetus-headed bird) subtly stitched together and floating in formaldehyde. Those wild-and-woolly days are clearly past. Tellingly, Yin’s second major installation in the show was a field of dried weeds and grasses “growing” out of a bed of concrete—a sardonic metaphor, perhaps, for the age of precarity.

Still, her giant youthful avatar remains in transit. The passenger’s bumpy, uncertain journey is a reminder that the formerly dominant schema of successive artistic problem-solving—a cutting edge, irreversible “progress” toward a single teleological end—was always too linear and too simplistic. Our time requires a more complex navigational math—one that accounts for stops and starts, ruptures and recuperations, parallelisms, fluid dynamics, convergences, and myriad cycles and recyclings.