As winter tightens its icy grip on the city, Beijingers may need more encouragement than usual to venture into the cold in search of contemporary art. Thankfully, the current creative climate in galleries and art spaces around town provides ample motivation to bundle up, get out, and have a look.

In keeping with the season, Pékin Fine Arts offers up two melancholic solo exhibitions, one by Beijing artist Bai Yilou (“Spring to Autumn”), the other by Hong Kong-based Tsang Kin-Wah (“The Third Seal — They Are Already Old. They Don’t Need to Exist Anymore”), both on view until January 18. Bai’s show brings together a moody combination of elements: A wooden boat that seems to overflow with ceramic skulls might offer passage between the worlds of the living and the dead, while a lynched figure hanging nearby turns out to be made of an assortment of clocks all painted black and ticking together like one enormous time bomb. Bai’s paintings enlarge the whorls of the artist’s fingerprints in white against stark black backgrounds, transforming them into starry nebulae and unfolding galaxies and linking even our lightest touch to larger forces within the cosmos. In an adjacent gallery, Tsang Kin-Wah has created a video and sound installation in which serpentine lines of text — his signature artistic material — snake and swarm their way up the wall until they overtake it in near-total blackness. His short phrases (“The recognition of class… The domestic enemy elements… The counter-revolutionary riots…”) speak to the contradictions and escalating violence that arise when one person or group asserts power over another. As Tsang’s video loops and the process begins again, there is a growing sense of the sweep of history and the cyclical recurrence of needless conflict.

There has been a lot of talk lately among arts professionals about discovering and defining the “next generation” of Chinese artists, those who have recently graduated from art schools and are beginning to show their work. It’s a generation of (mostly) only children, born at the dawn of the 1980s and after. Many of these artists grew up in cyberspace and at the mall, during a period of unparalleled economic growth. Not surprisingly, most have traded in the overt political symbols of the preceding generation for subtler approaches to critical art making. Works may or may not reflect national identity, and they are as likely to focus on materials, forms, and processes as they are on the development of more personal, idiosyncratic visual languages.

Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, located in the Caochangdi area, presents exhibitions by some of the most interesting young artists from Beijing and beyond. Its current solo show of new and recent works by artist Li Ming, titled “XX” and on view through December 27, is no exception. At 23 years old, Li Ming, who graduated last year from the pioneering New Media department at Hangzhou’s prestigious China Academy of Fine Arts, is clearly on the rise. Of the 11 videos and video installations in the exhibition, several feature staged, body-based performances or actions — dream-like activities that pulse with latent violence and a surreal homo- and autoeroticism. In the work that lends the exhibition its title, XX (all works 2009), two men sit outdoors on a rock, struggling to exchange their T-shirts while keeping their torsos touching at all times. In another, Beat Me, we see only a young woman’s face as she alternately slaps and is slapped by a man who is positioned just out of frame. Among the more narrative works is Visiting Ancestral Graves (Shangfen), in which a family ritual that includes lighting firecrackers in order to scare away evil spirits is shot in black and white, scored with revolutionary anthems, and mixed with old film footage, comically linking this expression of filial piety to wartime propaganda. The exhibition design theatrically incorporates the furniture and pieces of the natural landscape (dirt, tree branches) that appear in the videos, as if in an effort to draw the viewer into their stories. With such a compelling and original sensibility, Li Ming is an artist whose name you might want to remember.

Beijing is a city where solo exhibitions far outnumber group shows, and the latter are often organized without any discernible theme. This is not the case at Tang Contemporary, where a varied program features an alternating pattern of solid, large-scale solo projects and (usually) coherent group exhibitions. Though Tang’s recent show, "New Attitude of Image," which closed December 5, might be re-titled “What We Had in Storage,” the exhibition, by simply bringing together a group of established painters and artists whose practices incorporate painting, gave visitors the rare opportunity to survey current domestic trends within the medium. Not surprisingly, one theme that emerges is a critique of the medium itself, its history, and its complicity with advertising and commodity culture. Among these are Yan Leis digitally designed, hand-produced appropriations of advertising images; Chen Wenbos soulless paintings of what appear to be details lifted from promotional photographs of a luxury sedan; Zhou Tiehais deliberately flat-footed painting of collector Uli Sigg; Wang Xingweis brilliantly quirky take on outdated modes of visual culture; and works by MadeIn, an ongoing project by Shanghai artist Xu Zhen, who has founded a “company” that produces artworks in an effort, perhaps, to address the culture of consumption that underlies artistic production. If the works are “made to order” for the market — deliberately trafficked in symbols that have traction with buyers — then why do I still like them so much?

While Tang Contemporary’s exhibition has closed, several of the included artists — Liu Wei, MadeIn, and Zheng Guogu — also have works on view in the Ullens Center for Contemporary Arts current exhibition, "Breaking Forecast" (through February 28). While it seems odd to call the presentation of China’s most internationally visible artists a “forecast” (is it necessary to predict the present?), the exhibition assembles an extraordinary selection of major works by an all-star cast, which also includes Cao Fei, Chu Yun, Qiu Zhijie, and Yang Fudong (all of whom, incidentally, have been included in recent editions of the Venice Biennale). With its enormous space, UCCA (where, full disclosure, I formerly worked as a curator) is uniquely suited to present such a show; the exhibition fills all of the halls, the lobby, and the corridors with an array of large-scale installations, as well as photographs, paintings, and other wall-hung works.

Though there has been grumbling about UCCA presenting old works in “Breaking Forecast,” most of the exhibited artworks have never been shown in Beijing before, giving local audiences and 798’s international visitors their first chance to assess what China’s most active and ambitious artists have been up to in recent years. Collaborative duo Sun Yuan and Peng Yus installation, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, welcomes gallery-goers by regularly bellowing out an enormous smoke ring (perhaps six feet in diameter) that floats across the length of UCCA’s nave, only to be fanned away by a broom when it reaches the terminus of its trajectory. It is a simple, powerful gesture that invites one to meditate on the symbiotic nature of our most intimate relationships.

Nestled into UCCA’s modest middle gallery, Liu Wei’s works have never looked better. Here he presents a floor installation of sagging but recognizable architectural forms — presumably sites of empire and power — made from the type of rawhide usually reserved for dogs’ chew-toys; this is coupled with a selection of his gorgeous, reductionist landscape paintings, color studies all the more sublime for their computer-generated artificiality.

Chu Yun’s meditative, magical Constellation (2006) converts a darkened gallery into an electronic night sky through the careful arrangement of twinkling lights on second-hand household goods like printers, fax machines and water coolers. Who knew that a celestial encounter might await us come nightfall, in the dim corners of our kitchens and home offices? Chu Yun’s work fares much better at UCCA than it did at last year’s Venice Biennale, where it was positioned next to two noisy video installations at the end of the Arsenale. Filling a walled-off section of UCCA’s largest hall is a new, multi-part project by Yang Fudong. Entitled Dawn Mist, Separation Faith (2009), the work is comprised of more than a dozen 35 millimeter projectors simultaneously playing a new cycle of Yang’s gorgeous films — unedited black-and-white footage that captures unlikely scenes played out against the backdrop of Shanghai in another, more glamorous, era.

"Breaking Forecast" is a timely exhibition. The show makes a strong case for sustained interest in contemporary Chinese art when some have been claiming — particularly since the sharp downturn in the contemporary Chinese art market — that the excitement has been nothing more than hype. The exhibition makes such a position almost impossible to justify. In this way, if the show forecasts anything, it is the continuing endurance and ingenuity among artists in China, who show no signs of slowing down.