For ART021 Art Fair，Mocube (Booth E10) will present latest creations and representative works by Dong Bingxin，Feng Lianghong，Fu Jingyan，Guo Haiqiang，Han Wuzhou，He Tianqi，Li Yiwen，Jonathan Miles，Su Hua，Wang Lintong，Xu Chenxi，Yan Yan，Zheng Jing，Zheng Wenxin.

VIP Preview

2025.11.13 (Thu.) 11:00 - 20:00

2025.11.14 (Fri.) 13:00 - 20:00

Public Days

2025.11.15 (Sat.) 11:00 - 18:00

2025.11.16 (Sun.) 11:00 - 18:00

Shanghai Exhibition Center - Gate 2, No.1000, Middle Yan'an Road

I had originally planned to visit Mocube with Gary and Kris to see Li Yiwen's exhibition. But upon arrival, we found the poster at the entrance had been replaced with “Han Wuzhou: A Snowy Day." Peering through the glass, the interior was dimly lit with shadows moving about, yet the gallery door remained tightly shut, leaving only a narrow crack. When we pushed the door open, we discovered the space was already packed with people—some even sitting on the floor. It felt as though we had stumbled into a sealed miniature world. The moment the door closed behind us, reality seemed to shift in an instant.

What came into view was an artist standing on the second level of a scaffold, striking with full force at three suspended sacks of flour — each marked ‘25kg,’ their total weight roughly equal to his own. With every blow, a cloud of white powder burst into the air, slowly drifting through the space like snow or mist, settling on the withered trees and ground below. This was Han Wuzhou’s performance piece Tao Hua Yuan. We stumbled in halfway, unwittingly becoming a footnote to this ‘accidental entry into the Tao Hua Yuan.’

The Poetic Confrontation Between Body and Matter

Han Wuzhou uses his 150-jin (roughly 75kg) body to oppose an equal weight of flour — a pure dialectic between body and material. The act of striking becomes a metaphor: the labor, pain, and dissipation of the human body, in cyclical tension with the repeated collisions and drifting of inert matter. As the flour turns into dust, it gently falls, covering the withered branches on the ground, creating a “snow scene” that is both pure and tranquil, yet mournful and desolate. This “snow” does not descend from nature; it is an illusion summoned by the artist through physical exertion — symbolizing the consumption of life, the traces of illness, and an aesthetic sublimation of suffering.

On the withered branches beneath the scaffold, red pills are scattered like flower buds that cannot bloom — a spring that never arrives. These suggestions of unfinished lives imbue the entire installation with a sense of unfulfilled hope and slow, creeping despair — much like the way flour covers the branches of life: it conceals, but cannot heal.

The performance lasted for half an hour, during which Han Wuzhou, with a body growing steadily more exhausted, built a silent tension through his diminishing rhythm. His performance was not merely an accumulation of “actions,” but a practice of “edge-living” — a simulation of the limits of life that the audience could almost physically empathize with. In this process, the body’s breakdown echoed the dispersion of the flour, forming a spiritual cycle from flesh to matter, from awareness to concept. As the flour returned to dust, the artist also reduced himself to a vessel of perception, enabling the audience to experience a shared resonance in the falling “snow,” rather than remaining mere spectators.

This transformation evokes Zhuangzi’s words: “From the perspective of what does not change, all things and I are one and infinite.” Through this act of utter exhaustion, Han Wuzhou transforms individual suffering into a shared, cosmic experience of empathy. He detaches illness from the private realm, turning it into a philosophical perception within a public context. It is neither a protest nor a narration, but a silent ritual — one that achieves the poetic transcendence of pain.

Subtle Metaphors of Medicine, Green, and Culture

Han Wuzhou’s practice consistently revolves around “medicine” as a modern material experience. At A Snowy Day, red pills hang from withered branches — resembling flowers or fruit, yet arrested at the point of budding. They are no longer pharmacological entities nor objects within the medical system, but are instead imbued with cultural and emotional reinterpretation. Within the experience of illness, they serve as vessels of pain and hope; within art, they become silent yet powerful verses of poetry.

From Pomegranate, after Xu Wei (2021) to A study in pink medicine (2023), and now Caregiving (2025), Han Wuzhou has consistently explored the metaphor of life through the color green. In A Snowy Day, this green does not appear overtly, but is expressed through the act of concealment as flour falls, and through the way pills hang from branches. This hidden green represents life’s resistance under the weight of illness — a coded language embedded within the cultural context.

The green as Han Wuzhou understands it may be traced back to the Chinese literati tradition’s “will to live” — not a symbol of rebirth as in the West, but a subtle, resilient force of life that penetrates illness. It echoes the cool, ethereal spirit of Wei-Jin metaphysics, and the quiet voids between brushstrokes in Song and Ming painting. Through the metaphors of medicine and color, Han constructs a bridge between personal experience and historical consciousness, transforming contemporary trauma into part of cultural memory.

From Action to Co-being: A Contemporary Ritual

As a piece of performance art, A Snowy Day is not only an enactment of the body and material—it is also a ritual jointly completed by the artist and his audience. Han Wuzhou does not perform in isolation; instead, he constructs an open field of experience, where the breath, exhaustion, and sweat of the artist merge with those of the viewers, forming a shared perceptual community around this “snowfall” event. What he evokes is a deep bodily memory and psychological resonance: the stillness of snow, the dependency on medication, the fragmentation and reconstitution of life—all flowing silently, passing from one body to another.

The power of this work also stems from his re-signification of materials. Pills, flour, withered branches—seemingly ordinary objects—are transformed in Han’s hands into mediators of emotion and culture. He does not construct grand narratives, but instead weaves a metaphorical web of individual existence through the most mundane elements. Here, material no longer functions as external symbol, but becomes an inner form, fused with the artist’s embodied experience.

With A Snowy Day, Han Wuzhou responds to the possibilities of performance art in the contemporary context—not as spectacle, nor as conceptual representation, but as a space of mutual openness between body, matter, and culture. The “snow” in the title is not snow itself, but snow as art, snow as pain, snow as the fine dust where memory and forgetting intertwine. He pushes the body to its limits, and in the swirling mist, summons a long-suppressed aesthetic sensitivity—allowing us, in a sudden snowfall, to glimpse what it means for life to dissipate, and for will to fall silent.

The works of Zhu Tian, Selling the Worthless and Scan, have been included in the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in France. This acquisition is supported by the Chanel brand, and 21 works by 15 emerging Chinese artists have been added to the permanent collection. With the addition of these 21 pieces, the Centre Pompidou's collection of Chinese contemporary art has been substantially expanded, marking an important supplement to the existing collection and highlighting the Centre Pompidou’s ongoing focus on contemporary Chinese art.

The 15 Chinese emerging artists selected by the Centre Pompidou were all born in the late 1970s to early 1990s. Themes such as China’s opening-up, environmental changes, and shifts in social lifestyles are central to the works of this younger generation of artists.

Mocube is pleased to announce that we will present artist Zhu Tian’s  solo project A Long Defeat in the “Discoveries” sector of Art Basel Hong Kong from March 26 to March 30, 2025.

A Long Defeat is a project conceived specifically for Art Basel Hong Kong 2025, bringing together performance, installation, video, text, and sound to address the intellectual and cultural crises of our time. The title refers to an apparently impossible but noble struggle. In Zhu Tian's view, human history can be seen as a series of ‘long defeats’, with life itself being one against the inevitability of death. At the core of the project is a performance that reimagines the myth of Narcissus in a contemporary context—not as a simple tale of vanity but as a meditation on identity dissolution. It involves two synchronised performers, reflecting on modern narcissism, and its consequences—in particular, the inability to love beyond the self. This is accompanied by a sound piece composed by Zhu, layering electronic music with a storytelling of the Chinese mythological ghost tale The Painted Skin. The installations extend this exploration. Et in Arcadia Ego engages with the paradox of the Ancient Greek philosophical maxim about ‘self-knowledge’ and its modern implications, while SAD — an installation built from artificial sunlight lamps—plays on the dual meaning of ‘SAD’ as both a product for combating seasonal affective disorder and a metaphor for contemporary discontent, where it commodifies happiness, promising illumination while masking deeper unease. By engaging with these themes, the project seeks to rupture the smooth, frictionless experience of contemporary selfhood, offering instead a space where the audience might confront their own image—not as validation, but as a site of rupture, uncertainty, and, perhaps, the rediscovery of the ‘other’.

Mocube and Leo Gallery is pleased to introduce the catalogue of Li Yiwen, which meticulously compiles Li Yiwen's artworks created over the past decade, exhibition-related texts by art historian / curator Ruth Noack and Wang Che, as well as installation views capturing the artist's exhibition highlights. Each work is presented with exceptional attention to detail, inviting readers to immerse themselves in Li Yiwen's distinctive artistic vision. Additionally, the photographs from the exhibitions showcase their ingenious display arrangements once again, offering a profound artistic experience to those unable to attend in person.

Edit by Wang Che & Li Yiwen

Text by Ruth Noack & Wang Che

Translation by Shana Wu & Zang Yusi

Proofreading by Charlize Li & Yin Nuo

Book Design by Pigao

Published by Mocube & Leo Gallery

Nevertheless, abandonded building sites settled in nature can provoke, if not revery, at least benevolent contemplation in their viewers. There is something endearing about the efforts of human beings, even if they are failed. And because they failed their intended purpose and fell out of time – into stillness - they provide us viewers with a respite from our own diachronicity, our own flow of time. They create the distance we need in order to look at ourselves. Because this is, in most cases, not a very deep look, more a whiff or trace of understanding how we (or how our bodies) relate to time, this results in a warm and fuzzy feeling, or possibly a sadness – “Look at this never built, broken down, attempt at a building… what a waste!” – but not a deep sadness. 

Li Yiwen’s paintings carry these associations in their DNA, that is to say, they rely on emotions that we remain unaware of, because they are not in the foreground – they are not the artist’s primary goal. He is not giving us a quaint, picturesque view of a ruin in the distance, no: the building has been propelled right into our field of vision in such a way that it almost, but not quite overwhelms our senses with its monumentality. Almost, but not quite: The viewer is fully enveloped into the building site, but not cowered by its size. Maybe that is, because its monumentality is unashamedly artificial? Take the eccentric way that stories are stacked on top of each other to create a swirling, over the top feeling or take the fish-eye perspective, these are tropes that are used to create an effect of viewer-immersion similar to what we might encounter in an ego-shooter game.

Living a Performance Artist's Life ——2023 Performance Art Documental Exhibition

Opening Performance "Applause I"

Show Time：2023.5.13, 4:00 to 4:30 PM

Artist：Dai Chenlian

Exhibition Location：Madein Art Museum

"Applause I" is the "Actor" series of Dai Chenlian's theater project. The work focuses on the causes of Lu Junfei, an actor he once worked with, who studied communication engineering under the background of the reform and opening-up policy and then entered a foreign-funded enterprise, with a simple and moving narration, interspersed with narration and professional foreign trade management movements. Lu Junfei taught Dai Chenlian the basic postures of ballet, daily habitual movements and professional etiquette movements of foreign trade, which is not only the friendship of mutual learning after their reunion, but also the spiritual connection after the mutual dissolution of their physical movements. In the space of the MadeIn Gallery, where the relationship between abandonment and reconstruction is mixed, Dai Chenlian presents Lu Junfei with this performance, showing her confusion and happiness, past and present, reproducing Lu Junfei's tracing and examination of the history of engaging in foreign trade affairs, (the history of foreign investment in China, where foreigners provided equipment, raw materials, incoming samples and were responsible for exporting the products, and Chinese enterprises provided land, plants and labor) The "three comers, one complement" economic and trade cooperation model was very common after the reform and opening up), is a personal history belonging to her and a common memory of a generation.

"Applause II"

Performer: Dai Chenlian

Date: 2023.5.21, 7:00-8:30 PM

Address: The Cloister Project, 2F, The Cloisters Apartments, No.62 West Fuxing Road, Shanghai

The work "Applause II" originates from the period when I was stranded in my hometown (Shaoxing) to recuperate from the collective infection of New Crown Pneumonia in China, and I used to go for walks along the river. I mixed the sounds of the river at that time with the sounds of Shanghai's history, using the sounds and sound fields as an index to link time and space and a clue to edit history. The personal narrative unfolds as a repeated reminder of the immediate, while the compound crossover of sound and image forms a continuous spatio-temporal overlay, bringing us into multiple strange and magical spatial tunnels where time, events and people meet and disperse at numerous warp and weft points, allowing us to wander through the fragments of memory and reality. These fragments are actually portraits of communities, paying tribute to those who are still alive and those who have passed away, and connecting the meaning of memory and love in the post-epidemic era.

Text by Dai Chenlian

More Than Human

Participating Artists: Andrew Thomas Huang /Anna Raimondo /Artor Jesus Inkerö /Anna-Sophie Berger /Black Birds Creative Co. /Dai Chenlian /Die Ge / ErGao /François Chaignaud  /Hu Wei  /Jes Fan  /Jake Elwes /Konstantin Zhukov /Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen  / Martina Menegon /Melanie Bonajo /Miriam Cahn  / Otay:onii /Prinz Gholam /Tao Hui /Zheng Bo

Exhibition dates: 27 May 2023 – 23 July 2023

Opening days: Tuesday to Sunday

Time: 10:00 am to 6:00 pm

Venue: Blanc Art Space A1

Human being

NOUN

1. any individual of the genus Homo, especially a member of the species Homo sapiens.

2. a person, especially as distinguished from other animals or as representing the human species.[1]

It is clear from this definition that humans perceive themselves to be superior to — and separate from — other beings. This concept of the human is built on the idea of a liberal form of freedom: the ablitity to instil their desires and needs onto other entities and the world itself. [2] Humans also seemingly believe that they are free of any responsibilities for the problems facing our world today, the most urgent of which include the exploitation of other species, eradication of culturessocial isolation and gender discrimination. Specifically, they believe themselves free from the need to make any substantial changes to their lives as they can solve these problems with technological solutions.

In More Than Human, we challenge the very idea of “humans” itself. We begin by asking who actually is a human. But in trying to figure out the “who,” we cannot neglect the “how” — the process of becoming (non-)human. How, for instance, do humans order the world? And how are the problems facing the world the result of the humanist norms and structures that order our world today? Most importantly, we look at how a post-anthropocentric world would look like — one where human beings do not reign supreme and acknowledge their interdependency and entanglements with other species.

CLOUDSCULPTURE—— THE FIRST INVITATIONAL EXHIBITION

Ready-made Life Realistic Technology

Artist: Kang Jing、Liu Fujie、Li Nu、Liu Yazhou、Liu Zhan、Qin Ga、Tan Yingjie、Zhang Yi

Curator: Feng Xi

Exhibition Time: 2023.5.1-8.27

Address: Song Art Museum

Gallery Weekend Beijing 2023 Up&Coming Sector

Artists: Chen Qiulin、Chen Ruofan、Fan Xi、Fei Yining、Gui Kuan、Huang Ziyue、Liu Guangli、Liu Yujia、Qi Yao、Wang Yuchen、Yu Guo、Zheng Jiang

Guest Curator: Pu Yingwei

Date: 2023.5.28-6.4

Address: 2nd Floor, 798 Art Center

Li Yiwen's art practice mainly employs painting as the medium. His painting entails the thinking and interest in time and space. The experience in memory and the experience at present penetrate each other and accumulate to become the source of inspiration for expression. Li Yiwen often uses post-modern methods to filter, select, and enhance images to integrate illogical, fictitious, ectopic, and intuitive elements into the paintings. While subverting the previous painting narratives, they generate new pictorial meaning.

A depression named Shixia, the birthplace of artist Zheng Jiang, is located in Jinyun County, Lishui City, Zhejiang Province. Zheng Jiang grew up in an environment where his father's family was mostly engaged in quarrying.
From 2017, Zheng Jiang returned to the mountain pass under the stone from Beijing, and started his seven-year-long local creation activities, and launched "Feitsui", "Earth Pearls", and "Burning Pagoda" in 2019, 2021, and 2023 at Mocube in Beijing, He has produced a variety of live sculptures, videos and paintings over the years. Here, Zheng Jiang has nurtured and created his miracles with his own strength, making the vast grottoes glow with red and green "light", chiseling the rolling stones of the mountain pass into "teardrops" scattered on the earth with his bare hands, and deeply engraving the capital "Love" on a huge wall of rocks. "Love".
In May 2023, a publication containing the works and documents of Zheng Jiang's three exhibitions "Feitsui", "Earth Pearls" and "Burning Pagoda" was published under the title "Grottoes Trilogy". The abandoned site left after artificial quarrying.

北京当代·艺术博览会-重聚  | 墨方展位号C15

Beijing Contemporary Art Expo REUNION  | Mocube Booth C15

参展艺术家 | Artists

蔡龙飞 Cai Longfei | 曹应斌 Cao Yingbin | 戴陈连 Dai Chenlian | 付经岩 Fu Jingyan | 贺天琪 He Tianqi  | 康靖 Kang Jing | 来金娜 Lai Jinna | 栾雪雁 Luan Xueyan | 李易纹 Li Yiwen | 严岩 Yan Yan | 张震宇 Zhang Zhenyu | 郑江 Zheng Jiang

贵宾预览 | VIP Preview

2023.04.28（周五 | Fri.）12:00-19:00

2023.04.29（周六 | Sat.）11:00-18:00

公众开放日 | Public Days

2023.04.30（周日 | Sun.）11:00-18:00

2023.05.01（周一 | Mon.）11:00-18:00

地点 | Location

全国农业展览馆11号馆 | Hall 11 of National Agricultural Exhibition Center

北京当代·艺术博览会-重聚  | 墨方展位号C15

Beijing Contemporary Art Expo REUNION  | Mocube Booth C15

参展艺术家 | Artists

蔡龙飞 Cai Longfei | 曹应斌 Cao Yingbin | 戴陈连 Dai Chenlian | 付经岩 Fu Jingyan | 贺天琪 He Tianqi  | 康靖 Kang Jing | 来金娜 Lai Jinna | 栾雪雁 Luan Xueyan | 李易纹 Li Yiwen | 严岩 Yan Yan | 张震宇 Zhang Zhenyu | 郑江 Zheng Jiang

贵宾预览 | VIP Preview

2023.04.28（周五 | Fri.）12:00-19:00

2023.04.29（周六 | Sat.）11:00-18:00

公众开放日 | Public Days

2023.04.30（周日 | Sun.）11:00-18:00

2023.05.01（周一 | Mon.）11:00-18:00

地点 | Location

全国农业展览馆11号馆 | Hall 11 of National Agricultural Exhibition Center

墨方将于4月28日至5月1日参展北京当代·艺术博览会-重聚，展位号C15，期待您的莅临。

Journey to the West, Cao Yingbin

"Shattered Mirrors Cannot be Reassembled, Fallen Flowers Cannot be Returned to the Branches"_The Message is Medium Episode 2

Crosstalk

Exhibition Time：2022.6.24-7.3

Address: 1F, Hall A&B, 798 Art Center, Beijing 798 Art Zone

The Recitativo in the exhibition's title, "Crosstalk," is a reference to the name of a recitative-like tune in opera, a form of singing that mimics the rhythmic and tonal changes of speech and is used to move the plot forward, serving as an "introduction. It serves as an introduction. Through revisiting and re-reading the artist's works, the curatorial team observes the existence of the creator's experience in time and space and in the text through the chapters "Leaning Down" and "Wandering into the Darkness" respectively. The two seemingly independent leads frequently echo and intersect in the flowing narrative, opening a dialogue with each other in an overlapping manner. Among them, "Bend Over" includes more than ten artists who live and work in Beijing, attempting to focus on individual practices of daily life as a form of resistance, while marking these artists as both shapers of Beijing and witnesses of the city's changing times.

Conversations: The Skeleton of Sculpture and Nature

Guest Speaker: Dai Zhuoqun, Feng Xi, Wang Che

Artist: Kang Jing

2022.6.26, Sun/16:00 – 17:00 PM

In addition to being an important part of the structure of a living body, "bone" has many derivative and symbolic meanings, and many important concepts in ancient literature and painting theory are related to bone. In the Wei and Jin dynasties, the term "bones" was often used in the evaluation of characters. Gu Kaizhi introduced the term "bone method" to the rhetorical field of painting, referring mostly to the temperament revealed by the bones of the figures painted. Xie He's use of the term "bone method" has shifted to the beauty of the bones of the brush, which is more abstract.
The rules followed by the statues of the past generations are also a summary of practical experience under the influence of this philosophy.
The word "bone" comes from traditional Chinese phrenology, which corresponds the structure of human face to natural mountains and rivers, such as the left cheek corresponds to Dongyue and the upper forehead corresponds to Nangyue. This methodology of closely associating human beings with all natural things and cognizing them in reflection of each other can be used to view tiny things from a natural and extensive sense of space, or vice versa, to achieve a vast extent by exhausting the subtle.
From this perspective, on June 26th, 2022, at 4pm, as part of the Gallery Week academic program, Dai Zhuoqun, Feng Ruoxi, Kang Jing, and Wang Che will have a conversation on the topic of "Sculpture's Bone Method and Nature's Bone Phase" at Mo Fang Space. The conversation will be based on works from Kang Jing's solo exhibition "Carving Bones", which opens at MoFang Space on June 11, 2022. Details will be posted on the public website "Cloud Sculpture".
The works in this exhibition are shaped by the sense of life of objects. When the author makes them, he dissects the flesh and reveals the bones from the surface to the inside. These shapes begin with observation, observation to touch, to perception, to skin, to carving bone and flesh. The bones here are the natural and natural structures, the clues that appear and disappear, the axes of transformation of yin and yang."

艺术深圳2021  | 墨方展位号B26

Art Shenzhen 2021  | Mocube Booth B26

参展艺术家 | Artists

陈川 CHEN Chuan | 曹应斌 Cao Yingbin | 贺天琪 He Tianqi | 韩五洲 Han Wuzhou | 李易纹 Li Yiwen  | 刘瑜 Liu Yu | 姜波 Jiang Bo | 康靖 Kang Jing | 王锐 Wang Rui | 郑江 Zheng Jiang

藏家预览 | Collector Preview

2021/9/9 周四, 14:30 - 21:00

公众开放 | Public Days

2021/9/10-9/11 周五、周六, 10:00 - 19:00

2021/9/12 周日, 10:00 - 17:00

地点 | Location

深圳, 会展中心6号馆 | Hall 6, Shenzhen Convention & Exhibition Center, Shenzhen