Lisson Artists at 'Flowers in the Concrete', Bund Art Center, Shanghai

6 November 2025

From 12 November 2025 – 8 March 2026, Shanghai Bund Art Center (BAC) presents group show ‘Flowers in the Concrete’ at BAC’s Space 185. Featuring work by six artists from Lisson’s international roster, the title describes the theme of nature’s resilience and its ability to grow and thrive in the face of difficult conditions.

From a monumental stone sculpture for the ages, through to delicate blooms that flower in alien conditions, each artist presentation takes place in a dedicated area, representing six individual solo shows. These galleries within Space 185, housed in BAC’s historical building on the Bund – a former Mitsui Bussan Kaisha building – are themselves examples of rare architectural gems that have survived relatively untouched in the landscape of Shanghai, despite over a century of rapid and technological progress across the city.

Zhao Gang’s Untitled paintings of cut flowers sold from buckets on the street mark an ode to his return to living and working in Beijing, representing memories that persist and linger long after the original colours and smells have dissipated. Coinciding with his participation in this group show, his project The Basterd Gentry, is presented across multiple locations in Shanghai, including Lisson Shanghai, ASE Foundation and 185 Space of the Bund Art Center.

In floral sculptures A Stream Stood Still, the blooms and plant life growing from bright blue tree trunks by Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg are symbols of life returning from decay, given a fantastical mirror in the accompanying animated film A Pancake Moon (2022), which fills a nearby gallery.

Richard Long’s career has been spent walking through landscapes and creating subtle geometrical or bodily interventions along the way. Whether documented in photographs, text or by filling a space with slabs of slate on his return, the persistence of nature remains long after he has left his trace behind, as highlighted in Four Ways (2014), a sculptural installation made with rocks of Delabole slate from Cornwall, England.

The strength of humans to endure is portrayed in Yu Hong’s new work Diffuse (2025), an epic composition of tumbling figures who cling onto one another in order to keep from collapsing. It is their collaborative love which might allow them to stay the course. The title evokes a condition of uncertainty and hope, entwined in an unresolved present. Through the collision of emotion and collective unrest, the artist explores life’s complex nature, suspended between resilience and vulnerability.

The works of Anish Kapoor and Hiroshi Sugimoto also resonate with this sense of a trial by force or perhaps by fire and brimstone. Kapoor’s painting blazes with flame and fury, while his torqued steel sculpture Bridge Twist (2016) tests the limits of human-made material to near breaking point.

Sugimoto’s Conceptual Forms photographs of scientifically supreme shapes also challenge the edges of human knowledge and mathematics, while he too is capable of leaping into the void of time with his Theatre photograph, setting the exposure time to match the length of the film before compressing the entire film into a single, still image of a glowing white screen.

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