In the summer of 2025, following “Collection as Poem in the Age of Ephemerality”, “X Pink 101”, and “X Collection 202: Portrait of a Man”, X Museum is delighted to present its fourth edition of the collection exhibition, “X Abstract 303”. The exhibition is on view from May 25th to October 12th, 2025, on the second floor of X Museum, Beijing. Echoing the museum’s concurrent exhibition “Abstraction (Re)Creation – 20 Under 40”, this exhibition focuses on 15 international modern and contemporary artists’ abstract paintings and sculptures, supplemented by literature and publications. By juxtaposing works by abstraction masters and emerging artists, the exhibition captures the evolving fragments and pivotal moments of abstract art through the lens of their respective social identities, temporal-spatial contexts, and practice methodologies. From an equal perspective, it constructs dialogues between form, colour, structure, and emotion, seeking new possibilities for the continuous transformation of “Non-representational.”

Within the interplay of generations and cultures, the exhibition reveals the multifaceted trajectories of abstract art through juxtaposition. Since its inception in 20th-century Europe—emerging from the deconstruction of form in Cubism, the release of emotion in Expressionism, and the rational order of geometric abstraction to the exploration of materiality in Informel Art—abstract art rapidly proliferated and diversified globally. In this exhibition, German-French artist Hans Hartung, a pivotal figure in postwar European abstraction, propels the medium into radical dimensions with his bold brushstrokes and vivid chromatic clashes, capturing the tremors of wartime trauma through intersecting linear structures. On the other side of the world, American Minimalist pioneer Jo Baer’s deployment of “white within black” compositions resonates with the Zen-infused aesthetics of Taiwanese master Richard Lin, who materialises the Eastern philosophy of “Kong” through aluminium and rice paper. Meanwhile, in the 1980s Chinese avant-garde movement, Yu Youhan fused traditional Chinese symbolism with Western abstraction, becoming a seminal figure in China’s abstract art and Political Pop movements by grounding his practice in rural nostalgia and the zeitgeist of societal transformation.

Beyond form and colour, artists persistently interrogate and innovate materials, techniques, and methodologies. Helen Frankenthaler’s 1950s invention of the “soak-stain” technique pioneered a new path for abstraction, laying the technical groundwork for Color Field Painting, while forming an intergenerational dialogue with Kiki Xuebing Wang’s exploration of light and chromatic gradation in contemporary contexts—the former liberating pigment through raw canvas’s capillary action, the latter capturing the lingering emotions of light and color across layered planes. Similarly, Korean monochrome painter Cho Yong-Ik’s blade-carved textures, Swedish artist Andreas Eriksson’s collaged woven texture, and Japanese Mono-ha leading figure Kishio Suga’s investigations into the “presence and relations of objects” collectively expand the experimental frontiers of materiality. Historically, abstraction has never followed a singular trajectory; its inherent originality and unpredictability allow for endless reinvention, forming a multidirectional network across cultural contexts and becoming an inseparable part of today’s artistic ecology.

Artists

About The Artists

About The Curators