View of Inside the Frams: Twenty Years in Focus, SPURS Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of SPURS Gallery.
Looking back on the nearly 150 exhibitions presented over the past two decades at SPURS Gallery, Inside the Frame: Twenty Years in Focus unfolds in six chapters, each articulating a distinct way of framing. As the curators explain in their curatorial text, a retrospective gaze always requires a frame; or rather, the very act of looking back is itself an act of framing. It gives rise to further questions: who is looking, and at what; from which perspective, from what position, and with what kind of power? How do these elements interweave, confront one another, or become integrated? In the process of framing, which fragments are selected, which details are brought into focus, and which are filtered out or omitted? Which established narratives are rejected, and which are revised or carried forward?
View of Inside the Frams: Twenty Years in Focus, SPURS Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of SPURS Gallery.
Chapter one, Crossroads: The Possibility of Becoming an Individual, revisits the gallery’s efforts to reexamine and present so-called pre-’85 “unofficial” art. It reveals how the search for individuality and the question of art intersected through collective plein air painting, travel, self-education, and underground exhibitions, offering a critical reference for rethinking and reimagining the relationships between the individual and the collective, and between art and life.
View of Inside the Frams: Twenty Years in Focus, SPURS Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of SPURS Gallery.
Between Past and Future explores the formation and manifestation of historical consciousness. Back in 2008, when Qiu Anxiong’s long row of decommissioned trains, Staring into Amnesia, arrived in Basel, the media erupted with talk of “Chinese art heading to Basel.” Few noticed that what the artist was truly addressing was the absence of memory and the void of historical consciousness. In dialogue, the moving-image work of Vietnamese artist Nguyen Trinh Thi and the painting of Nicaraguan American artist Farley Aguilar—both based on archival images—demonstrate a different impulse: the urge to confront the unresolved ethical debts and catastrophic events that still call for renewed understanding and response.
View of Inside the Frams: Twenty Years in Focus, SPURS Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of SPURS Gallery.
From a moment of international turbulence, Alternative Ways of Imagining the World looks back at the peak of globalization, an era not so distant yet already seeming far away, to re-evaluate the legacy it has left us.
View of Inside the Frams: Twenty Years in Focus, SPURS Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of SPURS Gallery.
Ministry of Truth was the title of two previous exhibitions at the gallery. The chapter focuses on practices that challenge the existing structures of reality and power, tracing their concealed or overt operations. In his 2011 solo exhibition, Wang Wei reconstructed the notice-board corridor of the Beijing Zoo, while more recently Payne Zhu developed an allegory of “matching” that pointed to the entanglements among finance, the body, and the overflow of images within contemporary biopolitics.
View of Inside the Frams: Twenty Years in Focus, SPURS Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of SPURS Gallery.
Endoscope charts an opposite path, detouring from macroscopic forces to focus instead on microscopic, personal, and embodied experiences. In the works of artists such as Xing Danwen, one encounters various forms of self-reflection and self-care, alongside powerful expressions of recognition that are at once acts of resistance.
View of Inside the Frams: Twenty Years in Focus, SPURS Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of SPURS Gallery.
The exhibition’s final chapter, Spectacle, Interface, and Cartography, examines image-making in the technological age. From the tension between the electronic image-viewing habits and the artist’s painting behaviour in Hou Zichao’s work to Ye Linghan’s practice of “working from the screen,” technological advancement, social media, and platform governance have increasingly collapsed the boundary between image and interface.
About the Exhibition
Inside the Frame: Twenty Years in Focus
Co-curated by Li Jia, an independent curator and researcher, and Xiangning, a member of the SPURS Gallery team
Dates: December 13, 2025–March 1, 2026
Venue: SPURS Gallery
Address: D-06, 798 Art Zone, 2 Jiuxianqiao Rd, Chaoyang District, Beijing
Participating artists: Farley Aguilar, Chen Shaoxiong, Chen Siyu, Chi Tien Lin Cheng, Fang Lu, Guo Haiqiang, Hou Zichao, Huang Rui, Ji Zhou, Li Nu, Li Shan, Liao Guohe, Lin Yilin, Ma Kelu, Ma Yanhong, Nguyen Trinh Thi, ONS, Ou Jin, Payne Zhu, Roksana Pirouzmand, Qiu Anxiong, Qiu Xiaofei, Anselm Reyle, Song Kun, Sun Yitian, Tan Tian, Tang Pinggang, Tie Ying, Ulay, Wang Jiajia, Wang Wei, Wei Hai, Xing Danwen, Xu Haoyang, Yan Lei, Danful Yang, Ye Linghan, Yi Lian, Yuan Keru, Zeng Hong, Zhang Peili, Zhang Wei, Zheng Ziyan, Zhou Yan.
Courtesy of SPURS Gallery, edited by CAFA ART INFO.
