5 SHOWS is the new Artissima twice-monthly feature that recommends 5 exhibitions not to be missed in various geographical areas and cities around the world, chosen from the viewpoint of curators and directors of important institutions who live and work in these contexts. A different way to find guidance in the discovery of global contemporary art, from a personal and always up-to-date perspective.
The second focus is on China, with a selection by Damien Zhang, director of Aranya Art Center in Qinhuangdao.
Here are the 5 exhibitions currently on display that he has chosen for our readers:
As She Descends
Aranya Art Center, Qinhuangdao
Up to 1.03.2026
Aranya Art Center presents the group exhibition As She Descends, featuring 39 artworks across painting, video, sculpture, sound, and installation by 18 Chinese and international artists, including 17 newly commissioned works. The exhibition will also highlight a selection of archival documents thoughtfully assembled by the curatorial team.
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Saba Khan. Eyes Were Rendered Useless in the Muddy Dark Waters
suite, Shanghai
Up to 12.04.2026
Working between London and Lahore, Saba Khan is an artist and educator—and, like suite, a self-organizing practitioner. Her practice centers on the politics, histories, and cultures of water: from infrastructures that obstruct its flow, to lives that migrate along rivers, to myths and local knowledge concerned with restoring water sources. She examines how rivers are shaped by human and more-than-human forces, and in turn how they shape life and habitats.
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Liu Guangli. Once Upon a Time in America
4b(3)/Okra-Homa Projects, Beijing
Up to 8.03.2026
Dear Player,
Back then–was it five years ago already, or a very long time before that? When you think of it your throat goes scratchy.
This is the story of Alexandra and Elias and others. Fortunately you and I aren’t among them; we have not yet been touched by time, and the past still looks like the future. We sit in smoke-filled, raucous internet cafés, peering at a sliver of a distant world through pirated video games; through the dusty screen everything is a blur. Loading… 99% loaded… loading failed.
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Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun. Currents of Kinship
A4 Art Museum, Chengdu
Up to 8.03.2026
The year 2025 marks the tenth anniversary of the artistic practice project Water System Project by artist duo Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun. For years, they have focused on a specific river stretching from Chengdu to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, observing the fishermen, farmers, Qiang ethnic groups, and pastoralist communities living along its banks, as well as the stories, practices, and cosmology surrounding this river system. They trace these elements across diverse geographies, topographies, and histories to develop a non-separatist mindset and reflect upon the world-making.
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Wu Xiaojun. The Incomplete Beginning: Notes on 2025
Magician Space, Beijing
Up to 30.04.2026
Magician Space Antechamber presents its third project, The Incomplete Beginning: Notes on 2025, in collaboration with Wu Xiaojun. Inaugurated at the end of 2025, this project reviews the past year while revisiting the year 2008, when Wu presented the exhibition 2025 Project at Magician Space.
Both projects take Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty—a 2005 book proposing 2025 as the endpoint for extreme poverty—as their point of departure. When the book was translated into Chinese in 2007, Wu interpreted it as a form of post–Cold War positivism unfolding under the wave of globalization.
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If you want to discover the institutions explored so far, here are the previous episodes:
Emirati Arabi Uniti