Chengdu Biennale featuring Daniel Buren, Julian Opie and Yu Hong
2 March 2026
From 8 February – 23 August 2026, Chengdu Art Museum presents the latest editioin edition of Chengdu Biennale, featurnig works by Daniel Buren, Julian Opie and Yu Hong.
Themed ‘Pulse of Life’, the Chengdu Biennale centers around the living conditions of people across different times and spaces, exploring daily life within the complex and ever-changing social environment of the present day. It orchestrates a resonance between the tangible fabric of everyday existence and the data-deluged reality of contemporary life, thereby constructing a multi‑dimensional landscape of the ‘pulse of life,’ through which probes the inherent tensions within the evolution of cities, rural communities, and even civilisation itself.
Yu Hong shows Salvation (2021), a never before exhibited monumental five-panel painting. The depicted individual figures retain a palpable sense of bodily weight and presence, while together they form a dense, rhythmic constellation. With her characteristic attentiveness to the vulnerability and resilience of the human body, Yu Hong allows quiet moments of resolve and warmth to surface from within the compressed mass of figures, infusing the scene with a restrained yet persistent sense of vitality.
Daniel Buren presents Pile Up: High relief n° B5 (2017), an amalgamation of forms constructed out of two types of aluminium rectangular blocs, one covered with paint and the other treated in order to have a reflective, mirror-like surface. The sculpture derives its dynamism from a myriad of carefully arranged reliefs, which play with depth, surface, and space.
Julian Opie showcases a reclining stainless steel figure inspired in form by wooden tribal antique statuary from southeast Asia, alongside a series lightboxes denoting landscape scenes – stylised depictions of vistas from the French rural countryside, with roads, grasslands and mountains transformed into abstracted graphic forms.
Image: Yu Hong, Salvation, 2021, Acrylic on canvas, Overall: 300 x 1250 x 5.5 cm, 118 1/8 x 492 1/8 x 2 1/8 in © Yu Hong. Courtesy Lisson Gallery
