Award-winning artists Liu Wa and Bao Yang in the spotlight at Long Museum

An exhibition titled “Madlands” of work by Liu Wa and Bao Yang is at Long Museum (West Bund) through July 21.

This exhibition showcases a body of multimedia work created over the past two years for the staircase gallery, varying from their collaborative video work and Liu’s latest series of paintings to Bao’s large-scale stainless steel, 24K gold sound sculptures, oil paintings and mixed media work.

Liu, born in 1994, is a multimedia artist who works in video, painting, interactive installation and VR. She received her BA degree in Anthropology and Art with distinction from Yale University, an MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT, and is currently based in New York and Beijing.

Her new series of paintings, inspired by research into diverse natural and man-made landscapes — from lush rainforests to barren deserts and volcanoes — captures the unease and turmoil of the climate crisis.

Liu’s works brim with surreal imagination and visceral emotion. Her paintings boldly combine delicate imagery with immediate brushstrokes, capturing moments of suspense and tension with unsettling clarity.

Liu was awarded the International Emmy Awards Young Creatives Award, Forbes 30 Under 30 List, Porsche’s Young Chinese Artist of the Year, Robb Report’s Young Artist of the Year.

Born in 1991, Bao is an installation artist, pianist, and composer based in New York.

His site-specific 8.5-meter-tall mirror-finish stainless steel sound sculpture, “Infinity Tower,” reflects and refracts the exhibition space into multiple dimensions.

Drawing on his background as a classical pianist, Bao creates performative action paintings to encapsulate the essence of live performance and the minimalistic aesthetics of his composition. He performs on the canvas, accumulating oil paint into subtle spectrums and rich textures, or uses a palette knife to add and subtract paint, allowing the paintings to spontaneously develop unexpected outcomes.

Bao has been awarded the Maria Manetti Shrem Composer Prize, Forbes China’s “Most Influential Young Artists” and Robb Report’s “Young Artist of the Year.”

The spotlight of the exhibition is their collaborative works, single-channel 4K video, “No One’s Game” that draws from their long-distance rainforest trek and motorbike journey.

If you go:

Date: Through July 21 (closed on Mondays) 10am-5:30pm (Tuesday to Thursday), 10am-8pm (Friday to Sunday)

Venue: Long Museum (West Bund)

Address: 3398 Longteng Avenue 龙腾大道3398号

Admission: 100 yuan (US$13.90)