Beijing Dangdai Art Fair 2026 will take place from May 21 to 24 at Hall 11 of the National Agricultural Exhibition Center, with May 21 to 22 as VIP Preview Days and May 23 to 24 as Public Days. Under the theme “LAND TRACE,” this year’s edition re-examines cultural differences and uneven experiences through the lens of geography and historical geography across multiple contexts, further delineating the detailed landscape of contemporary art amid a moment of value reshaping.

We will be releasing a series of posters centered on works featured at the Fair. These works not only offer possible interpretations of and responses to “LAND TRACE,” but also serve as preview highlights of key artworks and participating institutions. The poster shared in this edition features a work by artist Yin Qi from Platform China Contemporary Art Institute — an introspective piece titled Soul.

About the Artwork

Yin Qi
Soul
Oil on canvas
140 × 198 cm
2025
© Courtesy of the Artist and Platform China Contemporary Art Institute

that transcends visual art itself: an introspective method rooted in the cultivation of an inner world. In an era marked by an overload of external information and the constant disruption of cognitive systems, he has chosen a reverse path—not to accumulate more images and concepts from the outside, but to turn inward, allowing perception itself to become a wellspring.

As seen in Soul, the work does not seek to reconstruct a world for habitation or entry, but rather transforms the symbols of nature into a spiritual field—one that simultaneously expands outward and condenses inward. Across the canvas, austere and irregular geometric forms press, stack, and cut against one another like fragments of mountain rock. On the right, a diminutive human figure appears like a faint glimmer, emerging from the sedimentation of the po (魄), and awakening the resonance of the hun (魂).

Looking back at the trajectory of modernism, one can see that while it liberated form, it also inevitably reinforced divisions between subject and object, sensibility and rationality, inner experience and external form. Yin Qi’s practice, by contrast, seeks to begin at the very root of these fractures—within the modes of perception shaped and disciplined by modernity—working to reconnect and reconcile what appears fragmented and disordered.

About the Artist

Portrait of Artist
©Courtesy of the artist and Platform China Contemporary Art Institute

Yin Qi, born in 1962, currently resides and works in Beijing and France. He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1987 and pursued further studies at Ecole National Superieur des Beaux Arts Paris in 1995.

 Yin Qi’s painting practice has consistently sought a path to the intrinsic nature of the body, aiming to replace the extension of spatial awareness in the modernist painting revolution, transitioning from perception to awareness.

 Yin Qi has held and participated in numerous exhibitions both domestically and internationally, including: “Landscapes of Affect” (Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing, 2025)；
“Alchimie” (Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing, 2023)；
 “Sleeping Lake – Solo Exhibition of Yin Qi” (Asia Art Center, Beijing, 2018);
 “Cosmos of Silence” (Inside Out Museum, Beijing, 2015);
“The System of Objets” (MinSheng Art Museum, Shanghai, 2015);
 “The Blossoming of Realism” (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan, 2006);
“Solo Exhibition by Yin Qi” (Meymac Contemporary Art Center, France, 2004);
 “China Avant-garde” (China National Art Gallery, Beijing, 1989).