Fluxus, by Chance
26 September 2025 - 22 February 2026
West Bund Museum｜Gallery 3
The Centre Pompidou × the West Bund Museum Project presents the temporary exhibition “Fluxus, by Chance” from September 26, 2025, to February 22, 2026. The exhibition features over 200 works from the Centre Pompidou’s collection, tracing the spiritual origins, development trajectory, and creative essence of Fluxus. It provides a comprehensive overview of this disruptive art movement of the 20th century.
Fluxus emerged at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s from the coming together of individuals who were not artists but became so through emulation. George Brecht was a chemist before becoming an artist. Robert Filliou was an economist before becoming an artist. La Monte Young was a musician before becoming an artist. Emmett Williams was an anthropologist before becoming an artist. George Maciunas was a graphic designer (and colour-blind) before becoming an artist, and so on. Their individual experiences offer a wealth of experimental potential to share, because Fluxus was a collective, cosmopolitan and participatory adventure. Through events and play, it sought to break down the boundaries and hierarchy between audience and artist. Maciunas came up with the name for this emerging group.
Fluxus comes from the word flux, and Fluxus activism spread through festivals, with the publication of a wide variety of magazines and editions, advocating art without works and without virtuosity, against the persistent over-valuation of the autographed art object, whose presumed excellence lay in its uniqueness, even after Duchamp. In this respect, Fluxus anticipated conceptual art.
The exhibition extends to the Dada antecedent and some of its natural heirs such as Jonathan Monk and Claide Closky. It also pays tribute to Huang Yong Ping, a self-proclaimed Dadaist, and to Geng Jianyi, an influential professor at the China Academy of Fine Arts who, at least telepathically, could not have been unaware of Fluxus.
Exhibition Information:
Fluxus, by Chance
Curator: Frédéric Paul
Duration: 26 September 2025 - 22 February 2026
Venue: Gallery 3, West Bund Museum (2600 Longteng Avenue, Xuihui, Shanghai)
Press Kit:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pdvnDOtnndqsBsVYQ7iMQh7xuSBkbcsU?usp=sharing
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About West Bund Museum
Located in the Shanghai Corniche in Xuhui District, West Bund Museum is one of the core public cultural institutions that make up the famed West Bund Cultural Corridor along the Huangpu River Waterfront.
Designed by renowned British architect Sir David Chipperfield, West Bund Museum first broke ground in 2017 and has been officially open to the public since 2019. In the inaugural year, the Museum joined hands with the Centre Pompidou for an unprecedented cultural partnership.
With cultural exchange between China and the world as its mission and visual art, performance art, New Media art, and contemporary design as cultural throughlines, the collaboration between West Bund Museum and Centre Pompidou, with its disciplines of architecture, audiovisual experimentation, music, film, visual art, is forming an ongoing dialogue productively and vibrantly.
From here and on, West Bund Museum will continue to be on the conceptual and structural frontiers of art museums, pushing the boundaries of traditional institutions, and is dedicated to being an open, inclusive, and public multi-disciplinary cultural centre.
About Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum
One of the key missions of the Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project is to mirror and promote Chinese culture in the world, and bring culture from all around the globe to Chinese audiences as well, which is a new exploration of the cultural exchange between China and foreign cultures.
In this perspective, the Centre Pompidou and the West Bund Museum signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2017. It was taken as the highest-level cultural cooperation project between China and France, and was included in the Joint Declaration between the People's Republic of China and the French Republic in 2018. And in 2019, it opened to the public at the special moment of the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China and the 55th anniversary of the establishment of Sino-French diplomatic relations.
In 2023, the West Bund Museum and the Centre Pompidou reached a new round of five-year exhibition cooperation relationship and signed a renewal agreement from 2024 to 2029. Therefore, it has become the Sino-foreign cultural exchange project with the highest level of cooperation and the longest cooperation period in the field of culture and art. In the second five-year period, both parties will embrace a broader cultural vision, deepen cooperation at all levels, and jointly write new possibilities for culture and art.
Press Contact
West Bund Museum
QI Xiaoyue
qxy@wbmshanghai.com
+86 137 9545 6005
PJ Arts & Communications
Vera Zhang
vera.zhang@poejay.com
+86 185 2422 8115