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City Art Break: Beijing

30th August 2015

As summer in the East winds down and crowds disperse, against-the-grain travellers may find it the perfect moment to plan a weekend getaway. For art-lovers with only a few days to spare, we recommend a few events and venues to see in Beijing in the coming months.

Ai Weiwei

Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei's first solo shows on mainland China are under way in Beijing in two adjacent spaces. At the Gallleria Continua until year-end, and spread into the Tang Contemporary Art Centre, the exhibition has for its centrepiece a Ming dynasty ancestral hall that was disassembled into more than 1,500 pieces and meticulously rebuilt across the two venues.

Beijing Minsheng Art Museum

A major new contemporary art space, occupying a 1980s factory renovated by Studio Pei-Zhu, the Beijing Minsheng Art Museum was inaugurated in June and is said to be the largest public dedicated exhibition space for Chinese contemporary art. The museum's opening exhibition, The Civil Power, runs through October 10 and is a large-scale show featuring work by more than 100 contemporary Chinese artists.

See more of this Asian powerhouse: Ancient China Revealed

Check out art in the Big Apple, too: City Art Break – New York

6th Beijing International Art Biennale

From September 24 to October 15, the National Art Museum of China is hosting the BIAB, whose 2015 theme is Memory and Dream. More than 3,000 participating artists from 85 countries take part in the event, which was developed after Beijing won the bid for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Olafur Eliasson's Water Pendulum

Through September 25, the Red Brick Art Museum is exhibiting its newest acquisition, Water Pendulum by Danish-Icelandic installation artist Olafur Eliasson, along with the rest of its collection of Eliasson's works. In the namesake installation, a running hose hangs from the roof in a dark room, its pressure causing the water to whip around, as a strobe light makes the water droplets appear to hang in mid-air.

This article was from AFP Relax News and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.