Half a Century of Global Art Between Abstraction and Figuration

At the threshold of a century marked by wars, reconstruction, and globalization, an ambitious exhibition attempts to show how artists have interpreted - and at times anticipated - the profound transformations of modernity. 10——60 brings together nearly two hundred works selected from the vast collection of Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, mapping more than fifty years of global artistic practice, from the 1930s to today. The exhibition unfolds across two major chapters. The Mind of Abstraction explores the moment when color, line, and material become autonomous languages: a universe of instinctive gestures, rigorous geometries, and inquiries into perception and the limits of the medium. Here, art does not describe - it thinks, vibrates, and attempts to grasp what resists stable form. In parallel, The Journey of Figuration traces the evolution of the human figure, landscape, and scenes of everyday life. Figuration does not retreat in the face of abstraction; it reinvents itself, becoming allegory, social critique, psychological introspection. Faces, scenes, and gestures become tools to question identity, power, memory, and the distance - or closeness - between the individual and the world. The exhibition reveals how abstraction and figuration are not opposing poles but parallel paths through which artists have tried to make sense of their time. From postwar trauma to the tensions of the global era, the show makes visible how images - free or recognizable, interior or social - have shaped the aesthetic consciousness of the twentieth century and continue to illuminate the present.