Chinese Contemporary Art is Thriving

Chinese Contemporary Art is Thriving

Discover eight works that highlight the scope of creativity among Chinese artists today — all on offer in our upcoming Hong Kong auction.

Discover eight works that highlight the scope of creativity among Chinese artists today — all on offer in our upcoming Hong Kong auction.

Wei Jia, Say Goodbye VI, 2007. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.

中文閱讀

A remarkable breadth of contemporary art has emerged from China in the past half century, with significant growth in both global reach and artist recognition. Across work that ranges from the figurative to the abstract, conceptual to realist, Chinese contemporary artists represent a visual exploration of cultural change that we're only beginning to unpack.

Here, discover eight works in our upcoming Hong Kong Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale in Hong Kong that should be on your radar.

 

Wei Jia

Wei Jia, Say Goodbye VI, 2007. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.

When encountering Wei Jia’s Say Goodbye VI, our eyes first notice the remarkable detail of the larger-than-life owl figure seen from behind — a symbol of solitude and wisdom. The texture and shadow push the animal closer to us, and we sense this owl has joined us as we both gaze out into the horizon. The picture plane itself that cuts us out as we realize this masterfully executed scene is at once a depiction of emotional release, individual growth, and the sense of alienation that often comes with these insights. Wei once explained that this work reflects his “lonely, proud swordsman” state of mind — a sense of detachment where past regrets are released, but a distance from reality always lingers.

Born in 1975 in Chengdu and now based in Chongqing, Wei Jia is a highly respected contemporary Chinese artist and is currently the president of Sichuan Fine Arts. In 1999, he graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Between 2003 and 2004, he began experimenting with acrylic painting, which allowed him to incorporate elements from his printmaking into his paintings, creating a unique fusion of the two mediums.

From December 2024 to March 2025, Beijing’s Song Art Museum held the artist’s largest solo exhibition to date, Wei Jia: Fantasy and Inebriety. This acclaimed exhibition showcased his seamless creative development across 80 works from his early to recent periods. His works are in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including Long Museum, Tank Shanghai, Yuz Museum in Shanghai, Song Museum in Beijing, HE Art Museum in Shunde, DSL Collection in France, and White Rabbit Gallery in Australia.

 

Jia Aili

Jia Aili, Untitled, 2008. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.

Born in 1979 in Dandong, Jia Aili is a leading figure among a new generation of Chinese artists whose practice interrogates painting’s boundaries while synthesizing art historical traditions and contemporary existential inquiry. In Untitled, Jia precisely renders a jet engine, forming a dynamic interplay with the ghostly white figure in the foreground: the former embodies technological rationality, the latter a disciplined corporeal specimen. Jia deftly weaves personal memory into the fabric of collective trauma — jet engines that once served as symbols of progress are now rusted metallic skeletons, mirroring Northeast China's industrial workers' trajectory from “the Republic's eldest sons” to “industrial cast-offs.”

A graduate of Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, Jia gained international recognition after his 2007 solo exhibition The Wasteland, and his epic We Are from the Century in November 2008 cemented his reputation for merging Socialist Realist technique with Taoist-inspired metaphysics. Over the past decade, his monumental canvases have been exhibited at major institutions, including the Singapore Art Museum, Venice’s Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, with solo shows at Gagosian (2019) highlighting his 2019 Sonatine series. His recent exhibitions include: On Sabbatical (2020, West Bund Museum, Shanghai), Duration: Chinese Art in Transformation (2020, Kiang Malingue), and Jia Aili (2017, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Málaga).

 

Wang Guangle

Wang Guangle, Untitled 20070812, 2007. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.

For Wang Guangle, light and time are two sides of the same dimension. His process-based works meticulously layer paint to create glowing, often monochromatic paintings that belie the flatness of their surface — you can peer into their depths for hours and never find the end. 20070812 is perfectly emblematic of this aspect of his approach and obsession with the passage of time, the phenomena of light and colour, and spiritual practice.

Born in 1976 in Fujian, Guangle is a key figure in contemporary Chinese conceptual and abstract painting. He graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing in 2000. In 2003, he co-founded the N12 artist group with fellow CAFA graduates, which sought to broaden the scope of contemporary Chinese painting beyond the prevailing Social Realist aesthetic.

His recent solo exhibitions have included Wang Guangle (2024, Pace Gallery, Seoul), The Dao Way (2025, Fosun Foundation, Shanghai), and Faded Colours (2022, Pace Gallery, London). His work is held in several notable institutional collections, including M+ in Hong Kong, the Long Museum in Shanghai, the Rubell Museum in Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and many more.

 

Liang Yuanwei

Liang Yuanwei, Piece of Life 9, 2006–2007. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.

Liang Yuanwei looks deeply at the details, translating her rational observations of daily life into striking and often experimental works that always make us look twice. Her Piece of Life series stands out as a moment when the artist simplified her language, homing in on the details of daily life and the labour of painting.

Encountering Piece of Life 9 from a distance, a soft gradient is seen, texturized by a faint pattern. Up close, intricate palm trees are revealed to pulse across the canvas, reminiscent of domestic wallpaper. Her process is painstaking and meditative, taking the artist up to eight hours per section. These patterns are first etched into the wet ground and then filled with colour. With the painting measuring nearly one and a half meters tall, this diligent practice is nothing short of impressive.

Born in 1977 in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, Liang Yuanwei has emerged as one of the most prominent female artists of her generation. Her recent solo and group exhibitions include Wu Se Tu (2024–2025, DRC No. 12, Beijing, China), Sailing Home (2024–2025, Zhoushan Art Museum, Zhongshan, China), and Liang Yuanwei (2022, Beijing Commune, Beijing). Her works are also held in prominent institutional collections, including M+ in Hong Kong and the Long Museum in Shanghai.

 

Ma Ke

Ma Ke, Theatre, 2012. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.

Born in 1970 in Zibo, Shandong, and currently based in Beijing, Ma Ke’s artistic path began with early training from his father in traditional Chinese oil painting and Russian social realism. He began to incorporate influences of Western modern and contemporary art during studies at the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Today, he is revered for a distinctive visual language that merges the traditional and contemporary, exploring identity and collective culture through expressive figurative paintings.

Across his works, basic visual dimensions from point to line, stroke, and colour block are reinterpreted in exciting new ways, and we find a constructed reality that can help us make sense of our own. The present lot shows a subject that proves to be fruitful ground for the artist. After all, the art form of theatre is a constructed reality itself, with the gaze of the audience and players reflecting upon each other in a dynamic that mirrors our daily consideration of reality.

Ma Ke’s recent solo exhibitions include Ma Ke: Contemporary Chinese Painting (2024–2025, Moscow Museum of Modern Art), Ma Ke: Monkey and Beetle (2022–2023, PIFO Gallery, Beijing), and Ma Ke: Journey To The West (2022, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich, Germany).

 

Yan Bing

Yan Bing, Mushroom No. 30, 2020. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.

Born in 1980, Yan Bing’s artistic talents vaulted him from an impoverished childhood in Gansu province to art school in Beijing by the early 2000s. It was there that his artistic aspirations were confronted with the realities of survival. “I saw poverty’s splendour, and splendour’s poverty,” he recalls. The artist began to translate his experience into works that elevate the everyday objects of subsistence in northwest China to the subject matter of his primal and spiritual painting practice. His works are now lauded for their restrained palette and monumental scale, evoking a sacred quality that bridges personal history with broader existential themes.

The Mushroom series marked a turning point for Yan Bing, growing out of his Potato series and bringing deeper psychological depth to his practice’s concentration on memory, labor, and rural life. The series stems from the shock of memory the artist felt as he encountered the mushrooms he bought as a child in a market later in life. In other works from the series, the mushrooms are detached from the earth and rendered in ambiguous space, seemingly as consumable products. But Mushroom No. 30 depicts the fungi firmly rooted, distilling a connection to the earth that harkens back to the rugged delicacy of men from the artist’s home.

Yan Bing graduated from the Third Studio of the Oil Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing, in 2007 and currently lives and works in Beijing. His recent solo exhibitions include: Yan Bing: Pear Blossom Turns White (2022, Guangdong Museum of Art), Yan Bing: Suddenly, Everything Became Clear (2021, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai), Apple Orchard (2024, START Museum, Shanghai).

 

Xia Yu

Xia Yu, The Tower of Triumph, 2019. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.

Xia Yu portrays glances of contemporary urban life through his signature tempera medium, creating chalky, opaque surfaces that evoke faded photographs. This tension between the tangible and the ephemeral calls to mind Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings, but Xia Yu’s practice is less focused on the mechanically mediated nature of photography. For him, it is the photographic appearance that lends a conflicting sense of reality to the dreamlike impossibility of his amalgamations. In Tower of Triumph, for example, the artist interrogates the visual markers of identity and the roles we play in society, revealing their fragility and pointing out the power of the image to reveal practically anything.

His recent exhibitions include Subjunctive Mood (2019, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Shenzhen), where the present lot was exhibited, Glittering Light and Sunken Jade (2023, Song Art Museum), and Golden Hour, (2024, K11 MUSEA, Hong Kong).

 

Ding Shilun

Ding Shilun, The Dispute (After La Sylphide), 2021. Modern & Contemporary Art: Evening & Day Sale Hong Kong.

“I consider all the figures in the paintings as the embodiment of myself,” Ding Shilun explains. “They’re all telling a story about me.”

Ding Shilun’s works wander fluidly between the visual languages of Japanese manga, Western popular culture, and Chinese tradition. The Dispute (After La Sylphide), created while he was still a student, shows his exploration of what would become the seed of his hallmark style: the tensions between the classical and the surreal. The romantic ballet La Sylphide is one of the first examples of the genre, telling a tragic story of the relationship between humans and spirits. In Ding Shilun’s reinterpretation, this idea is transformed into another kind of tension: two characters stand in close proximity but are unable to connect. Their bodies are elongated, their backs folded at nearly a right angle, their twisted postures impart the sensations of detachment in contemporary life — anxiety, desire, and resistance.

Born in 1998 in Guangzhou, Ding Shilun now lives and works between London and Guangzhou. In March 2025, the Institute for Contemporary Art, Miami presented his first solo exhibition in the United States — Ding Shilun: Janus. Other notable recent solo exhibitions include Mirage (2024, Bernheim Gallery, London), Invites: Ding Shilun (2023, Zabludowicz Collection, London), and Paradiso (2022, Bernheim Gallery, Zurich).

 

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