Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to announce "The Body to Be Shaped," a solo exhibition of new works by Wu Wei, on view at its Beijing 1st Space from July 4 to August 20, 2026. Curated by Zhu Zhu, the exhibition brings together more than 40 recently completed works by the artist, offering a comprehensive presentation of his latest practice.
Born in Zhengzhou, Henan, Wu Wei grew up in a province where the deep sediment of civilizational history collides violently with a backward and harsh present. He would have encountered, early on, the cruelty embedded in the old saying: when the skin is gone, what anchors the fur? The desolation of the Central Plains stretches across the horizon of his work, yet it functions as ground, never as frame. Through critical reflection, he has stripped away both the overuse of so-called "Oriental symbols" and the regionalism that wears the mask of fidelity but amounts to rigidity and regression.
Tactility—the living, palpable state of matter—was the urge that first drew him to art. The oversized cloth thumbs and the various paper pelages he created in response carry a warmth laced with strangeness, transmitting it to the viewer directly. As he grew more deliberate in contemplating the tension between the primitive and the civilized, identifying "how a primal, beastly force finds its place within civilization" as his central theme, ancient and folk mythologies became sources and reference frames for his visual vocabulary. But he never embarked on a nostalgic quest for totems, never assumed the role of "an artist from ten thousand years ago." Instead, through everyday perception and our already disciplined bodily senses, he conjures the visages of imagined beasts, still "holding onto the joy of incompletion"—a presence at once unmoored and necessary within this time and space.
In the "Section and Substitute" and "Skin Narrative" series, he reworks bodies drawn from Western and Chinese classical image histories, embedding wounds, pelage, and metal parts within them. He strips these carriers of their original religious vectors to expose the vulnerability of flesh, the dual pain of the physiological and the psychological, and the nature and energy that modernity threatens to destroy. As Walter Benjamin observed, "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." What Wu Wei pursues here is not a postmodernist deconstruction, but the disclosure of our civilization and collective fate as a body to be shaped.
The Pelage series on canvas continues. In recent years, his practice has moved away from a strong biomimetic impulse; influenced by abstract painting, it has shifted "from narrative function toward pure perception and formal expression." In addition, the Wild Things series in this exhibition—metal chairs scattered throughout the space and entangled with pelage—are not in a state of subjective overlay. Instead, they present a suspenseful bidirectional dynamic: these wild things may have invaded from the natural world, or they may have found conditions for autonomous growth within the human environment. The spatial atmosphere is stagnant, edged with a nightmarish quality. Years ago, when we were isolated from one another, each of us seemed to have stood alone in such a space. Perhaps this can be read as Wu Wei's renewed question of the primal force.
Text by Zhu Zhu
June, 2026
EXHIBITING WORKS
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Artist
Wu Wei
Wu Wei was born in 1981, Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China. In 2012, Wu Wei graduated from the Experimental Art Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts with a master's degree and now lives in Beijing.
He won the 6th Anniversary Award for the New Artists Space Award in 2015, and won the 3rd New Star Art Festival Art Award in 2012. He participated in international art residency in Vienna, Austria and Berlin, Germany. His works have been exhibited in Tang Contemporary Art (Beijin,Bangkok), Ipswich Museum(England), Ichihara Lakeside Museum(Japan), Power Station of Art (Shanghai), Zhejiang Art Museum, Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Art, Whitebox Art Center (Beijing), Blue Top Art Gallery(Chengdu), MOCA Yinchuan, Host Cloud Art Museum, The Shouter(Shanghai), Leonard Pearlstein Gallery (Philadelphia, U.S.A), Asian Library of University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), HuA Gallery (Berlin, Germany), Migrant Bird Space (Berlin, Germany), GlogauAIR (Berlin, Germany), FLUC Art Space (Vienna, Austria), Gallery SP(South Korea,Seoul) and many other art institutions; public collections includes Minsheng Modern Art Museum, The Museum of Central Academy of Fine Arts, Whitebox Art Center, Today Art Museum, Being3 Art Foundation, Lotte Group, White Rabbit Gallery (Australia) and other institutions.
Beyond engaging with material properties, Wu’s practice interrogates the relationship between humanity, society, and nature. His works often evoke tension and ambiguity, guiding the audience to contemplate underlying cultural connotations. Through a synthesis of personal sentiment and historical culture, Wu Wei’s art embodies a critical reflection on contemporary society, marked by a distinctive perspective and intellectual depth.
Curator
Zhu Zhu
Zhu Zhu, born in 1969, is a poet, curator, and art critic. He has received the Ango Poetry Prize, the Chinese Contemporary Art Critic Award, the "Mountain Flower" Biennial Award, among others. He has authored a variety of poetry collections, essays, and art criticism, including the Chinese poetry collections The Sea Inside My Body: Selected Poems of Zhu Zhu, The Trunk, Winter in the Five Avenues, the French poetry collection Blue Smoke, the English poetry collection The Wild Great Wall, and the collection of art criticism Gray Carnival: Chinese Contemporary Art Since 2000, as well as other works.