Elmgreen & Dragset will unleash their quirky brand of humour in China early next year, when a major retrospective of their work opens at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. As usual, there will be a twist: the survey (23 January-17 April) will be set in a mock art fair. Philip Tinari, the institution’s director, says: “We’ll use the visual grammar and architectural syntax of an art fair to display more than 100 of the artists’ pieces from the past 20 years.” Michael Elmgreen tells us that “a lot of the critique of art fairs is obvious and banal”, and that the artists’ planned setting is partly “a comment on the increasing commercialisation of the art world, where… new artists are flipped and spat out again when they are no longer hot”.
