TU HONGTAO
STONE STANDING IN THE WIND
Opening: November 4, 2026
On View: November 5, 2026 – January 9, 2027
October 14, 2026 (Berlin, Germany) – SOCIÉTÉ is pleased to announce Stone Standing in the Wind, Tu Hongtao’s first solo exhibition in Germany. His solo exhibition with Galerie Gisela Capitain will open at Zweigstelle Capitain in Naples on April 10, 2027.
Tu Hongtao’s paintings approach landscape as feeling and memory rather than a straightforward depiction of a specific place, superimposing a flood of impressions that disrupt linear space and suggest the collapse, or even disappearance, of traditional perspective. Made after his move from Chengdu to Hong Kong, the works in the exhibition react to the turbulent, hyper-mediated urban reality of his new surroundings, which he describes as inducing an inner sensation of “floating and falling.” Yet the city itself rarely appears in these works. It persists primarily as a phantom pressure that compels the artist beyond the built environment, toward the hills of Lung Fu Shan, woods in the aftermath of a typhoon, monsoon rain, or a mountain climbed alone. Rather than formally channeling speed, Tu’s works counter velocity with slowness and wildness, privileging unpolished, personal emotion over efficiency or cleverness.
The exhibition’s title articulates the paradox at the heart of Tu’s recent practice. The wind is at once the weather he walks into on the hills and the restless tempo of the city below, while the stone denotes a steadfast inner orientation amid shifting values. Yet, despite its relative solidity, the stone is not immobile: it rolls and shifts within the wind. For Tu, fundamental convictions can hold steady while the language of painting remains open and contingent.
In the Avian Tremors After Unseen Arrows series, densely wrought gestures accumulate into compact, heavily worked fields, while the larger Country Excursion opens these rhythms onto a broader expanse. Where Tu’s earlier titles often drew on poetry, many of his new ones read like diary entries, marked simply by time and action. Having set aside the photographic sources used to build his composite landscapes in favor of sketches and memory, which he finds more “accurate,” Tu pours lived feeling directly into paint. Most of these paintings, he says, are “like soliloquies, or quiet conversations with myself.”
TIMUR SI-QIN
PRISTINE, PART II
Opening: November 4, 2026
On View: November 5, 2026 – January 9, 2027
SOCIÉTÉ is pleased to present Pristine, Part II, a solo exhibition by Timur Si-Qin. The exhibition forms the second chapter of a body of work engaging with the Peruvian Amazon that Si-Qin inaugurated with Mariposita at Art Basel Unlimited earlier this year.
Timur Si-Qin’s engagement with the living world is central to his practice, rooted in the conviction that nature’s displacement to the periphery of Western spiritual life is inseparable from the environmental conditions we now face. His sixth exhibition with SOCIÉTÉ presents a series of stainless steel sculptures of botanical forms encountered during periods of isolation deep in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon.
For Si-Qin, the exhibition is a meditation on the concept of the pristine. For most people in contemporary societies, truly wild places are rarely, if ever, experienced. The pristine names an encounter with living worlds so intact, vivid, interdependent, and self-generating that they can feel almost impossible from within contemporary life. It does not necessarily describe a world untouched by human presence, but rather the continued integrity of living relationships developed across evolutionary time. As direct experiences of such ecosystems become increasingly rare, images of the pristine are often dismissed as fantastical, romantic, or merely aspirational. Yet this disbelief reveals how distant modern culture has become from the living systems that sustain it. Pristine insists that these places are not fantasies of a lost world, but living realities in the present.
“I’m always trying to go towards the most realistic depiction of nature because I think nature is herself the most radical,” Si-Qin says of the 3D scanning process used to create his new works. In Pristine, technological reproduction becomes a devotional act, a form of mirroring, naming, and reminding viewers that such environments still exist. This act of mirroring is both an artistic method and an ecological ethic: a gesture toward the forest spirits of the Ucayali, the fragile worlds threatened by extraction and deforestation, and the possibility of learning to walk differently within the living fabric of the earth.
NOTES TO EDITORS
Stone Standing in the Wind by Tu Hongtao and Pristine, Part II by Timur Si-Qin open on November 4, 2026, and are on view through January 9, 2027.
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About Tu Hongtao
Tu Hongtao (b. 1976, Chengdu, China) lives and works in Hong Kong. Tu’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Long Museum, Shanghai and Chongqing; Lévy Gorvy Dayan, New York; LGDR, Paris; Lévy Gorvy, London and Hong Kong; Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Yeo Workshop, Singapore. He has participated in group exhibitions at Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai; Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou; University of Hong Kong Art Museum; and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, among many other venues.
Tu Hongtao’s work is included in international collections, including Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Long Museum, Shanghai; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney; Fosun Foundation, Shanghai; and Simian Foundation, Hong Kong, among others.
About Timur Si-Qin
Timur Si-Qin (b. 1984, Germany) is a New York-based artist of German and Mongolian-Chinese descent who grew up in Berlin, Beijing, and the American Southwest. Si-Qin’s work is currently featured in the Jing’an Biennale Shapes of Becoming, Shanghai, and Among Trees at Villa Schöningen, Potsdam. His work has been extensively shown in solo exhibitions in Europe, the United States, and Asia, and was included in exhibitions at The High Line, New York; Schirn, Frankfurt; K11 Art, Shanghai; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Ullens Contemporary Art Center, Beijing; The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Kunsthalle Wien, among many others. He has participated in large-scale international exhibitions such as the Bangkok Art Biennale, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Kunsttriennale Beaufort, Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ural Biennale, 9th Berlin Biennale, and Taipei Biennial. Timur Si-Qin is part of a number of public collections including Sammlung des Bundes, Bonn; ICA Miami, Miami; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf/Berlin; Meta, New York; Zabludowicz Collection, London; Fosun Foundation, Shanghai; Saudi Ministry of Culture, Museum Commission, Riyadh; 798 Art Zone, Beijing; among others.
About SOCIÉTÉ
SOCIÉTÉ is a Berlin-based contemporary art gallery with a global reach. The gallery’s bold curatorial approach plays a pivotal role in advancing its artists’ visions, supporting major museum exhibitions, biennials, and acquisitions by leading institutional collections worldwide. Operating in both the primary and secondary markets, SOCIÉTÉ provides curated advisory services to select clients.
Beyond its exhibitions, the gallery’s publishing initiative, EDITION SOCIÉTÉ, collaborates with prominent writers and graphic designers to produce artist books, catalogues, and, more recently, high-end artist editions.
SOCIÉTÉ is an active presence at major international art fairs, including Art Basel, Art Basel Paris, Art Basel Miami Beach, Frieze New York, Frieze London, ARCOmadrid, and Gallery Weekend Berlin.
Image credits:
1. Portrait of Tu Hongtao, © Tu Hongtao Art Studio
2. Tu Hongtao, Avian Tremors After Unseen Arrows - Little Bush No.1, 2025-2026 (Detail)
3. Timur Si-Qin, Mariposita, 2026 (Detail)