And Then Some:
Works (mostly) from Tongji Philip Qian
Chosen (mostly) with Fan Ada Wang
Installed (in part) with McKinzie Trotta
Arranged (in part) with Si Tong
2026.3.13-6.30
Steve Sun Gallery
University of Chicago Center in Beijing
Culture Plaza 20th Floor
59 Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing, China
This exhibition in Beijing is a continuation of my Logan Center Exhibition at the University of Chicago in fall 2025, forwarding direct arguments on the dimension of inappropriateness and unreasonability in my kind of contemporary art. In Chicago, I showed a large series of T-shirts as the representation of history on behalf of a clothing store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, made the most prominent wall in the exhibition the faintest, stored wooden panels which were mostly off view, left the longest wall as critical space for imagination, and presented the Spiral Jetty video at the height of my dog.
Here, as well, I have chosen to depart from conventions and offer the works I most want to make public, private, visible, invisible, open, closed, overt, covert, serial, and singular. A key work here parallels the T-shirts in Chicago, and it reveals a glimpse into the enormous collection of pencil sharpeners from Meng Xianglin, my maternal grandfather at least from 1983, which was the date on one of the objects on view today. He prized these pencil sharpeners throughout his lifetime and never, ever, allowed us to touch. I only realized after his passing that he wrote, mostly with pencil, numbers in the style of the accession process in museums. It was evident that he cared little about the utilitarian values of the sharpeners—he rarely used them—but saw them as objects for display. I hope this exhibition fulfills that wish, because it is the first time they left the glass cabinet in his apartment in Shanghai. The pencil sharpeners occupy three shelves for the exhibition, placed in relationship with a wooden cabinet built by Zhang Xueyuan, my partner Ada’s maternal grandfather from the 1970s.
Also, I am presenting the latest iteration for the No-risk Hour, the seventh in the series around Daylight Savings Time, made on November 2, 2025 from 1 am to 2 am. I jotted down my thoughts without correcting any errors and used the second hour to manipulate the color of the word document. Eventually, typos became the positive ingredients in a picture otherwise impossible to register from the audience’s perspective.
Besides consistent interests like making ten-minute drawings using hotel stationary, collecting papers offered to me during travels and subsequently amending them to infuse texts with images, and tanning leather passively through exposure to the sun, I invited collaborators to directly co-define the exhibition. They are in the exhibition title, not as footnotes. My partner, Fan Ada Wang, selected most of the works for this exhibition from my studios in Chicago and New York, including frames and objects by additional artists, the names of whom appear in the front. McKinzie Trotta, my friend since graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design, flew from New York to install the exhibition and provide crucial design strategies. Both Ada and McKinzie engaged directly with my Chicago exhibition in the fall. And last but not least, Si Tong, a middle school student from Beijing, who has been to my exhibition at Kriti Gallery in Varanasi, India ten years ago, arranged the works on the back side of the temporary wall, which I see as a cabinet of curiosity, of sorts. With such gestures, I hope to complicate and offset the definition of a one-person exhibition, because no solo exhibitions, from my point of view, are possible with only the so-called genius artist himself, herself or themselves. It may just be the fact.
Tongji Philip Qian, Beijing, 2026
Works (mostly) from Tongji Philip Qian
Chosen (mostly) with Fan Ada Wang
Installed (in part) with McKinzie Trotta
Arranged (in part) with Si Tong
2026.3.13-6.30
Steve Sun Gallery
University of Chicago Center in Beijing
Culture Plaza 20th Floor
59 Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing, China
This exhibition in Beijing is a continuation of my Logan Center Exhibition at the University of Chicago in fall 2025, forwarding direct arguments on the dimension of inappropriateness and unreasonability in my kind of contemporary art. In Chicago, I showed a large series of T-shirts as the representation of history on behalf of a clothing store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, made the most prominent wall in the exhibition the faintest, stored wooden panels which were mostly off view, left the longest wall as critical space for imagination, and presented the Spiral Jetty video at the height of my dog.
Here, as well, I have chosen to depart from conventions and offer the works I most want to make public, private, visible, invisible, open, closed, overt, covert, serial, and singular. A key work here parallels the T-shirts in Chicago, and it reveals a glimpse into the enormous collection of pencil sharpeners from Meng Xianglin, my maternal grandfather at least from 1983, which was the date on one of the objects on view today. He prized these pencil sharpeners throughout his lifetime and never, ever, allowed us to touch. I only realized after his passing that he wrote, mostly with pencil, numbers in the style of the accession process in museums. It was evident that he cared little about the utilitarian values of the sharpeners—he rarely used them—but saw them as objects for display. I hope this exhibition fulfills that wish, because it is the first time they left the glass cabinet in his apartment in Shanghai. The pencil sharpeners occupy three shelves for the exhibition, placed in relationship with a wooden cabinet built by Zhang Xueyuan, my partner Ada’s maternal grandfather from the 1970s.
Also, I am presenting the latest iteration for the No-risk Hour, the seventh in the series around Daylight Savings Time, made on November 2, 2025 from 1 am to 2 am. I jotted down my thoughts without correcting any errors and used the second hour to manipulate the color of the word document. Eventually, typos became the positive ingredients in a picture otherwise impossible to register from the audience’s perspective.
Besides consistent interests like making ten-minute drawings using hotel stationary, collecting papers offered to me during travels and subsequently amending them to infuse texts with images, and tanning leather passively through exposure to the sun, I invited collaborators to directly co-define the exhibition. They are in the exhibition title, not as footnotes. My partner, Fan Ada Wang, selected most of the works for this exhibition from my studios in Chicago and New York, including frames and objects by additional artists, the names of whom appear in the front. McKinzie Trotta, my friend since graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design, flew from New York to install the exhibition and provide crucial design strategies. Both Ada and McKinzie engaged directly with my Chicago exhibition in the fall. And last but not least, Si Tong, a middle school student from Beijing, who has been to my exhibition at Kriti Gallery in Varanasi, India ten years ago, arranged the works on the back side of the temporary wall, which I see as a cabinet of curiosity, of sorts. With such gestures, I hope to complicate and offset the definition of a one-person exhibition, because no solo exhibitions, from my point of view, are possible with only the so-called genius artist himself, herself or themselves. It may just be the fact.
Tongji Philip Qian, Beijing, 2026
