“After Looking: What Does Looking Have to Do with Value?” is a roundtable bringing together the artists exhibiting in Vitalisms II, the second chapter of ICA’s ongoing research into painting, and the curators who facilitated the exhibition’s Study Session series. Their conversation continues the research that unfolded  through “Form & Content II: How Do We Value Painting(s)?”

Each week, the public was invited to spend sustained time with a single painting through close looking and group discussion. Rather than arriving at definitive judgments, participants produced observations, interpretations, and questions through facilitated conversation. From these Study Sessions, the ICA curators will bring selected material into conversation with the artists. How might an artist’s understanding of a work intersect with, depart from, or be transformed by the ways others encounter it? What happens when a painting is encountered as an artwork, cultural artifact, collectible object, commodity, or financial asset?

Together, they will consider the questions at the center of Vitalisms II: How does value come into being through our encounters with painting?


This event will take place across two consecutive 90-minute sessions (13:30-15:00; 15:30-17:00).

The conversation will be held in Chinese, with AI-generated live English captions available.

Free and open to the public. No registration is required.

In conjunction with Vitalisms II, an exhibition by Cong, GUO Hongwei, FU Site, XIAO Wenjie, WANG Xiaofu, WANG Xingyun and ZHAO Yao.

The exhibition Vitalisms II and related events are presented as the first season of the ICA’s artistic research program Untimely Inheritances (2026–28), attending to what inheritance asks of us and how we might inhabit unfinished worlds through practices of interpretation, response, and transformation.