UCCA Beijing is housed in factory chambers built in the 1950s and designed by East German architects of the Dessau Design Institute, the postwar successor to the Bauhaus. Its buildings maintain traces of their industrial past, with spaces renovated by architects Jean-Michel Wilmotte and Qingyun Ma in 2007 and further regenerated by OMA in 2019. With a total area of over 10,000 square meters, the campus includes the signature Great Hall exhibition space and additional galleries, public areas, an auditorium, and spaces for events, education, research and staff offices. In 2018, it was accredited by the Beijing government as a non-profit museum. 

UCCA Dune is an art museum buried under a sand dune by the Bohai Sea in Beidaihe, 300 kilometers east of Beijing. Designed by OPEN Architecture, its galleries unfold over a series of cave-like spaces. Some are naturally lit from above, while others open out onto the beach. UCCA Dune presents rotating exhibitions in dialogue with its unique site and space, with a particular focus on emerging Chinese and global talents. Opened in 2018, UCCA Dune is supported by UCCA strategic partner Aranya, the seaside cultural and lifestyle community where it is located.

Situated along the Suzhou Creek in Shanghai’s Jing’an District, UCCA Edge occupies 5,500 square meters on the three podium levels of the EDGE tower. Designed by New York-based architects SO – IL, the museum includes 1,700 square meters of gallery space, a wraparound outdoor terrace, and public spaces including a lobby and an auditorium. Opened in 2021, UCCA Edge mounts exhibitions of leading Chinese and international artists. Located just north of People’s Square and directly above the Qufu Lu station of the Shanghai Metro in a bustling revitalized neighborhood, UCCA Edge has become an essential art destination and an integral part of Shanghai’s vibrant cultural fabric.

UCCA Clay is a museum situated at the intersection of ceramics and contemporary art. Located in Yixing, Jiangsu province—China’s “City of Ceramics”—it anchors the city’s reimagined Creative and Cultural Ceramic Avenue district. Designed by Kengo Kuma and Associates, the 2,400-square-meter building is the Japanese architect’s first built work to employ clay as a primary material. Featuring a remarkable façade made of hand-fired terracotta tiles, the building showcases Yixing’s renowned purple clay (“zisha”) that began to be used in pottery during the Song Dynasty. UCCA Clay’s program takes inspiration from the region’s unique cultural heritage, drawing together Yixing’s thousand-year ceramic history with UCCA’s global artistic vision. The museum’s exhibitions center contemporary work in the medium of ceramics by Chinese and international artists, while also offering further context and facilitating exchange and dialogue with the wider world. Opened in 2024, it is the first contemporary art institution in Yixing.

UCCA was founded by collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens and opened in Beijing as the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in 2007. In 2017, it transitioned to the stewardship of a dedicated group of Chinese and international patrons and shareholders. Now officially known as UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, it remains committed to its mission of bringing the best in art to a wider audience, drawing China into the global cultural conversation through art.

Since its founding, UCCA has presented more than 200 exhibitions. The opening exhibition “’85 New Wave: The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art” (2007), curated by founding artistic director Fei Dawei, was the first institutional presentation in the PRC of the history of the Chinese avant-garde. Subsequent shows have continued to demarcate generations in the development of Chinese art, including “Breaking Forecast: 8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation Artists” (2009), “ON | OFF: China’s Young Artists in Concept and Practice” (2013), “Hans van Dijk: 5000 Names” (2014), and “The New Normal: Art, China, and 2017; ”City on the Edge: Art and Shanghai at the Turn of the Millennium” (2021) highlighted the period when Chinese contemporary art entered into global dialogue. UCCA’s exhibition program is also recognized for solo surveys and retrospectives of key figures in the ongoing history of advanced art in China, including Birdhead, Cao Fei, Yung-ho Chang, Chen Wenbo, Geng Jianyi, Gu Dexin, Hao Liang, Huang Rui, Huang Yong Ping, Ji Dachun, Yun-fei Ji, Kan Xuan, Liu Jianhua, Liu Wei, Liu Xiaodong, Mo Yi, Qiu Zhijie, Song Dong, Wang Jianwei, Wang Keping, Wang Xingwei, Wang Yin, Xie Nanxing, Xu Bing, Xu Zhen, Yan Lei, Yan Pei-Ming, Yin Xiuzhen, Yu Hong, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhan Wang, Zhang Huan, Zhao Bandi, and Zhao Gang, among others.

UCCA has mounted major exhibitions with international artists including Monira Al-Qadiri, Pawel Althamer, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, Heman Chong, Thomas Demand, Olafur Eliasson, Elmgreen and Dragset, David Diao, John Gerrard, Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid, Tehching Hsieh, Tatsuo Miyajima, William Kentridge, Maria Lassnig, Lee Mingwei, Peter Wayne Lewis, Sarah Morris, Elizabeth Peyton, Tino Sehgal, Taryn Simon, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Luc Tuymans, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Kehinde Wiley, Lawrence Weiner, Ming Wong, and Haegue Yang. Through these exhibitions and related programs, UCCA has built vital links between China’s art scene and the wider world, and exposed audiences to figures they may not otherwise have had the chance to encounter directly. UCCA has also mounted exhibitions of key art-historical figures, often in connection with China’s modern and contemporary art history, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol.

A commitment to emerging Chinese artists has long been a core thread in UCCA’s curatorial program, most recently through first institutional solo shows for artists including Zhang Ruyi (2022) and Wang Tuo (2021), and earlier in the “New Sites” series of lecture performances (2019), the “New Directions” series of exhibitions (2015-2019), and the “Curated by…” series of exhibitions (2009-2011). Further exhibitions have explored related areas of visual culture including photography, architecture, and design. UCCA frequently collaborates with leading international institutions to stage major exhibitions outside of Beijing or even China, furthering its mission of presenting Chinese contemporary art in a global context. Notable examples include the first Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2022), “Bentu, Chinese artists in a time of turbulence and transformation” (Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2016) and “Cao Fei: A Hollow in a World Too Full” (Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong, 2018).

When the Ullens family transferred ownership of the institution to a new group of patrons and shareholders in 2017, UCCA Beijing was formally registered as a non-profit museum, and UCCA Foundation for Art and Education, which supports charitable outreach initiatives, was accredited by the Beijing Bureau of Civil Affairs. Since then, the museum has developed commercial entities including UCCA Lab and UCCA Kids to provide additional support, and opened additional locations beyond Beijing.

For more information on UCCA’s activities in 2024, please download our annual report.

Philip Tinari
Director, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

Philip Tinari is Director and Chief Executive of UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. Since joining UCCA in 2011, he has led its growth and transformation from a founder-owned private establishment into China’s premier institution of modern and contemporary art, accredited across multiple locations.

At UCCA, Tinari has brought world-class exhibitions and programs to a broad audience, pursuing a vision of art as a bridge between China and the wider world. During his tenure, the museum has presented leading Chinese and international contemporary artists, including Matthew Barney, Cao Fei, Maurizio Cattelan, Gu Dexin, Lubaina Himid, William Kentridge, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Luc Tuymans, Xu Bing, Haegue Yang, and Zeng Fanzhi, among more than one hundred others. His program has identified and cultivated emerging talents in addition to surveying historical figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol in the most comprehensive exhibitions of their work presented in China. Under Tinari’s leadership, UCCA has grown from a single venue into a constellation of four architecturally and programmatically distinct museums, including the flagship UCCA Beijing, UCCA Dune in Beidaihe, UCCA Edge in Shanghai, and UCCA Clay in Yixing. He has pioneered an operating model that merges a highly evolved network of individual donors and sponsors with an ambitious range of commercial projects to supplement traditional forms of revenue for the institution.

Known for his curatorial work and expertise on Chinese contemporary art, Tinari was co-curator of the landmark exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” (2017) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Guggenheim Bilbao, and SFMOMA; and curator of the exhibition “Bentu, Chinese Artists in a Time of Turbulence and Transformation” (2016) at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. In 2021 he organized “Feeling the Stones,” the inaugural edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Riyadh, at that time the largest contemporary art exhibition to have taken place in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He is curator of the 2025 edition of the Verbier Art Summit, on the theme “Quarter Life Crisis: Art in a World on the Brink.”

From 2009 to 2012, Tinari was founding editor of LEAP, China’s first international contemporary art magazine. Prior to that, he worked in Beijing as founding editor of the Chinese edition of Artforum, China representative for Art Basel, and lecturer at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Dushu. In 2015 he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In 2016 he was a fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He holds degrees in East Asian Studies from Harvard University and literature and history from Duke University, and studied Chinese as a Fulbright scholar at Tsinghua University. Born near Philadelphia in 1979, he has lived and worked in Beijing since 2006.