UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents “Carsten Höller: Two,” from July 14, 2026, to January 31, 2027. Featuring some of the artist’s most iconic works alongside a selection of new pieces, the exhibition unfolds as a “Laboratory of Doubt,” exploring themes of repetition, play, time, dreams, and collective experience. Through participatory installations and “influential environments” that challenge our understanding of reality, Höller invites visitors to embrace uncertainty and encounter the world, themselves, and others in unexpected ways.
From July 14, 2026, to January 31, 2027, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents “Carsten Höller: Two,” the artist’s (b. 1961, Belgium) first institutional solo exhibition in China. Bringing together a selection of Höller’s landmark installations—some of which are presented in new forms specifically made for UCCA Beijing—and new artworks, “Two” is both a display of single objects and films as well as an artwork as a whole. The exhibition is accessible through two entrances, and visitors are randomly assigned an entrance upon arrival. After this initial divergence, they encounter parallel versions of the same environment—one in color, one in black-and-white—where specific conditions unfold in corresponding yet contrasting ways. Throughout the exhibition, visitors are confronted with doubles and parallel possibilities that invite them to reconsider what might otherwise be seen as a certainty, giving space to perplexity and doubt. This exhibition is curated by Philip Tinari with UCCA Assistant Curator Jiashu Zou.
[ . . . ]
Other works reflect Höller’s enduring interest in experimentation and the logics of repetition and reproduction. In the “Divisions” series (2018–2026), the artist employs division as a procedural principle, repeatedly bisecting canvases through lines and sequences of desaturating tones to create increasingly diminishing visual compositions. Through applying a set of fixed rules, these works function as visual experiments to generate forms approaching infinity. In Smell of My Mother and Smell of My Father (both 2017), Höller translates the logic of inheritance and genetic division into an olfactory experience. Recreating the scents of his parents and dispersing them under an exhibition bench, the released molecules envelop visitors to smell like his mother or his father, raising questions regarding the nature of lineage, resemblance, and even attraction.
Giant Triple Mushroom (2024) combines enlarged cross-sections of three mushroom species into a single “clash of forms.” The monumental sculpture exemplifies the beauty of fungi and questions the biological, adaptive functions of their different forms, colors, and chemical components. Giant Triple Mushroom reflects Höller’s fascination with how distinct forms emerge from shared origins, suggesting that even the closest study of the natural world leaves room for wonder, ambiguity, and the limits of human understanding.
Across visitor-activated installations, experiential environments, and alternately playful and uncanny encounters, “Carsten Höller: Two” unfolds as an exploration of doubling in its many forms. While visitors navigate the exhibition’s shifting pathways and experimental situations, they are invited to consider what might otherwise be: how similarity gives rise to difference, how seemingly contradictory possibilities may coexist, and how familiar boundaries can be redrawn. In “Two,” doubt becomes a catalyst for imagining the world anew.
Carsten Höller: Two
July 14, 2026 – Jan 31, 2027
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art
Beijing, China
