Carsten Höller Splits UCCA Beijing Into ‘Two’ Parallel Color and Monochromatic Worlds
The Belgian contemporary artist transforms the museum’s historic Bauhaus-influenced Great Hall into a sprawling, interactive playground.
Summary
Carsten Höller:'s 'Two' opens at UCCA Beijing, marking his first major solo show in China.
On view till January 31, 2027, the curation splits the space into parallel color and monochromatic environments.
Visitors interact with robotic roaming beds, slow-moving carousels and ingestible installations.
The UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing is hosting Carsten Höller‘s Two, a major site-specific exhibition that transforms the museum’s signature 1,877-square-meter Great Hall into an interactive environment. Curated by Philip Tinari alongside UCCA Assistant Curator Jiashu Zou, the showcase acts as what Höller calls a “Laboratory of Doubt,” utilizing an architectural framework that deliberately splits the factory-influenced Great Hall into two mirror-image, parallel environments — one rendered entirely in vivid color and the other in black-and-white.
Upon arrival, visitors are randomly assigned an entrance that permanently alters their initial physical route through the twin spaces. The layout features landmark installations specifically modified for UCCA Beijing, including “Tilted Carousel (Two Whites)” and “Tilted Carousel (Five Colours)” — two fully functional, 6.3-meter-high amusement park rides clad in flashing light bulbs that complete slow, counter-rotational movements over a two-minute cycle, suspending and trapping their riders until a full spin finishes.
The parallel rooms also house contrasting temporal instruments: the standard-time neon configuration “Sexagesimal Clock” faces off against “Decimal Clock, ” a functional time-piece operating on a historic, 10-hour French Revolutionary system. Additionally, the central section introduces the interactive marble sculpture “Dice,” which allows guests to physically climb into its hollow interior, and “Pill Clock,: which drops ingestible pills containing an undisclosed substance onto the floor at three-second intervals. Carsten Höller’s Two is now on view at UCCA Beijing through January 31, 2027.
UCCA Beijing
4 Jiuxianqiao Rd, Chaoyang,
Beijing, China, 100102
