Qualia Contemporary Art & GOCA at EXPO Chicago 2026

Qualia Contemporary Art will present nine artists at Expo Chicago, on view April 9 through 12, 2026, at Festival Hall at Navy Pier in Chicago. The Expo Chicago art fair is the gallery's first national art fair presentation, arriving weeks after its international debut at Art Central Hong Kong in March, and marks a pivotal moment in a six-year trajectory.

A&O Public Relations has worked alongside Qualia since the gallery's founding in 2020, providing business advisory, public relations, messaging strategy, and reputation management through each stage of the program's development. The Expo Chicago booth marks a defining moment in our engagement, with two emerging art fair presentations in a single season.

A Defining Year for Qualia Contemporary Art

Qualia opened during the early months of the pandemic under the direction of Dacia Xu, a Stanford-educated professional who left a career in technology to start the Palo Alto based gallery. The program is built around a curatorial dialogue between Eastern and Western contemporary art, which is an approach that has shaped both the roster and artistic allure Xu has assembled over its first five years.

In March, Qualia presented new paintings by Lyu Peng and Xu Hongming at Art Central Hong Kong in the fair's Duo Projects section, which was the gallery's first international fair appearance. Now, just four weeks later, the Expo Chicago booth brings nine artists from across the gallery's program to a national stage. Reaching the international and national fair circuits in the same season, six years into the program, is a milestone that comes from sustained curatorial conviction and consistent strategic positioning.

The Nine Artists on View

The booth features work by Xu Bing, Hung Liu, Wang Dongling, Tai Xiangzhou, Wang Tiande, Zhang Yu, Chu Chu, Victoria Yau, and Huang Hairong. The nine artists span generations and form a cross-section of practices rooted in or in dialogue with the Chinese ink tradition.

Xu Bing, a MacArthur Fellow whose work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the British Museum, is among the most widely recognized Chinese contemporary artists working today. Wang Dongling, regarded as China's greatest living calligrapher, has pushed the form toward gestural abstraction through his invented “luanshu,” or chaotic script. Tai Xiangzhou merges Song Dynasty landscape conventions with contemporary cosmology in ink paintings on antique silk, with work in the Art Institute of Chicago and the Harvard Art Museums.

Wang Tiande layers ink with incense burns on paper, a technique held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and LACMA. Zhang Yu is known for his “Fingerprints” series, in which rice paper is marked by hand rather than brush, and was included in the Met's 2014 “Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China.” Chu Chu, who earned her doctorate in calligraphy under Wang Dongling, works across ink, photography, and oil. Huang Hairong presents photo-realistic oil paintings held in the M+ Sigg Collection in Hong Kong.

The booth also presents estate works by Hung Liu (1948–2021), the pioneering Chinese American painter whose multilayered compositions drew on historical photographs to recover anonymous lives, with work held in the National Gallery of Art and the Whitney Museum, and Victoria Yau (1939–2023), one of the earliest Asian American abstract painters, who produced more than seven hundred works over six decades in Evanston, Illinois.

Art Fair Advisory Support for Contemporary Art Galleries

A&O is also pleased to celebrate GOCA at Expo Chicago this year. Earlier in 2026, A&O provided business advisory and art fair application support to the Chelsea-based gallery, which is dedicated to Japanese and Asian contemporary art and exhibits at Expo in the Focus section. Together, the two presentations exemplify the work A&O loves best: the long-term support of galleries whose curatorial vision earns them a place on the national and international stage.

Expo Chicago 2026

Now in its thirteenth edition, Expo Chicago is the largest fair of contemporary and modern art in the Midwest. The fair was founded in 2012 by Tony Karman as a successor to Art Chicago, which had operated at Navy Pier since 1980 as the first modern art fair in North America. Frieze acquired the fair in 2023, and the 2026 edition is the first under new director Kate Sierzputowski, bringing together approximately 130 galleries from more than thirty cities across fifteen countries.

The 2026 fair is organized into Galleries, anchored by Embodiment, a project organized in partnership with the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center; Focus, titled “Gathering of Waters” and curated by Katie A. Pfohl of the Detroit Institute of Arts, dedicated to emerging galleries twelve years old or younger; Profile, for solo and focused projects from established international programs; and IN/SITU, which stages large-scale work within Festival Hall and along the lakefront. Without a competing fair in the city, Expo has built its reputation on curatorial focus and on the depth of its civic integration with Chicago's arts and architecture communities.

Visiting Expo Chicago 2026: Dates, Hours, & Location

Expo Chicago takes place April 9 through 12 at Festival Hall, Navy Pier, 600 East Grand Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611. Opening Night Vernissage is Thursday, April 9, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM. General hours are Friday and Saturday, 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM, and Sunday, 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM.