Su Wei

Su Wei is a curator and art history researcher based in Beijing. He was Senior Curator at the Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum from 2017 to 2020 and research fellow at Tsinghua University Art Museum from 2021-2024. Su Wei's work in recent years focuses on re-constructing the narrative—and radical imagination—of contemporary Chinese art history, and explores the roots of the legitimacy and rupture of contemporary Chinese art history in a global context. Pivotal to his work is the attempt to take the “post-1949” as the key in understanding artistic production in a contemporary situation, and in so doing he seeks to re-define the stance and possibilities of art in nowadays China. He thus engages in an anti-establishment critical practice by mapping the limits, contextual clues and unconscious energies of the post-1949 art production, which figures the dual presence of decay and emptiness.

His exhibition projects include: the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (Shenzhen OCAT, 2012), "No Reference: A Revisit of Hong Kong Video and Media Arts from 1985" (Hong Kong Videotage, 2016), and “Community of Feeling: Emotional Patterns in Art in Post-1949 China"(Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, 2019), etc. In 2023, he co-initiated the project “Watch on a Promontory” in 2023, which focuses on cross-regional artistic exchanges from 1950s to 1980s in East, Southeast, and South Asia and their potential to break out of the existing framework of artistic narratives. He has recently initiated “Long Careers”, an ongoing research project to re-explore individual artistic practices in China's “post-1949” situation from contemporaneous perspective. His latest curatorial project, China Moment: Individualism in Context in Chinese Contemporary Art will be held at the documenta Institute in Kassel in 2026.

Su Wei has been involved in organizing seminars at esteemed institutions such as the Tate Modern and the Manchester Chinese Arts Centre. He has published a number of articles in local and international art journals including e-flux Journal, YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Journal of Contemporary Art (Bristol, UK) and Kunstforum. He is the editor of Community of Feeling: Emotional Patterns in Art in Post-1949 China, forthcoming from Zhejiang Photographic
Press).