ICA explores how value comes into being through contemporary painting in China.

The Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai (ICA at NYU Shanghai) opens Vitalisms II, an exhibition by Cong, GUO Hongwei, FU Site, WANG Xiaofu, WANG Xingyun, XIAO Wenjie, and ZHAO Yao, as the inaugural season of its new artistic research program Untimely Inheritances (2026–28), attending to what inheritance asks of us and how we might inhabit unfinished worlds through practices of interpretation, response, and transformation. This fall, the ICA also welcomes artist and researcher YIN Aiwen for the second Friends of ICA residency. In collaboration with 夜校AfterSchool, Yin will transform the ICA Reading Room through their project Alchemy of Commons: Long Way to Belong, creating a space for reading, conversation, and reflection on community and belonging.

Vitalisms II is an exhibition-as-experiment that continues a long-term research and education project on contemporary painting in China. Following the first chapter’s inquiry into the historicity of painting, this second chapter turns toward a different question: How does value come into being through our encounters with painting?

As the opening season of Untimely Inheritances, ICA at NYU Shanghai’s new artistic research program, Vitalisms II considers inheritance as a condition we inhabit and reinterpret. Within the financial imagination, value is rendered calculable, comparable, and exchangeable. Yet value can also name artistic, historical, social, institutional, and affective relations. The exhibition asks how we might recover these different forms of value and what happens when a painting is encountered as an artwork, cultural artifact, collectible object, commodity, or financial asset.

Vitalisms II focuses on abstract and non-representational painting, a field whose boundaries remain uncertain. The exhibition brings together practices ranging from conceptually driven, hard-edged geometric painting to more intuitive and expressive approaches, including works that approach the threshold of representation. How might abstraction reveal, rather than obscure, relations that are otherwise difficult to perceive? How might we keep interpretation open, rather than seeking settlement? And what might speculation come to mean as a practice of imagining otherwise, rather than predicting return?

The title Vitalisms draws from Isabelle Graw’s account of painting’s “vitalistic fantasies”—how vitality and agency have been projected onto painting. Vitalisms I extended this proposition by considering paintings as active participants in the historical and social relations through which they are made, encountered, and circulated. Vitalisms II asks: What might happen when we approach a painting not simply as an image to be interpreted, but as something with which we enter into relation?

Like the first Vitalisms, this chapter is conceived as an experiment in which knowledge is exchanged and produced throughout the exhibition. Weekly study sessions invite participants to spend extended time with the paintings, developing interpretations collectively through close looking, discussion, and reflection. These encounters become part of the exhibition’s research, inviting us to ask: What might we come to value—and, in turn, make possible?

Vitalisms II is accompanied by a series of related events, including weekly Study Sessions that invite participants to look closely at individual paintings through conversation and an artists roundtable that extends these discussions around looking and value.

Venue
567 West Yangsi Road, Pudong New Area, Shanghai 200124, China

Artists
Cong, GUO Hongwei, FU Site, WANG Xiaofu, WANG Xingyun, XIAO Wenjie, and ZHAO Yao

Exhibition Dates
18 Sep – 19 Dec 2026

Admission Hours
Tuesday – Saturday | 11 AM – 6 PM

Website
https://ica.shanghai.nyu.edu

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/ica_nyushanghai/

Contact
shanghai.ica@nyu.edu

About the Artists

Cong (b. 1982, Qingdao) received her MFA in Oil Painting from the School of Art of Soochow University in 2008. She captures individual experiences with rich, enduring traces. Her reclusive lifestyle allows her glimpses into the abundance of the ordinary, while maintaining a clear and thoughtful observation of the tumultuous outside world. With confidence, she seizes upon lines and planes to construct a lush, vibrant canvas. Her brushstrokes reveal the architecture of her inner sanctuary—a precise visual creation that, together with her spirit’s restless journey, becomes her courageous hymn against the void. Cong presented solo exhibitions at Antenna Space (Shanghai, 2023 and 2019), 5art Space (Guangzhou, 2018), and NUOART (Beijing, 2018 and 2016). She lives and works in Shanghai.

FU Site (b. 1984, Liaoning) graduated from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2006, the École des Beaux-Arts de Versailles in 2011, and the École Supérieure d’Art du Nord Pas de Calais in 2014. His painting practice centers on the interconnectedness of things. In his works, humans, nature, living beings, and fictional forms continually encounter, permeate, and transform one another, giving rise to an open and fluid structure of relations: a continuous movement between the body, emotion, desire, memory, and a sense of the sacred. Fu presented solo exhibitions at HdM Gallery (Beijing, 2026), START Museum (Shanghai, 2024), MadeIn Gallery (Shanghai, 2023), Paris-B (Paris, 2022), and Kylin Gallery (Los Angeles, 2021). His work has also been exhibited at ShanghART WB Central (Shanghai, 2025), X Museum (Beijing, 2025), West Bund Museum (Shanghai, 2024), Unit Gallery (London, 2024), and Nassima Landau Art Foundation (Tel Aviv, 2022), among others. He lives and works in Paris and Shanghai.

GUO Hongwei (b. 1982, Sichuan) earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art, focusing on easel painting, from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2004. He explores the multiple meanings of viewing from the depiction of natural history objects and the intertextual relationship between vision and fantasy. By investigating different visual systems, he switches between watercolor, oil painting, and other media, constantly probing the paradigmatic differences that structure painterly order. Guo presented solo exhibitions at Magician Space (Beijing, 2025 and 2021), Chambers Fine Art (New York & Beijing, 2020), and DRC No.12 (Beijing, 2019). His works have also been exhibited at G Museum of Art (Nanjing, 2024), Yuan Art Museum (Beijing, 2024), M+ (Hong Kong, 2024), etc. His works are collected by M+, LACMA, White Rabbit Gallery, By Art Matters Museum, DSL Foundation, He Art Museum, G Museum of Art, etc. He lives and works in Beijing.

WANG Xiaofu (b. 1991, Wuhan) received her BFA in Photography from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and her MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her works often embed recognizable elements within near-abstract spaces, drawing on a visual language suggestive of landscape. Working across painting, works on paper, and writing, Wang explores perception, spatial experience, and how meaning gradually emerges through sustained looking. She approaches painting as a way of encountering and understanding the world. Wang received a full fellowship for a 2018-19 residency at the Shandaken Projects’ Paint School in New York and was nominated for the 2018 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in New York. In 2026, she was selected for ArtReview’s Future Greats. Her work has been presented at CLC Gallery Venture (Beijing, 2025), Antenna Space (Shanghai, 2025), the Institute of Contemporary Arts at NYU Shanghai (2024), Vanguard Gallery (Shanghai, 2023), the Chengdu Biennale (2021), Himalayas Museum (Shanghai, 2021), and Pierogi Gallery (New York, 2019), among other venues. She lives and works in Shanghai.

WANG Xingyun (b. 1997, Beijing) graduated from SUNY Purchase College of Art + Design and later received her MFA from Hunter College in New York. Her practice is characterized by a meticulous and process-driven approach. By mixing pigment with glue and layering delicate sheets of paper onto heavy watercolor paper, she creates richly textured surfaces. Material states such as breaking, fusing, hardening, and flowing intertwine throughout her works, inviting viewers to reflect on turbulence, fragility, resilience, and the psychological and emotional states embedded in these fictional landscapes. Her recent exhibitions include the 4th Xinjiang International Art Biennale (Urumqi, 2024), as well as exhibitions at ZIAN Gallery (Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Beijing, 2024–25), BROWNIE Project (Shanghai, 2024), Shanghai Bund Art Center (Shanghai, 2024), Studio 9D (New York, 2024), and Ruby/Dakota Gallery (New York, 2024), among others. Her works are held in the collections of Longlati Foundation, MACA Art Center, and Initial Research, among others. She will present a solo exhibition at Cc Foundation in Shanghai in November 2026. She lives and works in New York.

XIAO Wenjie (b. 1982, Hong Kong) studied at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute from 2002 to 2005. Since 2022, he has introduced lines and forms into his earlier practice of layering color blocks, gradually developing a body of work centered on the visual motif of the “Lump.” Its form emerges through the repeated layering and adjustment of pigments and painting tools. Through thinly layered brushstrokes and the interaction of different media, his paintings hover between perception and recognition. Rather than a predetermined subject, the “Lump” functions as a mode of perception that resists definition through language. His recent major exhibitions include: Xiao Wenjie: “Lump” Series, ShanghART Gallery Upstairs, Beijing (2026); Soft Frequencies, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai (2026); and Provisional Matters, ShanghART Gallery, Beijing (2024). He lives and works in Beijing.

ZHAO Yao (b. 1981, Sichuan) works across a wide range of media, including painting, installation, photography, video, and performance. Zhao adopts an approach that keenly examines epistemology, perception, everyday life, and institutional frameworks. By bridging everyday experience and artistic experience, his work investigates how perception and meaning take shape, offering viewers perceptual and conceptual experiences that invite a rethinking of the familiar. Recent exhibitions include the 59th Carnegie International If the word we (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA, 2026), By and by it unfolds and then folds. (Fosun Foundation, Shanghai, China, 2025), the Thailand Biennale 2025 (Phuket, Thailand, 2025), IT’S ORDINARY, BUT… (Ota Fine Arts Tokyo / 7CHOME, Tokyo, 2025), A Few Ordinary Parallel Lines (Ota Fine Arts Singapore, Singapore, 2025), Signals from Heaven, Signals from Heaven (Beijing Commune, Beijing, China, 2018), and A Painting of Thought (Pace Gallery, Hong Kong, China, 2015), among others. He lives and works in Beijing.

About ICA at NYU Shanghai

The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) at NYU Shanghai is a non-profit kunsthalle and research center committed to the development, presentation, and exchange of diverse ideas through contemporary arts. Our commitment is based on a core belief that engagement with art engenders critical thought, creativity, and openness to complexity, across disciplines and society and in everyday life.

As one of the few university-affiliated art institutions in China to focus on contemporary art, the ICA was first established as the NYU Shanghai Art Gallery (2015–17) and reopened to the public with a new mission and reinvigorated vision in 2019. The ICA builds upon the earlier ambitions of the Gallery, while expanding our aims to emphasize experimentation, to further understand art and exhibition-making as a form of research, and to learn from artists living and working today.

About NYU Shanghai

Founded in 2012, NYU Shanghai is the first Sino-US joint research university in China and the third degree-granting campus of NYU. With an enrollment of nearly 2,000 students and a distinguished international faculty, NYU Shanghai exemplifies the highest ideals of contemporary higher education. At the undergraduate and postgraduate level, NYU Shanghai’s programs prepare graduates to be creative and culturally adept leaders with global vision.

NYU Shanghai was founded through a unique partnership between New York University and East China Normal University with the support of the city of Shanghai and the Pudong District. We are pioneering innovative curricula and stimulating a culture of creativity, at the forefront of a new breed of global institutions of higher education.

(Text and images courtesy of ICA at NYU Shanghai)