For this year’s spring exhibition “All Means Are Sacred”, the Beijing-based collection M WOODS presents works by artists across fifteen centuries in a focused examination of reverence, energy, and the spirit.

Staging an encounter between contemporary and pre-contemporary works, the exhibition confronts the means by which art seeks to transcend, often in unconventional ways, the materials and conditions of its making.

Taking over the entire museum – located in a former munitions factory in Beijing’s bustling arts district 798 Art Zone – the exhibition features the work of artists Ouyang Chun, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Raoul De Keyser, Olafur Eliasson, Giorgio Griffa, Charles Harlan, Giorgio Morandi, Guido van der Werve, Xu Sheng, and Yang Changxu alongside anonymous Indian Tantric drawings, a Northern Renaissance painting by a follower of Hieronymous Bosch, and ancient Chinese stone statuary. Time and media are collapsed within this selection, the works – religious and secular alike– unified by an earnest ambition to overthrow ordinary modes of experiencing art to communicate a spiritual truth.

Drawn predominately from the M WOODS collection, the exhibition takes its title from Wassily Kandinsky’s text Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) in which the artist asserts the legitimacy of all means of art making that serve a work’s inner necessity. Honoring this thought, the exhibition highlights themes of transcendence and enlightenment that are key concerns of the M WOODS permanent collection.