GÈN: A Journey Through Art's Transcendence

Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art's opening exhibition "GÈN: A Journey Through Art's Transcendence," curated by Wu Hongliang, brings together 27 Chinese and international artists across 55 works, with new pieces specially created by Xu Bing, Sui Jianguo, and others for the museum's opening.

From 30 August to 8 November 2026, "GÈN: A Journey Through Art's Transcendence" is presented in Gallery 8 (Floors 1–2) of Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art (Suzhou MoCA), curated by Wu Hongliang, director of the Beijing Fine Art Academy. The exhibition brings together 55 works by 27 leading Chinese and international artists, spanning sculpture, painting, installation, new media, and photography, with several artists — including Xu Bing and Sui Jianguo — creating new work specially for the museum's opening.

What would it look like if six thousand years could appear inside a single museum at once? "GÈN" places the ancient and the contemporary, the garden and the cosmos, the body and technology, within the same moment of time, asking a deceptively simple question: what does time leave behind?

Sui Jianguo's Cloud Garden — Nine Cubic Meters scans and enlarges the brief gesture of hands pressing clay into monumental sculptures that can be walked around, freezing a few seconds of motion into something that can be seen. Ding Yi's Appearance of Crosses 2025-B1 continues a symbol the artist has painted for decades, here woven together with Naxi constellation motifs, so that repetition itself accumulates the weight of time. Xu Bing's Where Are You? cuts the wreckage of the "Xu Bing Tianshu" art rocket into 5,480 fragments corresponding to its satellite's orbital track; visitors can scan a code to be randomly matched with a fragment of their own, linking a vast aerospace undertaking to one specific viewer. Huang Yongyu's Suzhou Humble Administrator's Garden Handscroll, a line drawing made during a visit to the garden in 1973, returns to Suzhou after nearly fifty years, bringing the four-hundred-year-old garden, the artist's 1973 journey, and today's viewer into the same span of time. Further works — Robert Zhao Renhui's Urban Wildness Detective, Michael Cherney's Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze River, and Shi Hui's Ring, Bi, Jue — extend the exhibition's inquiry into what time leaves behind, from urban wilderness to contemporary photography to the forms of ancient jade.

The exhibition closes on a line written some 1,700 years ago by the third-century Suzhou-born writer Lu Ji: "to survey past and present in an instant, to hold the four seas within a single glance." The past, it suggests, has never truly disappeared — it only keeps changing shape before it meets us again.

Exhibition design is by KITCHEN.

Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, exterior architectural view. Courtesy of Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art

Limage Studio, *New Moon, Full Moon* , installation view of "GÈN: A Journey Through Art's Transcendence" exhibition, Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, Suzhou

Ding Yi, *Appearance of Crosses 2025-B1*, installation view of "GÈN: A Journey Through Art's Transcendence" exhibition, Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, Suzhou

Xu Bing, *Where Are You?*, installation view of "GÈN: A Journey Through Art's Transcendence" exhibition, Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, Suzhou

Zhan Wang, *Wanting a Hole* , installation view of "GÈN: A Journey Through Art's Transcendence" exhibition, Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, Suzhou

Shi Hui, *Bi*, *Ring*, *Jue*, installation view of "GÈN: A Journey Through Art's Transcendence" exhibition, Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, Suzhou

Wei Bi, *Tower*, *Array*, installation view of "GÈN: A Journey Through Art's Transcendence" exhibition, Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, Suzhou

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