Lubaina Himid was born in 1954 in the Zanzibar Sultanate, then a British protectorate, now part of Tanzania. Himid moved to Britain with her mother, a textile designer, and both her heritage and her mother’s craft influenced her artistic vision. By the 1980s, she was a key figure in the British Black arts movement, creating bold, figurative paintings with vivid colors and symbolic compositions. Her work places realistic figures in dreamlike spaces, exploring themes of memory, identity, and the African diaspora. Spanning five decades, this retrospective is Himid’s first in China. —Elena Clavarino