Eliana Willis

Gallery Weekend Beijing returns this weekend after nearly a month’s delay due to Covid restrictions in the Chinese capital, making it the first major in-person cultural event in China this year. Featuring a stellar line-up of more than 40 thematic exhibitions, by both local and international commercial galleries as well as non-profit organizations, the week-long event aims to bring audiences back after a difficult first half of 2022.
“The first half of the year has been a great challenge to local galleries, and people have high expectations of this year’s edition since it is the first main cultural event taking place physically,” said Amber Yifei Wang, director of Gallery Weekend Beijing, during an online press conference. “We hope this can be a great reboot of the local art scene.”
Running from this Friday, June 24, through July 3, with the first three days (June 24 to 26) serving as VIP previews, this year’s edition features exhibitions revolving around the theme of “Sharing.” There are 30 galleries and five non-profit institutions in the main sector, a rise from the last couple of years. as well as seven international galleries featured in the “Visiting Sector.”
Chen Shuxia, Eastward (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Asia Art Center.
Female artists are in the spotlight this year, with several galleries presenting works by women artists. Beijing Commune presents a solo show of paintings by the Xi’an-born, Beijing-based artist Liang Yuanwei (b. 1977). And at the Asia Art Center, Chen Shuxia (b. 1963) reflects the helplessness and depression experienced during the pandemic through a new body of work on canvas. Tabula Rasa Gallery has a group show of paintings by eight European female artists, while White Space presents the Beijing-born Liu Shiyuan (b. 1985), who works with photography, video, stage performance and installations.
This year also features the first collaboration among Beijing’s non-profit institutions, which are staging thematic exhibitions. Held at the 798 Art Center, the show “Crosstalk” is curated by four young curators—Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum’s Wenlong Huang and Yichuan Zhang, as well as Neil Zhang and Jiashu Zou from UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. It features works by more than 20 artists represented by galleries in Gallery Weekend Beijing’s main sector.
International dealers Pilar Corrias, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Gladstone Gallery, Balice Hertling, Kiang Malingue, Timothy Taylor, and Almine Rech are participating in the event’s visiting sector, presenting shows in temporary spaces with local staff. Among them, Chantal Crousel, Timothy Taylor, and Almine Rech are making their debut at Gallery Weekend Beijing.
Andrea Marie Breiling, Emma (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech. Photo: Adam Reich Photography.
Despite the stringent Covid restrictions and hard lockdown across the country, galleries are confident in Chinese collectors’ buying power, particularly those from a younger generation. Star-maker gallerist Almine Rech, who is presenting abstract paintings by the New York-based Andrea Marie Breiling—the artist’s debut show in China—said demand for works by the artist has been going strong, and Chinese buyers have been very active internationally.
“We have galleries in Paris, London, Brussels, and New York, and Chinese collectors are buying from each of them,” Rech said during the virtual press conference. “They are buying internationally. The young and active collectors in China are tastemakers, and they are an important force for the global art scene.”
Despite the high hopes, Wang admitted that organizing this year’s Gallery Weekend Beijing has not been easy, as the pandemic situation in China keeps changing, and restrictions take a very localized approach to meet the country’s ongoing dynamic zero-Covid policy.
But the show will go on. Last year’s edition saw a record-breaking attendance of 199,000 visitors, despite Covid restrictions, but setting a new record this year isn’t a priority for the event’s organizers.
“We have to adhere to the restrictions by maintaining control over the attendance, with allocated time slots. We also adopted a hybrid format for those who cannot join us in person. We just have to be flexible and be agile in terms of organization and planning,” Wang said. “Visitors’ safety is our priority.”
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Two major public sculptures were unveiled yesterday in London to honor the Windrush Generation, the hundreds of thousands of West Indian migrants who moved to the U.K. in the decades after World War II.
A large bronze monument depicting new arrivals from the Caribbean standing on suitcases, by the Jamaican artist Basil Watson, was inaugurated at Waterloo Station. In the London borough of Hackney, Warm Shores, two standalone sculptures by Thomas J. Price, were installed outside the town hall. 
The works were made public on Windrush Day, which was first introduced on June 22, 2018, to commemorate the Caribbean arrivals, including those on the Empire Windrush ship that docked in 1948. They made major contributions to the rebuilding of postwar Britain but also faced discrimination. 
The National Windrush Monument at Waterloo Station in London. Photo courtesy of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
The official National Windrush Monument by Basil Watson is intended to convey the courage, commitment, and resilience of those who migrated to start new lives in the U.K. between 1948 and 1971, when the Immigration Act was introduced. The work was made possible through £1 million funding from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. 
“My parents, along with a great many others, took the long arduous voyage from the Caribbean with very little or nothing other than their aspirations, their courage, and a promise of opportunity for advancement,” said Watson. “Despite many challenges, they spread their culture across Britain influencing many aspects of society.” 
Thomas J. Price in front of Warm Shores (2022) outside Hackney Town Hall. Photo: Damian Griffiths.
Thomas J. Price won the Hackney Windrush Art Commission in 2020 for his proposal to depict the Windrush Generation and their descendants. In May 2021, he invited Hackney residents with a personal connection to Windrush to be digitally photographed with a 3D-scanning device. The information gathered about clothing, features, and stature were all used in composite to inform the final two large-scale bronze sculptures of a man and a woman. 
“It is important that my figures are not placed on plinths, to disrupt a sense of hierarchy that surrounds many public monuments,” said Price. “They exist amongst the public and daily life and are an extension of the people who inhabit these spaces.”
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This year’s Whitney Biennial names 63 participating artists and collectives, but unless visitors also buy a copy of the exhibition catalogue, they will only be able to see works by 62 of them.
That’s because artist EJ Hill, known primarily for his arduous durational performance art, declined to show his work at the museum. Instead, he contributed only to the biennial’s official publication, where he is represented by a blank page of pink paper.
Striking in its simplicity, the pale pink page is strangely beautiful, a thin sliver of color visible in the book’s fore-edge when the pages are closed. But it’s undoubtedly an unorthodox response to an invitation to one of the contemporary art world’s most prestigious exhibitions—one that would be a major career milestone for any young artist.
Through his Los Angeles gallery, Commonwealth and Council, Hill declined to comment on the move, leaving the interpretation of the cryptic gesture up to the viewer. But the artist’s previous works may offer some clues.
EJ Hill, Altar (for victors past, present, and future) in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Photo courtesy of the Hammer Museum at UCLA.
For the 2018 “Made in L.A.” biennial at the Hammer Museum, Hill revisited six of the seven schools he had attended in the city and ran laps around them. He later installed a model track in the galleries and, for the entirety of the show, stood atop a podium-like sculpture in the galleries.
A statement from the museum said the work “reflects both the hardships that certain bodies are forced to endure and the enormous resilience of those bodies.”
The omission of Hill’s own body from the Whitney Biennial, and his refusal this time to endure physical hardship, also speaks volumes.
EJ Hill’s contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial is a blank pink page in the exhibition catalogue. Photo by Paul Salveson.
It could be read as a decision rooted in self care, and a natural progression from Hill’s recent solo show “Wherever We Will to Root,” which opened at Los Angeles’s Occidental College in February, and featured a series of six floral paintings.
This departure from physical performance was about “the work of care, a therapeutic mechanism for healing, rehabilitation, and even refusal,” according to the exhibition statement.
EJ Hill’s contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial is a blank pink page in the exhibition catalogue. Photo by Paul Salveson.
“No more wringing myself dry. Just flowers, and clouds, and puppies, and ribbons, and pink, and other sissy boy shit,” Hill wrote in a since-deleted Instagram post that was quoted by the Art Newspaper.
The artist’s account now contains just one post, shared on April 7, of a plain pink square. It’s the same shade of “Millennial Pink,” which became ubiquitous over the past decade, as the catalogue contribution, and it, too, offers no caption or explanation.
“We admire EJ’s embrace of opacity and his questioning of what representation means at this historical moment,” David Breslin and Adrianne Edwards, the exhibition’s co-curators, told Artnet News in an email.
EJ Hill’s contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial is a blank pink page in the exhibition catalogue. Photo by Paul Salveson.
Hill’s pink page has a soothing aura about it, seemingly offering readers a moment to rest. Perhaps it also offered Hill a moment to recharge his creative energies for his next artistic endeavor—and it looks like a return to performance is on the horizon, with a solo show featuring an installation with a performance stage opening at MASS MoCA in the fall.
“Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, April 6–September 5, 2022.
“EJ Hill: Brake Run Helix” will be on view at MASS MoCA, 1040 MASS MoCA WAYNorth Adams, Massachusetts, October 29, 2022–January 2024.
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At this year’s Carnegie International, the emphasis is definitely on the “international.”
“How can we think of the ‘international’ as an idea from the specific place that we’re working from?” said Sohrab Mohebbi, head curator of the 58th edition of the show, set to open this September at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 
The exhibition will seek to answer this question by tracing the “geopolitical imprint of the U.S. since 1945”—a moment that, according to Mohebbi, signals both the birth of contemporary art and the country’s ascension to global hegemonic power. 
The exhibition’s global framing is mirrored by its expansive list of participants, a lineup that includes artists both living and dead, as well as several creative collectives and institutional collections. Altogether, there are 150 names from 40 territories around the world, including Claes Oldenburg, Diane Severin Nguyen, Susan Meiselas, and Trương Công Tùng. 
Trương Công Tùng, the state of absence–voices from outside (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
That’s a huge grouping, even for a historically scopious show like the International, which is the longest-running exhibition series in the U.S. (The previous edition, in 2018, for instance, boasted 32 collectives.) 
“The show is, by design, different in almost every way,” said Eric Crosby, director of the Carnegie Museum. Among the themes animating it are “issues of artistic solidarity, reconstitution, and responding to traumatic world events.” 
Special focus will be given to “thinking historically,” the director went on, “to looking not just at the present moment but at practices that have been overlooked by art history. We want to bring those practices into the museum alongside the [Carnegie’s] own collection in a way that prompts new reconsiderations of our history through the lens of the contemporary.”
Edgar Calel, Pa ru tun che ́ (From the Treetop) (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
Édgar Calel, a Kaqchikel artist, was responsible for the show’s title: “Is it morning for you yet?” Calel was visiting Mohebbi in Pittsburgh when he explained that, for his people in the Mayan Kaqchikel community of Guatemala, it is customary not to say “good morning” but to ask, “Is it morning for you yet?”
“This really kept resonating in many ways,” Mohebbi recalled, referring again to the relativity of the exhibition’s conceit. The title, he said, “was a way for us to acknowledge this question around what is contemporary. Are we together? Are we on the same clock? Let’s check our times together.”

See the full list of the participating collectives, institutions, estates, and artists below:  
Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara 
Ali Eyal 
Võ An Khánh 
Andy Robert 
Angel Velasco Shaw 
Anh Trần 
Antonio Martorell with poetry by Ernesto Cardenal 
Aziz Hazara 
Banu Cennetoğlu 
Carlos Cañas 
Carlos Motta 
Christian Nyampeta 
Claes Oldenburg 
Colectivo 3 (Aarón Flores, Araceli Zúñiga, Blanca Noval Vilar, and César Espinosa) Dala Nasser 
Daniel Lie 
Denzil Forrester 
Dia al-Azzawi
Diane Severin Nguyen 
Doan Ket 
Dogma Collection 
Édgar Calel 
Felix Gonzalez-Torres 
Fereydoun Ave 
Giana De Dier 
Hiromi Tsuchida 
Hyphen— (Akmalia Rizqita “Chita,” Grace Samboh, Ratna Mufida), presenting works by: Kustiyah alongside Edhi Sunarso, Gregorius Sidharta Soegijo, Kartika, Rustamadji, Siti Ruliyati,  Sriyani Hudyonoto, Sudarso, Trubus Soedarsono, Zaini 
I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih 
Isabel De Obaldía 
James “Yaya” Hough 
Joong Seop Lee 
Julian Abraham “Togar” 
Tith Kanitha 
Karen Tei Yamashita 
Kate Millett 
Krista Belle Stewart 
Laal Collection 
Laila Shawa 
LaToya Ruby Frazier 
Let’s Get Free: The Women and Trans Prisoner Defense Committee 
Los Angeles Poverty Department 
Louise E. Jefferson 
Malcolm Peacock 
Margarita Azurdia 
Melike Kara 
Michael Zinzun 
Mire Lee 
Mohammed Sami 
Monira Al Qadiri 
Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende Collection presenting works by: Alberto Pérez, Alfredo Portillos, Anders Åberg, Anonymous women, Bat T. Tchouloun, Carol Law,  Derek Boshier, Eduardo Terrazas, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Francisco Brugnoli, Gontran Guanaes  Netto, Hanns Karlewski, Hugo Rivera-Scott, Leonilda González, Lilo Salberg, Luis Felipe Noé, Luis  Tomasello, Maryse Eloy, Myra Landau, N. Bavoujav, Öyvind Fahlström, Patricia Israel, Paul Peter  Piech, Ricardo Mesa, Ryszard Winiarski, Sambuungiin Mashbat, SANALBAT (S. Natsagdorj, N.  Sandagdorj, N. Sukhbat), Valentina Cruz, Ximena Armas 
Nancy Buchanan 
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa 
Nikki Arai 
Pacita Abad 
Patricia Belli 
Philomé Obin 
Pio Abad 
Rafa Nasiri and Etel Adnan 
Rafael Domenech 
Vandy Rattana 
Park Rehyun 
Rini Templeton 
Roberto Cabrera 
Rosa Mena Valenzuela
Sanaa Gateja 
Soun-Gui Kim 
Susan Meiselas 
Svay Ken 
Tei Carpenter / Agency—Agency 
terra0 
Thu Van Tran 
Thuraya Al-Baqsami 
Tishan Hsu 
Tony Cokes 
Trương Công Tùng  
Yolanda Lopez 
Yooyun Yang 
Zahia Rahmani
“Is it morning for you yet?” will run from September 24, 2022 through April 2, 2023 at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Three centuries ago, sweetgum trees blanketed the island of Manhattan. Next month, a grove of those same trees will pop up in Times Square, albeit upside down—a symbol of all the cultures that have been uprooted and erased by racial capitalism’s merciless march. 
The installation is just one component of a hugely ambitious—and rigorously conceptual—project by Charles Gaines. It also marks the first time the venerable artist has created public art in his five-decade-long career.
Presented by Creative Time, Times Square Arts, and Governors Island Arts, the project will move from Manhattan to Governors Island and then all the way to Cincinnati, Ohio, actualizing the route that enslaved African Americans once took along the Ohio River, seeking freedom in the North. 
Capitalism and the institution of slavery are at the heart of Gaines’s target here, but the artwork, called The American Manifest, also interrogates issues of colonization, environmental exploitation, and how the country’s unique topography, legal history, and property laws fed a system of subjugation that continues today.
“The installation,” Gaines told Artnet News, “is intended to unpack these things and show the relationship they have to each other.” 
“The entire narrative isn’t exposed in one location,” he continued. “It takes a consideration of all three locations to see the entanglement of how connected these practices have been in shaping the American institute.” 
Gaines’s installation of sweetgums, called Roots, will open in Times Square, the de facto capital of American commerce, on July 13. Inaugurating the event will be a two-night performance of an operatic piece the artist composed based on the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that Black people were not conferred citizenship under the U.S. Constitution. During the performances, the text of Justice Roger Taney’s decision, which Gaines calls “unbelievable” still today, will scroll down a screen mounted before the iconic Times Square billboards.
Charles Gaines in his Los Angeles studio, 2020. © Charles Gaines. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.
In October, Gaines will open the second “chapter” of his project on Governors Island: a 100-foot-long immersive sculpture meant to recall the hull of an old ship, perhaps one transporting slaves. Inside, eight motor-operated chains will rotate along at the pace of the current in New York’s harbor (roughly 2.5 knots, the artist said), while a ninth, central chain will churn at a quicker clip—the average speed (7 knots) of ships and barges.
“The middle chain points to the speed of commerce,” Gaines explained, “while the other chains reflect the flow of the river.” 
Visitors can climb atop the imposing structure to watch the chains from above or enter to view them from below. “The sound,” according to the artist, “will be massive.” He hopes the “challenging” piece, called Moving Chains, will engender a visceral response.
Come Summer 2023, Moving Chains will open on the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati, completing The American Manifest’s path. 
Though it may be unlikely that many viewers will experience all three stages of Gaines’s vision, Creative Time executive director Justine Ludwig said the project was “conceived so that individual elements could stand on their own as singular experiences.”
“Part of the power of public art is that visitors sometimes just happen upon the work,” she added. “It provides a truly unexpected experience that intersects with the rhythms of daily life.”
Many will have that experience, it seems. Times Square Arts director Jean Cooney expects 20 million people to encounter the first part of The American Manifest this summer alone.
“Charles [is an artist who] approaches critical and monumental topics in a way that requires meditation and attention,” Cooney said. “My hope is that even if a small portion of that audience is able to either conceptually link these narratives, or even better, experience Gaines’s installation on Governors Island or head home to Ohio and see his work there, we’ve fulfilled our responsibility as a public art organization to provide new access points for discovery and engagement.”
Chapter One of Charles Gaines’s The American Manifest will be on view from July 13 – September 23, 2022 in Times Square in New York. Chapters Two and Three will open in October 2022 and the Summer of 2023, respectively.
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