黑料不打烊

I came across this exhibition purely by fate. My friend Danny was visiting from Bangkok and after I told him about my career as an art historian, he started raving about the artist currently on view at the UCCA Center of Contemporary Art. The exhibition features Lubaina Himid, a Zanzibaran-British painter, who was one of the core members of the Black Arts Movement in Britain, 2017 Turner Prize winner and recently announced as chosen artist for the Venice Biennale’s British Pavilion in 2026.

Lubaina Himid, Cosmic Coral, 2024, acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 152.4 × 213.36 cm. © Lubaina Himid. Photograph by Andy Keate, courtesy the artist, Hollybush Gardens, London, and Greene Naftali, New York.

My youngest sister and I arrived on a Saturday in the afternoon, tickets were more affordable, and the crowd was less populated than normal. The main painting promoted, Cosmic Coral, was placed on the central wall at the entrance. With the larger open-format gallery in the back closed, Himid was the only artist on view in the museum.

Staging Accurate Fictional History

Installation view of “Lubaina Himid,” UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.

The first collection of works on view, Naming the Money, features cardboard and wooden cutouts of fictional servants within the colonial period accompanied with poems like titles. The texts listed the title of the person, which doubled as the work’s name, their birth name, their given name from their new home, previous profession, and new profession now that they have reached new land, with the last stanza contrasting the grandeur of their clothes and life with freedom or a stance of self-actualization. The Shoemaker’s excerpt reads:

My name is Effiong

They call me John

I used to make rings for royal fingers

Now I make shoes for ladies’ feet

But I have the gold

Although the character, Effiong, has been renamed and reassigned to a new profession, he knows who he is. Here, with all these things being imposed on him that wish to put upon him what he is now, the true essence of who he is and what he has in his soul has been untamed. The figures, all feature these haiku adjacent sonnets which humanize these colonial era fictional personas.

Installation view of “Lubaina Himid,” UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.

Opposite to the individual life-size wooden cutouts is the installation, A Fashionable Marriage featuring larger than life wooden and cardboard cutouts of what one could imagine as generals lounging paintings, books, a cardboard cutout of the first female prime minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and what could be thought to be the a modern version of the servant; waiting at Reagan’s feet appearing disgruntled, and ready to do something about it. In Himid’s UCCA interview on the exhibition she reflects on the “many layers of cruelty and (…) joyous contribution” and how the work is a way to “broker a conversation between these two elements” to “build bridges of understanding.”

Blue, Bleu…

Off to the next room, Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service combines porcelain bowls, serving plates, and jars with painted texts of declarations of sale for slaves, portraits that resemble the wooden cutouts seen in the gallery before, British maps, gentlemen, and distribution channels.

In the following gallery, a sound installation where Himid states the word “blue” in different languages and tones, overlapping one another from six standing speakers creating a sound scape within the mixed-media piece, Blue Grid Test. Here, a variety of objects that Himid has collected from all over the world installed at eye level across the gallery walls with a consistent stripe.

Installation view of “Lubaina Himid,” UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.

Crossing the hall to enter the second and final gallery Himid’s figures exist within the fore of the painting and even further into our physical space of the gallery through mastery of the brush and found object: painted doors, wagons, and readymade toys, propped on a platform in the middle of the room. The flat yet contrasting array of hues imbue a kind of multidimensional drawn painting.

Installation view of “Lubaina Himid,” UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, 2025. Photograph by Sun Shi, courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.

Curator’s Job to Writer's Take

As a mere viewer I could guess Himid, takes us completely into her imagination here as each painting leads us into a room of a scene on the gallery walls (or the void within a room) and each door creates a relief of the woman painted. When I asked curator, Shixuan Luan, if that was one of her goals she retorted, “Not exactly. My job isn’t necessarily to tell my own story but to present them to others and see what they can draw from it.”

According to Luan, the show is in “rough chronological order”. Following this thread, the second gallery obviously shows progression in Himid’s practice, imbuing a different line of thinking when bringing these characters to life, and how they ought to be presented according to her impetus. The world that she has made for us to enjoy features two dimensional approachable and unreal, yet tangible figures with references to colonial instruments, toys, and men’s coats paired with a red tote bag, the bomber jacket, trench coat, or trousers.

In her exhibition interview, Himid reflects that the pretenses in which Africans arrived to other parts of the world are nothing short of “horror, but that what is obvious is that the descendants of those people have enriched the cultures that they ended up in. And it’s really my life’s work to try to point out that in enriching those cultures whether (…) an artistic, engineering or architectural way, it is incredibly important to those cultures in a kind of ongoing history.” She explains that her work serves as an archival purpose, “but what happens time and time again is that this contribution is ignored, and I’ve made it my business to expose and share where we’ve made the contribution.”

It’s quite clear that Himid’s “reimagination of the past” is actually a way of world building into the future or rewriting the recent history. She mentioned to the UCCA, she’s no historian, but the show serves a historical purpose to spark inquiry of the viewer, “I can’t always tell the story in a strictly historical academic way. I’m a painter. So, I like to imagine myself in some of those situations and work out ‘OK, what would I have done, how would I have behaved, how would I react’ and somehow take that personal interpretation, relate it to historical facts…”

Questions and Takeaways

I cannot help but notice the covert underpinning of violence within the works, either which seems to be waiting to happen whether that be within the figure’s presence at the imaginative ball, declarations of sale, and mentions of the sea which are known to have swallowed whole thousands of lives during the TST. I’m specifically thinking of the figure who is a woman sitting at Ronald Reagan’s feet in A Fashionable Marriage with a distasteful look on her face and what seems to be a gun on the small table adjacent to her. At her feet is a basket filled with literature, two of the legible texts being Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson by George Jackson and The Groundings with My Brothers by Walter Rodney. Both modern books with revolutionary ideology within the Black Power Movement of the United States which is far in the future from the colonial time and dress of the wooden cutouts just across the gallery, the placement of the woman cutout at Reagan’s feet, yet and still they fuel a kind of quieted rage.

Lubaina Himid, Water Seller, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 244 × 183 cm. © Lubaina Himid. Courtesy the artist.

I could also point to Water Seller in the second gallery, where the scene of a man donning a sky-blue suit jacket, white collared shirt, and trousered in dark, knee-deep in water, carries two barrels of water on his back that are levied by a simple wooden log. I find myself questioning its necessity and the conditions requiring this method, especially if his dress leans contemporary. Taking a step into this covert violence, would we have arrived at an industrious world without it? Great questions to ponder for Beijing’s general public. Luan mentioned that the show’s impact will send ripples through the fine arts community in Beijing, that is constantly searching for new mediums, pathways, and histories to expand and connect with.

The void of a background within Himid’s paintings no matter the medium, seem to be an informed fictional world of the global collective history playing out in her mind. This retrospective allows the viewer to approach these topics from a safe place where it is welcoming, distant, yet impactful.

More questions on the horizon for me are: Are Black people only relegated to this world? Can this existence only be confined to the future, a vision of our minds, or essentially the afterlife? Looking at the rooms in comparison, one could infer that the governing powers of the past now exist in a diluted fashion.

In all the shows I’ve seen at the UCCA, the work may have not convinced me, but the exhibition design always compensated for that. For Himid’s show the simple white box layout, custom walls, wall cuts, and one floor space display was enough and dynamic. When I mentioned this to Luan she was elated, “Thank you so much, I usually have a vision for the exhibition and work concurrently with the exhibition design team to achieve it – it's an ongoing conversation.” It’s clear to me in the design choices that the goal was to aid the viewer’s focus.

As an American, I find the show’s execution grounding and momentous, especially at a time when my country still profits from institutional slavery through the prison industrial complex. The first portion of the show speaks to the past, and the second to the future, even if faint and obscure. Yet and still, we can imagine a new world. We can dream up a globe of off-kilter and unorthodox possibilities.

Himid’s work leaves the viewer with the facts of global history and enough room to glimpse what’s on the horizon. The retrospective tells a clear, concise story of the colonial Black past, and a possible future within Himid’s mind. I hope visitors take heed. I surely have, and I’m excited to see what’s to come in Venice.

The show will be on view until April 27th.

For more on auctions, exhibitions, and current trends, visit our Magazine Page