BANK is thrilled to announce Shi Hui‘s participation in: the First Double Solo Exhibition of Two Leading Figures in Art Transformation A Lifelong Practice of the Hands, Across Continents and Decades, Rethinking Art History from the Perspective of “Material” and Fiber Materials Matters. Hands Make It Felt.
West Bund Museum will open Material Matters: Sheila Hicks & Shi Hui on April 17, 2026. As the museum’s first double solo exhibition of living artists, it takes material as its point of departure to rethink art history. When art moves beyond image and representation and returns to touch and repeated manual exercise, material itself becomes a perceptual language. This exhibition marks Sheila Hicks’s first solo exhibition in China and offers a comprehensive presentation of Shi Hui’s practice since the 1980s. Two key art figures are brought together in a shared context for the first time. The exhibition traces the transformation of fiber from decorative craft into an independent contemporary language. Through nearly one hundred works—both iconic and recent—it reveals how this language has developed across different cultural contexts, allowing a living, embodied history to unfold. Focusing on works shaped by sustained manual work, the exhibition foregrounds practices that carry the experience of time and the body. In a world dominated by images and vision, these works offer both a response and a return, pointing toward a renewed perception of reality.
Against the Current: Expanding the Boundaries of Art
Since the 1960s, a movement in Europe and the United States has shifted weaving and fiber from traditional craft toward modern art. Materials once regarded as decorative began to enter the field of contemporary creativity. At the 1962 International Tapestry Biennial in Lausanne, Switzerland, fiber moved from surface to space, from wall to exhibition hall, and from small-scale weaving to large installations. Artists such as Sheila Hicks played a key role in transforming fiber from a “marginal material” into an independent artistic language on its own right. In China, fiber did not enter contemporary discourse until the 1980s, with Shi Hui as one of the key figures in this transition. In 1987, her collaborative work Longevity, created with Zhu Wei, was selected for the 13th Lausanne Biennial, marking a pivotal moment for Chinese contemporary tapestry on the international stage. She later became a founding figure in the field, establishing China’s first academic program dedicated to fiber art.
Parallel Sections: A Material Theatre Beyond Cultural Boundaries
The exhibition departs from conventional academic display to construct a theatre shaped by material, space, and the viewer. Through a dual structure presented in parallel, the practices of Sheila Hicks and Shi Hui intersect: Hicks’s expands outward into space and scale, while Shi Hui’s turns inward toward material and spirit. There is no fixed route. Visitors move freely between these two artistic languages. This mode of viewing itself echoes weaving—without a fixed beginning or end, capable of continuous growth, extension, and connection.
The first section, Sheila Hicks: Rivers Near and Far, spans nearly seventy years of Hicks’s practice, bringing together diverse bodies of works shaped by her travels across South and Latin America, India, and China. From everyday weaving records and early designs to works with strong architectural qualities, Hicks continually explores the limits of art, using color, scale, and gravity to reshape how space is perceived. The exhibition design employs staggered display structures to create layered visual fields, like moving through mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Landscapes— mountains, waterways, skies, and seas—are given new forms, placing visitors within a colorful geography made of fiber.
The second section, Shi Hui: A Song of Paper and Stones, presents her work from her early explorations in the 1980s to recent series, offering her most comprehensive survey in recent years. It shows how she has continously built connections between material and spirit, the visible and the invisible. Working with fiber as a form of writing, and drawing from calligraphic traditions, Shi Hui extends what was once two-dimensional expression into three-dimensional space. Through varied forms and textures of weaving, she invites visitors into a “garden” that can be both seen and “read.” Works in this space are presented without labels, encouraging viewers to turn, look again, and imagine the sensory world extended by the material.
During the exhibition, visitors are invited to reconsider their relationship with materials—the texture of clothing, the temperature felt by the body, the touch of objects during their daily activities. These everyday experiences offer another entry point for understanding the works.
Beyond Vision: Activating a New Field of Perception
The exhibition extends into the museum’s central hall on the first floor and public spaces on the second floor and is open to all visitors free of charge. It does not begin at the gallery entrance, but as soon as one enters the building. Visitors are already immersed in a new perceptual field upon arrival. Shi Hui’s large-scale installation Unify descends from the height of the atrium, inviting visitors to walk through it and experience the relationship between material and the body in motion. Old Wall, built from layers of paper pulp bricks, extends to 8 meters in length, drawing on the artist’s observation and memory of the changing walls of Wushan in Hangzhou. Sheila Hicks’s works, such as Flow River Flow and Target, engage with the architecture through color and soft materials, creating a direct dialogue with the museum space and extending her concept of “soft architecture” into a site-specific context. Documents and archival materials presented alongside the works form another layer of reading. Through everyday movement and pause, visitors gradually reactivate their perception of “things.”
The museum is currently presenting Reinventing Landscape: Highlights of the Centre Pompidou Collection vol. IV. In parallel, this exhibition returns to touch, manual know-how, and time, offering another way of “seeing” art history.
The Museum as a Bridge: Engaging the Hand
Following the large-scale participatory project Weaving to Gather, West Bund Museum will launch a new public program during the exhibition, continuing its effort to bring art and the public into close contact. Titled Unknotting Emotions, the program begins with a simple idea: knots hold feelings, and art can release them. Visitors are invited to explore tying and untying ropes in the museum’s public spaces. Here, the hand becomes a way of knowing, and a means of expressing emotion and connection. Through more open and interactive formats, the museum responds to the exhibition’s core theme, breaking away from the one-directional structure of artmaking. Art no longer remains something to be viewed, but something that continues to take shape through touch and action. In this process, emotion moves from one individual to another through the hand, and the museum becomes a true space of interaction and connection.
