Two sculptors who have spent a decade studying the traditions of Chinese sculpture are showing together in Beijing. Empty Mountain, Living Forms, a joint exhibition by Li Wei and Liu Zhiyin at Whitestone Gallery, opens on 31 October 2026 and runs to 19 December, curated by Duan Shaofeng.

The pair began their joint research into traditional Chinese sculpture in 2016, a project that took them to live at the foot of the Helan Mountains, the range that runs along the border of Ningxia and Inner Mongolia. The landscape there — bare rock, open sky, a terrain shaped by wind and time — has fed directly into the work, which treats the mountain not as a backdrop but as a way of thinking about form itself: solid and hollow, enduring and eroding at once.

The exhibition's title sets up the pairing at the heart of the show. The empty mountain is the landscape of classical Chinese thought, a place of withdrawal and contemplation; the living forms are the sculptures themselves, objects that carry the mountain's lessons into the gallery. Working in dialogue, the two artists test how an old sculptural language — carving, modelling, the handling of stone and other materials — can still describe a contemporary experience of place.

The show opens with a reception on 31 October, from 3 to 5pm, at Whitestone's Beijing space. It is the gallery's latest presentation of Chinese sculptural practice, and a portrait of a collaboration built slowly, over years of shared research rather than a single commission.