The traditional Chinese Qingming Festival, or Tomb-Sweeping Day, will begin on Sunday this year.

As the temperature rises, it is not only a solemn festival for sweeping tombs and offering sacrifices to ancestors, but also a festival for people to get close to nature, go on outings and enjoy the spring.

The three-day festival is just around the corner. Besides going on outings, there is another choice for you --- fascinating art exhibitions.

1. Lunar Samples No. 001: Witness of China's Space Dream

Exploring the vastness of the universe is the common dream of mankind. The Chang'e-5 return capsule landed safely on earth with a payload of 1,731 grams of lunar samples on Dec 17, 2020, representing China's first successful return of samples from an extraterrestrial celestial body.

The National Museum of China is holding an exhibition centered on Lunar Samples No. 001, displaying more than 40 scientific and technological objects related to the lunar exploration program, supplemented by a large number of pictures, dynamic images, and videos.

If you go

Venue: West Hall, National Museum of China

No. 16 East Chang'an Street, Dongcheng District, Beijing 100006

Time: 9:00 to 17:00 (last admission at 16:00) and closes on Monday (except statutory holidays)

2. Silent Thunder

The UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents, Silent Thunder, a group exhibition examining the links between Buddhism and contemporary art in China, interrogating the concept of "Buddhist art" as a whole. It is open until May 23.

The four artists featured in the exhibition approach Buddhism from varying angles, some earnestly engaging with faith and belief, while others utilize religious iconography as an entry point into broader social and historical questions. From these different perspectives, the artists use sculpture, installation, painting, and other media to propose how Buddhist and Chan art might be reimagined, at once bypassing and implicitly responding to external frames for understanding Buddhism.

If you go

Venue: UCCA Beijing, 798 Art District

No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015

Time: Monday to Sunday, 10:00 – 19:00 (last entry at 18:30)

3. Like Strings of Splendid Beads: Exhibition of Works of Calligraphy and Painting Donated by Qu Geping

The exhibition displays artworks donated by Qu Geping, a pioneer of environmental protection and one of the founders of environmental protection education in China. 

Qu Geping is associated with many famous calligraphers and painters, such as Zhao Puchu, Qi Gong, Li Keran, Wu Zuoren, and Huang Zhou through close friendships. Moreover, his collection of hundreds of outstanding artworks can be considered to represent a microcosm and epitome of modern and contemporary Chinese calligraphy and painting.

If you go

Venue: Tsinghua University Art Museum

NO. 1, Tsinghua University Campus, Hai Dian District, Beijing

Time: 9:00—17:00 (No entry after 16:30)

Tuesday to Sunday; closed Mondays (Except for statutory holidays)

4. Christopher Le Brun: A Sense of Sight, Abstract Work 1974-2020

The Red Brick Art Museum is holding the exhibition Christopher Le Brun: A Sense of Sight, Abstract Work 1974-2020 until May 9. Featuring his paintings and sculptures spanning almost 50 years, the exhibition unprecedentedly shows the long development of the abstract in his work and reveals the essentially formal nature of his work as an artist.

Christopher Le Brun is one of the most influential figures to emerge in British Art in the 1980s. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1980 and in 1982 took part in the epoch-making exhibition Zeitgeist at the Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin.

If you go

Venue: Red Brick Art Museum

100 meters west of the intersection between Maquanying West Road and Shunbai Road, Hegezhuang Village, Cuigezhuang Township, Chaoyang District, Beijing

Time: Summer: May 1-September 30, 10:00-18:00 (Latest entry at 17:30)

Winter: October 1-April 30, 10:00-17:30 (Latest entry at 17:00)

Closed Monday (Except for public holidays)

5. Giorgio Morandi: The Poetics of Stillness

The survey exhibition at M WOODS, Giorgio Morandi: The Poetics of Stillness, explores six decades of Morandi's practice across over 80 works, from his early life, when he first exhibited in Bologna in 1914, and was heavily influenced by avant-garde art movements like Cubism and Futurism, to the period between 1930 and 1956, when Morandi was professor of etching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, and his later work in the 1960s just before his death.

As the first museum solo exhibition of Morandi's work in China, the show also considers Morandi's silent investigations of form, meditative repetition of still life and introspective compositions in parallel with concepts of timelessness in both European and traditional Chinese thought and philosophy.

If you go

Venue: M WOODS 798

No.2 Jiuxianqiao Rd, Chaoyang, Beijing

Time: Tue-Sun 10:00-19:00 (Last admission 18:00)

Closed on Mon ( Holiday excepted)