Solo Exhibition Art Fairs West Bund Art Center, Shanghai
Art and Design Education: Future Lab
2025.11.1-11.2
Opening: 16.30, 10.31
West Bund Art Center, Hall A
West Bund Art & Design, xiàn chăng
2025.11.12-11.16
West Bund Art Center, Hall A
ShanghART is pleased to announce the exhibition, Hu Xiangcheng: Sojourns of a Stranger II, will be presented in the xiàn chăng section of West Bund Art & Design from November 12 to 16. Within nearly 1,000 square meters of space in Hall A of the West Bund Art Center, the project features a selection of Hu’s paintings, sculptures, and large-scale installations spanning from the 1990s to the present. The installing process of the project will also be presented as a special segment of the Art & Design Innovation Future Education Expo from October 31 to November 2.
This exhibition marks the second chapter of Hu Xiangcheng’s solo show Sojourns of a Stranger, first presented at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2007. Together, the two exhibitions form a cohesive whole—an ongoing inquiry into the labyrinthine journey within everyday life, interweaving diverse artistic media and materials. Seeking to forge an unfamiliar path through this journey, Hu often encounters a creative force akin to the “natural emergence” once ascribed to Romantic-era poets—a generative vitality that brings forth the strange and the wondrous.
Rooted in the flux of the contemporary world, Hu’s artistic practice draws not only from his early years’ experience in Tibet and Africa—where he moved between distinct cultural contexts as a “stranger”—but also from the technological, philosophical, and existential conditions of our time: the explosion of information, the blurring boundaries between human and machine, and humanity’s expanding exploration of the cosmos. These unfamiliar horizons open boundless possibilities for dialogue with the unknown.
Born in Shanghai, Hu Xiangcheng came to recognize ever more deeply the city’s pluralistic spirit upon returning from his years of global artistic nomadism. Many of his works likewise draw directly from the surrounding environment—agricultural and industrial wasted, architectural fragments, even remnants of Hu and other artists’ creations—all reassembled into new forms. Through these processes, the cycles of renewal and transformation between the individual and the city are continuously constructed and reimagined. In Sojourns of a Stranger II, Hu Xiangcheng creates a passage that traverses past and present, geography and culture, the artificial and the imagined—inviting viewers to wander within it and glimpse more distant landscapes.
Alongside Hu Xiangcheng’s large-scale project, the Xiàn Chǎng sector of the West Bund Art & Design Fair will also feature works by artists including Jing Shijian, Lin Aojie, Qiu Deshu, Tang Yiyao, and Zhou Li.
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