Gravity Art Museum presents its annual exhibition "The Signifying Object" in Shijingshan District in Beijing. Curated by Ouyang Xing, Director of Gravity Art Museum, the exhibition invites Li Xianting, a renowned critic and curator, as the academic director. It showcases fifty works by 13 artists, including Chen Mingqiang, Chen Mutian, Chen Qingqing, Ji Chuan, Li Bingyuan, Liu Wei, Mo Nijian, Song Dong, Sui Jianguo, Wang Enlai, Wu Gaozhong, Xu Bing, and Zhu Lizige. Taking everyday ready-made objects as a creative thread, the exhibition connects the history of ready-made art with local life experiences in China by covering installations, video, and live creation. It reexamines the relationship between people and objects, extending the discussion to how digital production, networking, and AI are constantly reshaping our daily experiences today.

MADE IN CHINA, Sui Jianguo, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object", Gravity Art Museum, 2026Background Story Wonderful Landscape in Hunan, Xu Bing, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object", Gravity Art Museum, 2026Wisdom of the Poor Living with the Pigeons, Song Dong, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object", Gravity Art Museum, 2026

In the creations of these artists, those seemingly ordinary old objects are no longer just common items that are repeatedly used in daily life and can be found everywhere. Instead, they quietly carry the time that has been frozen, personal life memories, and unique cultural emotions. They break away from their original practical context and are transformed into visual symbols full of metaphors and tension.

From Xu Bing’s exploration and reconstruction of the relationship between material and matter in his Background Story series, to Song Dong’s displays about family, city, and life memories, while Li Bingyuan, Wang Enlai, and others explore the boundaries of interaction between body and objects... each work acts like a storyteller inviting viewers to awaken their personal experiences and rethink the essence of life and emotional anchors.

Although the thirteen artists in this exhibition create with different media, each of them shows a unique sensitivity to “objects” in their work. Through polishing, reorganizing, replacing, or even breaking old things, they start from everyday experiences to present the complex and subtle interactions between people and objects, inviting viewers to participate in the co-creation of meaning and inspiring people to better perceive reality and deeply reflect on their current lives.

Brushstroke, Zhu Lizige, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object", Gravity Art Museum, 2026Armor of Love, Chen Mingqiang, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object", Gravity Art Museum, 2026Every Utterance is Inhabited by Other Eyes, Chen Mutian, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object" Gravity Art Museum, 2026Cosmos Series and Janus Series, Ji Chuan, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object", Gravity Art Museum, 2026Works by Chen Qingqing, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object", Gravity Art Museum, 2026

The Signifying Object: Linguistic Threads and Experiments Associated with "Everyday Object"

By Li Xianting

The “objects” featured in this exhibition are ready-made articles drawn from everyday life. The scope of discussion specifically traces back to Duchamp’s first submission of a urinal to an art exhibition. Within the linguistic framework of art history, this gesture, both contestable and generative, served as a wellspring for successive generations of artists to rethink and reinvent. Duchamp brought the “mass-produced urinal” into the venue as his own work to mock and satirize the ingrained mindset that “whatever enters the venue is artwork.” This purely conceptual work inaugurated a mode of practice: making art in direct dialogue with the art-historical context. But the “object” also left behind an immense space of infinite possibility in relation to different cultural backgrounds and individual experiences of existence. The birth of “Mono-ha” (School of Things) in Japan in the 1960s was a product of this same linguistic thread. Rooted in Japan’s indigenous “worldview of nature”, and in response to Duchamp’s “industrial products”, Mono-ha emphasized that the “object” is first and foremost a natural object. Looking back at Mono-ha practice, all its artists employed natural objects like stone, wood, and earth. The best-known work in the art world is surely Nobuo Sekine’s Phase - Mother Earth, for which he directly excavated a column of earth from the exhibition site. 

In May 2008, I went to Moscow, and by chance came across some small works made by Ilya Kabakov in the 1970s in a small gallery. They were presented in the signature display format that made him famous throughout Europe and America in the early 1990s: wooden vitrines with glass panes commonly found in museums of socialist countries, typically used to display revolutionary relics or educational documents. But inside these small vitrines were everyday objects, like used coffee cups bearing faded inscriptions, small spoons, and crumpled scraps of paper scrawled with casual notes. One could instantly recognize them as everyday items from the Soviet Union’s most severe economic hardship, evoking an instinctive feeling of recognition. They represent a major turning point and experimental moment in the linguistic thread of the ready-made: the ready-made is related to the conceptual premises of art-historical exhibition practice (as with Duchamp), to cultural background (as with Mono-ha), and to the artist’s own experience of existence in a particular era (as with Ilya Kabakov). From this point onward, the use of “object” as a specific medium of language was expanded and carried forward.

Cai Guoqiang’s contribution lies in expanding “ready-made object” into “ready-made event”. At the 2000 Queensland Triennial in Australia, he directly installed a scene of traditional life painting of nude models into the exhibition as his own work. At an exhibition in Vancouver, Canada, his work was sited directly in local “Suzhou Garden” built by Suzhou garden designers at the city’s invitation. The Suzhou Garden was originally a “false landscape” constructed within a private courtyard to fulfill Chinese literati’s ideal of “roaming among mountains and rivers at home”. Cai then invited ink painters from the Zhejiang Painting Academy to sketch on site, leaving the subtext of the piece to resonate without explicit explanation. At the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, Cai Guoqiang’s work was a process of simulating the large-scale sculpture Rent Collection Courtyard on site. Rent Collection Courtyard was created in 1964-65 during the Socialist Education Movement (commonly known as the “Four Cleanups” movement) by professors from the Sculpture Department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and local folk artists, at the rent-collection site in Liu Wencai’s former residence. It later became a widely influential work of revolutionary realist group sculpture in Chinese art history. What is most noteworthy is that the original site of Rent Collection Courtyard was the rent-collecting grounds of Liu Wencai’s house, and the work employed extensive ready-made objects such as agricultural tools, threshing machines, and woven baskets. The folk artists who had co-created the original work in 1965 were invited to the imitation process. This work thus received the highest award of that year’s Biennale, the Golden Lion¹. In 2002, at his solo exhibition in Shanghai, Cai Guoqiang directly exhibited works by the Soviet artist Konstantin Maksimov from his personal collection. But ever since the “Maksimov Oil Painting Training Class” was organized at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in China in the 1950s, Maksimov had greatly influenced several generations of Chinese artists. Cai Guoqiang’s appropriation of these events, including major episodes in Chinese art history since the 1950s, endowed his works with multiple layers of meaning in cultural memory, nostalgia, reflection, and irony.

Works by Li Binyuan, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object", Gravity Art Museum, 2026Works by Wang Enlai, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object" , Gravity Art Museum, 2026Among Chinese artists working along this linguistic thread, the most influential works are arguably Mao Tongqiang’s Tool (2005) and Title Deed (2009), and Song Dong’s Waste Not (2005). Mao’s innovation lies in discovering iconic objects closely tied to Chinese history, culture, and politics, then repeatedly collecting them to achieve a staggering quantity. Song Dong, meanwhile, transformed his mother’s “everyday objects one cannot bear to throw away” into an artwork which encompasses every aspect of the daily life of ordinary Chinese households in all its meticulous detail, and the sheer variety and overwhelming quantity is astonishing. His work has aroused widespread social empathy, for it embodies the traditional Chinese life concept of frugality encapsulated in the saying that “a shabby home is worth a fortune”. Cai Guoqiang’s “ready-made events”, Mao Tongqiang’s “ideological ready-mades”, and Song Dong’s “ready-mades rooted in traditional Chinese life concepts” are, in my view, among the most valuable works in Chinese contemporary art over the past four decades. Their creative expansions along the linguistic thread of the “ready-made” also contribute to world contemporary art history.

Background Story Wonderful Landscape in Hunan, Xu Bing, Mixed media installation, Glass size: 840×62cm, Lightbox size: 948×78×35cm, 2022

Subsequent uses of the ready-made in artistic practice have been more closely associated with installation as a linguistic or technical element. Nevertheless, in the works we discuss today, the “signifying quality” of a ready-made object remains important, because it can still reveal why the artist uses this particular “object” rather than another. In Xu Bing’s Background Story: Wonderful Landscape in Hunan, the traditional literati painting part corresponds to the “discarded material” on the reverse side of the work that constitutes it. The rubbish acts as the hidden answer to the riddle posed by the traditional landscape painting. Sui Jianguo’s work consists of vertically-stacked discarded sleepers from old railway tracks, which carry collective memories and associations of travel, like visits to friends and relatives, and business trips, across several generations. Another work covers a massive sheet of rubber with countless nails hammered across its surface. The softness and sharpness embodied in these two expressive objects materialize a certain prickling sensation that the artist finds difficult to describe. And that enormous shipping container with the cut-out word “CHINA” is a symbol of China’s manufacturing industry going global. Liu Wei’s installation draws on the Chinese folk custom of using homophones as auspicious words, such as “888” for “fortune”. His work Peace and Abundance: koi uses the image of fish to invoke the auspicious homophone for “abundance”. For the fish motif, he selected koi, a symbol of wealth and fashion. The entire installation is made from a large number of colored plastic bags and bottles, which may be, in this consumer age, the most emblematic objects of all. In the artist’s own words, they are “cheap, toxic, fashionable, translucent, and light, decorative and illusory, convenient and necessary for daily life yet causing great harm to people and the environment”. And, “layered transparent plastic generates rich shifting hues.” Thus, the image created with the appropriate objects, and the feeling the artist wishes to express, complement each other perfectly and irrefutably. Chen Qingqing’s works employ various “found objects”, including discarded dolls, mirrors, tree branches, medical X-ray films, and other everyday items, which were set into various found boxes to create a theatrical, stage-like effect reminiscent of a peep box. Perhaps each “little stage” is a metaphor for the bittersweet experiences of her own life.

Works by Liu Wei, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object: , Gravity Art Museum, 2026May you have peace and contentment-Koi, Liu Wei, Plastic bottle, plastic bag, 200×500×25cm, 2020The Key, Chen Qingqing, Mixed media installation, 51×39×16cm，2015

Among the younger generation, Ji Chuan, Mo Nijian, and Chen Mutian focus on the shapes, textures, and properties of objects. Ji’s works employ basins, bowls, teacups, and other everyday objects. Through different combinations, they unexpectedly yield another kind of “object”, something like a shooting target, or an image reminiscent of popular science illustrations of a ring-shaped universe, or a paraglider. By repositioning these everyday objects from unfamiliar angles, the author reimagines them as alien forms, humorous and simple. Mo splits a hitching post, an object that only traditionally wealthy families could afford and that carries a certain antiquarian value, into four parts, and uses the cordon tape commonly seen in public places to form the kind of isolation barrier typically found at exhibition sites. The do-not-touch exhibit in the middle remains a hitching post. The hitching post as a work is blurred and effaced by the hitching post as the barrier: the sacredness of the hitching post as an artwork becomes a subject of jest, and the jester is itself a hitching post. Chen’s work shows a clear awareness of female identity, emphasizing the traditional notion of “needlework” from the choice of materials such as fabrics and fibers, to the creation of dreamlike scenes, resplendent with color and suffused with warmth and serenity, through embroidery, sewing, weaving, and other crafts. The objects, namely the brilliant colors and soft textures of the fabrics and fibers, become the very foundation of the artist’s vocabulary.

Cosmos Series (detail), Ji Chuan, Ceramic, stainless steel, plastic, 80×80×30cm, 2015-2026Relationship, Mo Nijian, Hitching post, retractable belt barrier, bluestone, 130×130×130cm, 2023Pavilion of Humility, Chen Mutian, Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object", Gravity Art Museum, 2026

Some artists inflict a kind of “violence” on objects, altering their properties to achieve the desired effect. The works by Wu Gaozhong, Zhu Lizige, and Wang Enlai in this exhibition serve as examples of this approach. Wu’s work Home employs bedroom furniture: double bed, bedside table, folding chair, screen, and so on. The artist has subjected these pieces of furniture to “thousands of hacks”, making it the language and technique of the work. The force of the “hacking” and the control of that force create “slowly inflicted wounds” on the furniture, birthing a new kind of object: furniture that makes one “fearful”. Viewers standing before these pieces instinctively hold their breath and fall silent, as if a single gust of air might shatter the fragile structures. “Home”, as the most basic social unit of human life, has endured “harm”, whether inflicted by society or by the time, and has been reduced to the kind of fragile, vulnerable visual image that Wu Gaozhong presents. Zhu Lizige disassembled stainless steel scourers, and wove them into steel wire mesh nets. A scourer is a tool for scrubbing pots, and the act of disassembling it bit by bit before reweaving the strands into a net carries an undercurrent of material violence: it involves forcefully dismantling a sharp tool, and the prolonged labor of pulling and braiding the sharp wires also inflicts physical harm upon the artist herself. She titled her work Brushstroke, referring to the tactile sensation of sharp steel wire against her own hands! It is hard to imagine whether, during that long process of disassembly and weaving, she was also thinking and reflecting upon certain experiences in her own life. At the very least, the repetitive labor conjures visceral sensations of injury, entrapment, and prickling. Especially when that “golden-coated”, sharp steel wire is transformed into an enormous, spiderweb-like form suspended above or beside us, the sensation resonates with every viewer. Wang Enlai created a series of works titled Pressure Release. Those selected for this exhibition are the ones employing spray-paint cans and glass panels. Through a certain technique, the artist exerted immense pressure on spray-paint cans with a one-centimetre-thick glass sheet. Compared with the colored shapes sprayed by manual pressure, the weight of the thick glass gives the colored shapes sprayed from the cans an astonishing force. At the same time, the “physical violence” inflicted by the glass upon the spray-paint cans here transforms the colored spray paint into a powerful “visual image” that gives one an immediate feeling of release, of catharsis. This installation, in which one object enacts violence upon another, is Wang Enlai’s signifying object, which releases the psychological pressure that a certain kind of violence has imposed upon the artist.

Home: Plant Stand (detail), Wu Gaozhong, Wood, 35×35×109cm, 2015Brushstroke (detail), Zhu Lizige, Stainless steel scourer, nail, Dimensions variable, 2026Pressure Released-Glass Plate #3, Wang Enlai, Tempered glass, spray paint can, Dimensions variable, 2026

Both Li Binyuan and Chen Mingqiang articulate their respective conceptual ideas through the confrontation between their own bodies and objects. Many of Li’s works involve the element of the body confronting powerful objects. Included in this exhibition is his work Free Cultivation, executed in his hometown. On the eve of rice transplanting, when the paddy fields need to be harrowed to loosen the soil, he stood by his family’s paddy field in a suit and leather shoes, with a particular ceremonial gravity, to express gratitude to the earth for the grain it provides to humanity. Then, under the gaze of his fellow villagers, he jumped into the paddy field and repeatedly jumped and rolled, using his own body to replace the harrowing implement. He used his body to confront the earth, working the soil that had hardened over the year into yielding softness. He also used his body to caress the earth, letting it feel the warmth of his body. Chen Mingqiang’s work addresses the problematic patterns of consumption that have long been entrenched in Chinese marriage practice, namely the elaborate and cumbersome processes from wedding photography and lavish banquets to bride price, in which money has become the most conspicuous marker. In his work, he uses various everyday metal objects, like pots, pans, and bowls, to fashion a “wedding dress”. Here the “wedding dress” becomes a kind of armor with confrontational undertones. His wife deserves great praise, for her ability to understand and cooperate with his conceptual approach. They use their own bodies to endure the hardness of the steel “wedding dress”, while the dress, as armor, becomes a critical stance and symbol against the contemporary state of marriage.

Free Cultivation, Li Binyuan, Performance video, Dimensions variable, 2014Armor of Love, Chen Mingqiang, Metalwork, 180×80cm, 2012-2013

There are many more artists who work with ready-made objects, but given the limits of our perspective and venue, this exhibition merely raises questions — leaving the art world with a topic for discussion and critique, in the hope that this modest offering may invite richer responses.

1. Rent Collection Courtyard was originally created on rent-collecting grounds of Liu Wencai’s residence, and employed extensive ready-made objects such as agricultural tools, threshing machines, and woven baskets. Therefore, it attracted such serious attention from European and American art circles. I later learned that this work was selected for the 1972 Kassel Documenta by the then curator, Harald Szeemann. In 1983, the People’s Fine Arts Publishing House published a collection of 100 American sculptors, in which George Segal was classified as a sculptor. Yet in American art-historical narratives, he is an environmental or Pop artist, for he placed sculpted figures in everyday real-world settings such as bus stops and bars, adopting an identical site-specific approach to Rent Collection Courtyard. Segal’s works came slightly later than Rent Collection Courtyard, and I don’t know whether he was influenced by it. But that is not important. What matters most is Szeemann’s selection. The 1990s saw the widespread currency of the concept “CONTEXT,” and this largely explains why the European and American art communities valued Rent Collection Courtyard: the intrinsic bond between a work and its display environment had already become a consensus in the international art world. Moreover, in Germany I bought a thick book titled Context Kunst. In 1999, I had lunch with Harald Szeemann, the curator of that year’s Venice Biennale. Szeemann is Swiss, so we ate at the Swiss Embassy in China, hosted by the then Swiss Ambassador to China, Uli Sigg. After the meal, I interviewed Szeemann about his decision to select Rent Collection Courtyard for the Documenta in the early 1970s, and promised him that if he wished to fulfill his aspiration from the 1970s, I could assist in arranging the loan of its replica. For that Venice Biennale, Szeemann selected a considerable number of Chinese artists, such that they accounted for nearly one-fifth of the theme exhibition. I once heard a rumor from a German artist that 1993 was the Year of Young British Artists, and 1999 was the Year of Young Chinese Artists. At the time, I took it as a joke. However, it is true that Szeemann had a particular fondness for Chinese contemporary art, and that Cai Guoqiang won the Golden Lion that year.

Exhibition View of "The Signifying Object", Gravity Art Museum, 2026

About the Academic Director

Born in Jilin Province in 1949, Li Xianting is a renowned independent art critic and curator of contemporary Chinese art, sometimes he is referred to as the “Godfather of Chinese contemporary avant-garde art”. Graduated from Chinese Painting Department, Central Academy of Fine Art in 1978, he became the editor of Fine Art Magzine until 1983. From 1985 to 1989 he was the editor of the authoritative China Fine Art Newspaper, and was active as independent critic and curator based in Beijing henceforth.

About the Curator

Graduated from the Printmaking Department of the School of Fine Arts, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Ouyang Xing is currently the Director of Gravity Art Museum. He received professional training in printmaking in his early years and has long been engaged in artistic creation such as printmaking and oil painting. In recent years, he has mainly been engaged in the operation of art museums, exhibition planning and art research. He has participated in the planning of exhibitions and public cultural projects such as " Half-manual Era ", ".GIF ", "Square Array" and " The Signifying Object ", focusing on contemporary art, painting language and public cultural dissemination.He is committed to the development of young artists and the public promotion of contemporary art.

About the Exhibition

The Signifying Object

Sponsor: Gravity Art Museum

Artists: Chen Mingqiang, Chen Mutian, Chen Qingqing, Ji Chuan, Li Binyuan, Liu Wei, Mo Nijian, Sui Jianguo, Song Dong, Wang Enlai, Wu Gaozhong, Xu Bing, Zhu Lizige

Duration: 2026.7.12 — 2027.1.3

Venue: Gravity Art Museum Exhibition Hall 1\2\3\4\5\6

Curator: Ouyang Xing

Academic Director: Li Xianting

Coordinators: Quan Li, Ji Yucheng

Visual Designer: Studio.linshi

Exhibition Service: Chen Mengyin, An Xin

Courtesy of Gravity Art Museum, edited by CAFA ART INFO