At the foot of Lianhua Mountain, where Shenzhen's dense urban fabric softens into greenery, the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning in Guangdong province rises in fluid white lines, poised between city and nature.
This spring, the space becomes a site of reflection and movement, hosting Walking in the Sun — Ai Jing Art Exhibition 2026, a major solo exhibition that traces artist Ai Jing's evolving creative and philosophical journey.
Running through June 21, the exhibition is among the most significant contemporary art presentations in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area this year. It brings together Ai's multidisciplinary practice, spanning music, painting, installation, sculpture, and video, into a cohesive narrative structured around a single, enduring theme: walking.
Curated by He Guiyan, a professor at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, the exhibition unfolds across three interlinked sections that move from the intimate to the universal. Rather than following a linear chronology, the show constructs what He describes as a "chain of questions", inviting viewers to confront life, reality and modernity through shifting emotional and spatial experiences.
"The core of the exhibition lies in 'facing directly'," He explains. "Facing the essence of life, confronting suffering, and engaging with the dilemmas of modernity. These questions unfold progressively across the three sections."
The journey begins with My Mom and My Hometown, where Ai returns to her origins, both materially and emotionally. In a gesture that is at once literal and symbolic, she transported 150 bags of black soil from her hometown of Shenyang, Liaoning province, to Shenzhen, spreading them across the gallery floor. The installation anchors the exhibition in memory, grounding it in the textures of childhood and the weight of belonging.
"The works here begin with a personal narrative," Ai reflects. "My mother, my hometown, childhood memories: the open fields where I played, chasing dragonflies, the closeness to nature, and those impressions of color and light."
