About Art Beijing

Art Beijing

Art Beijing was a major art fair held in Beijing, the capital of China, at the National Agricultural Exhibition Center. Founded in 2006, it emerged from the team behind the China International Gallery Exposition, known as CIGE, as that fair's spin-off, and it was directed for most of its life by Dong Mengyang. The fair opened as a largely academic contemporary exhibition and developed into the capital's largest and most public-facing art fair, organised into contemporary, classic art, photography and image, design and public art sections. The Art Newspaper characterised its tenth edition in 2015 as simultaneously China's worst art fair, yet the capital's best, a judgement that captured its defining tension: Art Beijing was aimed at a broad domestic collecting public rather than at international professionals, in deliberate contrast to the more internationally oriented fairs of Shanghai. The fair staged its 16th edition from 30 April to 3 May 2021, bringing together some 150 institutions, and it has not staged a further edition since 2021. Art fair directories treat it as ceased, and its 2006 to 2021 run stands as a document of the first boom of China's domestic art market.

Founding in 2006 and the CIGE Spin-Off

Art Beijing was founded in 2006, emerging from the team behind the China International Gallery Exposition. CIGE, launched in 2004, was China's first international art fair, and Art Beijing began as its spin-off before becoming a separate fair in its own right from 2007. The new fair opened as a largely academic contemporary exhibition; Art Un-Forbidden was the theme of its 2006 to 2007 editions. The timing placed Art Beijing at the height of the first great expansion of the Chinese contemporary art market, when auction prices for Chinese contemporary art were setting records internationally and a domestic gallery and collecting scene was forming rapidly in Beijing around districts such as 798. Where CIGE positioned itself as the international, professionally selective fair, Art Beijing from its early editions took a different path, opening its doors widely to the capital's growing public of new collectors, students and general visitors. That founding choice, made by the team that knew the Beijing fair landscape better than any other, shaped every subsequent edition and explains both the fair's scale and the criticism it attracted.

Dong Mengyang and the Fair's Direction

For most of its life Art Beijing was directed by Dong Mengyang, whose intentions for the fair were a recurring subject of commentary. Dealers and critics quoted during the fair's run described a director who wanted the fair to be international but who faced, in the words of Taipei's Eslite Gallery director Emily Chao, a contradiction: China, in that view, had to build its own market first and create a healthy domestic scene. Dong's fair accordingly privileged the domestic ecosystem. Beijing dealers who exhibited year after year testified to the team's effort and progress; Amy Li, a Beijing dealer exhibiting for a sixth time at the tenth edition, said the Art Beijing team really worked hard and that progress could be seen every year. Lu Chao of Chambers Fine Art Beijing, attending for an eighth year, described the fair's specialty as being Beijing's best fair and its biggest, while noting that Shanghai gave a feeling of having more international collectors and Beijing was more domestic. Those assessments from repeat exhibitors define Dong Mengyang's Art Beijing: a fair judged by its own participants less on international prestige than on its service to the capital's galleries and buyers.

Venue: The National Agricultural Exhibition Center

Art Beijing was held at the National Agricultural Exhibition Center in Beijing, the large exhibition complex on Dongsanhuan North Road in Chaoyang District. The venue, one of the capital's established large-scale exhibition grounds, gave the fair the floor space to operate as the capital's biggest art fair, with distinct pavilions for its different sections. At the tenth edition in 2015, the contemporary pavilion alone held 127 of the fair's more than 140 exhibitors. The centre's halls accommodated the fair's mixture of gallery booths, special exhibitions, forums and public art, and its accessibility to a general city audience suited the fair's public-facing character. The venue link persisted to the end of the fair's run: the 16th edition in the spring of 2021 was staged at the National Agricultural Exhibition Center over the May Day holiday period, and accounts of the fair's identity consistently tie Art Beijing to that address. The same complex also hosted other Beijing art events of the period, but Art Beijing was its longest-running art fair tenant and the event most closely associated with it.

Structure and Sections

Art Beijing was organised into sections that broadened over its life from its contemporary art core. By its mature editions the fair comprised five sections: contemporary art, classic art, photography and image, design, and public art. The contemporary section was always the largest; at the tenth edition in 2015 it accounted for 127 of more than 140 exhibitors, and exhibiting galleries at the 2016 edition included Galleria Continua, ADMIRA Gallery, Beijing Art Now Gallery, ON/gallery and Sokyo Gallery, spanning Asian, European and American galleries. The classic art section accommodated more traditional work, the photography and image section recognised the strength of photographic practice in Chinese contemporary art, and the public art section commissioned and displayed works intended for shared space; the 2016 public art programme, entitled Art for Tomorrow, focused on the trend of art publicity and explored the function of art integrating with the public and its relationship with nature and the city. A professional design platform, Design Beijing, was added at the 2016 edition, which the fair's own numbering treated as its tenth anniversary edition, under art director Takahiro Kaneshima, formerly of Art Fair Tokyo. The fair also ran an Art Forum of talks and discussions, whose 2016 topics included dialogues between Western and Chinese design masters, artificial intelligence and art, and the exchange of practice cases in art intervention.

Growth and the Domestic Market

The growth of Art Beijing tracked the growth of China's domestic art market itself. The 2011 edition gathered over 100 art institutions from nearly 20 countries and included VIP art-education forums aimed at new collectors, a programme choice that reflected the fair's mission of cultivating a first generation of Chinese buyers. By the tenth edition in 2015 the fair had more than 140 exhibitors, and sales reporting from that edition shows the domestic market in action: Chambers Fine Art Beijing had sold half the art in its booth by the second day, particularly works by GAMA ranging from 150,000 to 200,000 renminbi and by Fu Xiaotong for under 100,000 renminbi, while Long March Space reported Chinese collectors from very different backgrounds buying Hu Xiangqian's videos. The Art Newspaper's 2015 review noted the fair's crowd-pleasing works, including statues of Shaun the Sheep and Bi Heng's comic book-inspired Iron Panda, as evidence of its orientation toward a general public. Fair directories in later years described a massive fair showcasing about 190 galleries from China and the rest of the world. Across these accounts, the consistent theme is a fair scaled to the breadth, rather than the top end, of Chinese collecting.

The Tenth Edition and Critical Debate

The tenth edition of Art Beijing, held in the spring of 2015 and closing on Sunday 3 May, generated the fair's most quoted critical judgement. The Art Newspaper's review, headlined as a fair that for better or for worse was more Chinese than ever, recorded that Art Beijing had been called China's worst art fair, yet the capital's best. The criticism was that the fair was aimed more at a general public than at the art industry, and the review balanced that charge against testimony from exhibiting dealers who praised the team's work and reported real sales to a diverse domestic collecting base. The debate the review crystallised was a genuine one about what a Chinese art fair should be in a market whose collector class was still forming: an internationally selective professional event on the model of Art Basel, or a large public marketplace that educated new buyers and moved work at accessible prices. Art Beijing under Dong Mengyang consistently chose the second model. The same review's details, from the 127 contemporary exhibitors to the popular imagery on display, remain the fullest single English-language account of the fair at its peak and are the source from which later directories and summaries of Art Beijing have largely drawn.

Special Exhibitions and the 2021 Edition

Alongside its gallery sections, Art Beijing presented special exhibitions intended to give the fair curatorial weight. The 16th edition, held at the National Agricultural Exhibition Center from 30 April to 3 May 2021, brought together some 150 institutions across the fair's five sections over the May Day holiday period. Its highlighted programmes included a show of Damien Hirst, the Young British Artist, whose prints from his three famous series, the Kaleidoscope Paintings, Spot Paintings and Spin Paintings, were put on display; a Trend of China presentation focusing on the development of home-grown urban art, in which young Chinese artists influenced by street art and graffiti were shown drawing on their own cultural traditions; and attention to the late oil painter Xin Dongwang, known for portraying the typical faces of a time through years of depicting grassroots people from different walks of life, particularly underprivileged groups. The 2021 edition, staged after the disruption of 2020, demonstrated that the fair retained its formula of gallery sections plus headline special shows to the end of its run. It also proved to be the final edition: no further Art Beijing has been staged since 2021.

Relationship with CIGE and the Beijing Fair Landscape

Art Beijing cannot be understood apart from the fair landscape of Beijing in the 2000s and 2010s. It began as a spin-off of CIGE, and after CIGE's own final edition in 2015 the two fairs' histories together describe the first era of Beijing art fairs: CIGE, from 2004, the international pioneer; Art Beijing, from 2006, the large domestic successor that outlasted it. For years the two fairs ran days apart each spring, and The Art Newspaper judged CIGE the more internationally oriented of the two, a comparison that Art Beijing's organisers effectively accepted in their programming. Later entrants changed the landscape again: JingArt, founded by the team behind Shanghai's Art021, launched in Beijing in 2018 with international mega-galleries such as David Zwirner and Hauser and Wirth that had never participated in a Beijing fair, and Beijing Contemporary, founded in 2018 and directed by Bao Dong, took over the National Agricultural Exhibition Center's spring art slot with a more curated model. Art Beijing's run thus sits between the pioneering CIGE era and the curated, internationally anchored fairs that followed, and its history records the moment when Beijing's fair scene was defined by domestic scale rather than international selection.

Closure and Status

Art Beijing has not staged a further edition since its 16th edition in 2021, and it is treated in art-fair directories as ceased, with directories stating plainly that the fair has ceased and no further edition is to come. No formal closing announcement anchors the record; like several Chinese art fairs of its generation, it ended by not returning. Because the fair is closed, its history is written in the past tense. Its official website, artbeijing.net, documented the fair during its active years, and the fullest records of its editions survive in contemporary press coverage, above all The Art Newspaper's tenth-edition review, in China Culture and Aesthetica coverage of the 2016 and 2021 editions, and in fair directories that preserve its founding date, venue and sectional structure. The absence of editions after 2021, in a city that continues to host Beijing Contemporary, JingArt's successors and other fairs, marks the close of the fair's 15-year presence on the capital's calendar.

Legacy and Significance

The legacy of Art Beijing is the record it provides of the first boom of China's domestic art market. Between 2006 and 2021 the fair grew from an academic contemporary exhibition spun off from China's first international art fair into the capital's largest and most public-facing art fair, with sections spanning contemporary and classic art, photography, design and public art, a design platform added under a former Art Fair Tokyo director, and editions that gathered 100 to 190 institutions. Its defenders and its critics agreed on what it was: a fair for the Chinese public and the Chinese collector, built in Beijing while Shanghai built fairs for the international circuit. That choice makes Art Beijing historically significant beyond its sales. It educated new collectors through forums and education programmes, gave hundreds of domestic galleries a dependable annual marketplace, and embodied a theory of market-building, that China must build its own market first, which its director Dong Mengyang pursued for most of the fair's life. As a document of that era, the fair's history complements the record of CIGE before it and of the curated Beijing fairs after it.