Art and Music Go Online as Beijing's Galleries Find Ways to Overcome Closures

“When the public cannot visit the exhibition site, in what form should art be presented? How should art museums display art?” These are two questions that M Woods poses in the announcement of their latest exhibition, A Hypothetical Show for a Closed Museum. 

And with art lovers stuck inside and unable to visit the city’s many cultural institutions, they are not alone in finding novel ways of keeping fans and artists alike engaged.

M Woods

A Hypothetical Show for a Closed Museum launched on Feb 13 and features a diverse range of artworks, including video installations, photography, and poetry which explore the themes of ecology, nature, decline, isolation, and kinship. 

Visitors can roam through a virtual recreation of their new-ish Longfusi gallery via Weibo (every Sunday, midday), WeChat (ID: MWOODS木木美术馆; every Saturday, 6am), and Instagram (every Thursday and Friday, 10pm), so if you haven’t had a chance to see the new space yet, it’s also a good opportunity to become familiar from the comfort of your home. 

The exhibition currently has no end date, and M Woods aims to continue to add artists to the exhibitions as the weeks unfold. 

For more information and details on how you can watch the exhibition, click here.

National Art Museum of China

The National Art Museum of China has also made some of their works available for enjoyment online, although in a much less high-tech fashion, curating a collection of works dedicated to medical workers, which features the themes of healing, nursing, and doctors. In total, the collection includes 23 different works of multiple different media, including painting, sculpture, photography, ink on paper, engraved woodcuts from the 1940s onwards. 

Check out the full collection on the NAMOC website here.

UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

Faced with the closure of their exhibition Voluntary Garden, which was cut short due to the COVID-19 virus, this Friday from 8.30pm onwards, UCCA will livestream Voluntary Concert Online Concert: Sonic Cure, an extension of the original show. Nine musicians of very different backgrounds, styles, and locations (Beijing, Shanghai, Boston, and New York) will perform five improvised concerts, which will be broadcast on video sharing app Kuaishou.

The artists include the legendary Japanese pop, ambient, and everything composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, Beijing-based electronic producers Feng Mengbo and Huang Jin, and suona master Guo Yazhi, among others.

For more info about the show, and info on how to follow on Kuaishou, click here.

READ: Just Do a Quarantine When You Get Back to Beijing, OK?

Images: National Art Museum of China, M Woods, UCCA