2026.10.23–2027.02.23

KW-ART CENTER

Room 201, 2nd Floor, East Tower, World Financial Center, 1 Dongsanhuan Zhonglu, Chaoyang District, Beijing

Curator: Yu Lingxuan

Artists: Cai Yaling, Chen Ke, Chen Xi, Ding Yi, Fang Lijun, Hai Bo, Huang Rui, Jiang Jie, Liang Shaoji, Liu Xiaodong, Miao Xiaochun, Shang Yang, Song Kun, Sun Yitian, Wang Guangyi, Xing Danwen, Yu Youhan, Zhan Wang, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhou Chunya.

How does an era leave its mark? Its traces enter history, but also the body, emotions, desires and everyday life. Art offers a distinctive way of recording these traces: it may not speak directly of an era, yet it often reveals, almost incidentally, how its people see the world. A work preserves both the artist’s personal experience and clues to how a society understands itself.

Since China’s reform and opening up, profound changes have taken place in people’s lived experience, values and visual memories. Urban development has reshaped relationships between people and places, commodities and advertising help shape desire, and screens and networks have become everyday means of encountering the world. Working within these conditions, artists re-examine personal experience and cultural traditions while continuing to explore the possibilities of form, material and medium. Art responds to reality and, through the invention of its own languages, expands how we perceive and understand the world.

How to bring these diverse artistic practices into closer contact with audiences today remains a central concern of KW-ARTCENTER. For ten years, the center has brought contemporary art into everyday urban life through exhibitions and communications in the heart of Beijing’s CBD. In this commercial district, where efficiency and achievement are everyday measures, art preserves a space for other ways of seeing and thinking: we can recognize our own experience in a work, or encounter different feelings, perspectives and understandings. King & Wood’s sustained support for art has enabled these encounters to continue and gradually become part of the city’s public life. From first visits to subsequent returns, the relationship between an art space and its city takes shape through these encounters.

In 2026, KW-ARTCENTER marks its tenth anniversary. Ten years have brought experience and trust; yet for an art institution, ten is still young. At this moment, we wish to turn our attention towards practices that deserve a continuing investment of time. The Coordinates of Time takes this as its point of departure, drawing on our observations to bring together representative artists and works along ten strands of contemporary Chinese art that merit sustained attention, making this anniversary the beginning of a dialogue with the future.

These ten strands encompass both explorations that have deepened over time and profoundly shaped contemporary Chinese art, and new fields continually unfolding alongside changes in society, everyday life and technology. The practices of different generations converge here, leaving vivid visual memories while continuing to generate new ideas and artistic languages. Following these strands, we can trace the journey of contemporary Chinese art to the present and discern the possibilities for its future that are still taking shape.

The exhibition takes works that are distinctly representative of each strand as its coordinates. In these works, the defining concerns and characteristics of different artistic languages find concentrated, compelling expression, offering important points of reference for understanding the practices to which they belong. When brought together in one space, individual works acquire further meaning in relation to one another, revealing the broader artistic practices behind them. Moving from works to strands of practice, and through the affinities and differences between them, a picture of contemporary Chinese art today gradually emerges. The Coordinates of Time invites viewers to experience the force of the works themselves, develop an overall understanding of contemporary Chinese art, and discover directions that warrant lasting attention.

The tenth anniversary is a moment to pause, but our gaze need not remain fixed on the past. Works are continually reinterpreted over time, just as our relationships with art deepen through repeated acts of looking. The Coordinates of Time hopes that today’s encounters will extend beyond the gallery, becoming experiences that remain with us, to be recalled and discussed in everyday life. For KW-ARTCENTER, continuing to preserve a space for such encounters is a commitment we are willing to sustain over the long term. The meanings that art generates through time will continue to unfold with each future act of looking.

The Coordinates of Time

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