Group Exhibition Institute of Contemporary Arts At NYU Shanghai, Shanghai
Vitalisms II is an exhibition-as-experiment that continues a long-term research and education project on contemporary painting in China. Following the first chapter’s inquiry into the historicity of painting, we now turn toward a different question: How does value come into being through our encounters with painting?
As the opening season of our new artistic research program Untimely Inheritances (2026–28), Vitalisms II considers inheritance as a condition we inhabit and reinterpret. Within the financial imagination, value is rendered calculable, comparable, and exchangeable. Yet value can also name artistic, historical, social, institutional, and affective relations. What happens when a painting is encountered as an artwork, cultural artifact, collectible object, commodity, or financial asset?
Vitalisms II focuses on abstract and non-representational painting, a field whose boundaries remain uncertain. The exhibition brings together practices ranging from conceptually driven, hard-edged geometric painting to more intuitive and expressive approaches, including works that approach the threshold of representation. How might abstraction reveal, rather than obscure, relations that are otherwise difficult to perceive? How might we keep interpretation open, rather than seeking settlement? And what might speculation come to mean as a practice of imagining otherwise, rather than predicting return?
The title Vitalisms draws from Isabelle Graw’s account of painting’s “vitalistic fantasies”—how vitality and agency have been projected onto painting. *Vitalisms I asked whether we could extend these fantasies and think of paintings as active participants in the historical and social relations through which they are made, encountered, and circulated. Vitalisms II asks: What might happen when we approach a painting not simply as an image to be interpreted, but as something with which we enter into relation?
Like the first Vitalisms, this chapter is conceived as an experiment in which knowledge is exchanged and produced throughout the exhibition. During weekly study sessions, we spend extended time with the paintings, developing interpretations collectively through close looking, discussion, and reflection. These encounters become part of the exhibition’s research, inviting us to ask: What might we come to value—and, in turn, make possible?
* Isabelle Graw, The Love of Painting (Sternberg Press, 2018): 21-24.
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