Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art is honored to present Ding Liren: Drifting Encounters, opening in August 2025. The exhibition brings together over 100 works by artist Ding Liren (b. 1930), spanning more than six decades—from as early as the 1960s to his latest pieces from this year. Rich in media and forms, the show centers on painting and sculpture, and also includes selections from Ding’s personal collection. Alongside Ding’s work, the exhibition features newly commissioned works by seven emerging artists—each born in the 1980s or 1990s—created over the past year. These younger voices participate as equals, forming an inter-generational dialogue with Ding Liren in Beiqiu’s exhibition space with special scenography. The result is a shared artistic moment: a true “drifting encounter.”

Ding Liren is the point of departure—but how could an “encounter” occur with only one player? A single clap makes no sound; a solo rendezvous breeds only solitude. As such, Drifting Encounters is not a solo show in the conventional sense. It is an ensemble production. These new participants engage, intervene, contaminate, provoke. Together, they enact a dynamic interplay of recognition and departure—a scene that begins, but never quite ends.

Consider the younger artists who’ve come to “encounter” Ding: Ge Yulu, ever the outlier, refrains from creating new work himself, instead curating a mini-exhibition of artist Zhan Qi—a “show within a show”—as a gesture of introduction and encounter. Hu Yinping revisits her ongoing series “What did the masters come to the east for?”, producing a new episode of Xiaofang in the visual style of Ding’s early works, paying tribute to his deep affinity with grassroots culture. Li Xindi devises a set of rules for an interactive installation that redefines “encounter” as the evolving relationship between viewer and exhibition—a script written through movement. Liu Dongxu reimagines household items into sculptures that echo both classical and modernist vocabularies, staging a formal encounter across time. Su Hua paints scenes teeming with unruly vitality—markets, rivers, martial worlds—unfolding with ceaseless energy. Wu Shangcong repurposes discarded materials into narratives that bridge sculpture and painting, dissolving boundaries in a manner deeply resonant with Ding’s spirit.

Ding Liren, born in 1930 in Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, is a professor at the College of Design and Art, Shanghai University of Technology, and a guest professor at Guangdong University of Technology. Although Ding never received formal academic training in fine arts, he developed an early and distinct aesthetic approach that deliberately avoids adherence to any single artistic school. Instead, he draws inspiration equally from diverse painting traditions and folk art forms.

Tiange Yang is a Beijing-based curator and art historian. He currently holds the position of curator-at-large at the Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art, Nanjing, and is enrolled in a Ph.D. in art history at Peking University. Yang is the inaugural recipient of the Mo Yuan: Art History Research and Writing Grant in the field of contemporary Chinese art writing from the New Century Art Foundation. His research explores issues of the body and the construction of identity, and nationalist formations in twentieth-century China and the contemporary world.