With a track-record of recent exhibitions that is hard to beat, the UCCA should be the first port-of-call for any trip to Beijing’s 798 Art District. The current Multitude Art Prize, exhibiting now until the 16th June, makes this no exception.

What sets the UCCA apart from so many of its neighboring galleries is that despite the inevitable flow of visitors, the UCCA is not content to simply rest on its laurels and look pretty. Rather, the UCCA continues to raise the bar for critical exhibitions. The point of the Multitude Art Prize is not just to promote contemporary Asian art but to question the role and relevance of the very works it is exhibiting.

The name of the exhibition is a reformulation of the idea of ‘multitude’ as based on Antonio Negri’s 2004 Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. This book looks at how ‘practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real’. As such, the only criteria for these winners is that they are based in Asia or are of Asian descent and that they have an ability to analyze and communicate their ideas in a way that makes them relevant on a global scale. The results are in, and the winners have succeeded. The exhibition showcases the most meaningful produce of Asia’s most critically engaged contemporary artists.

The pick of the prize is El Fin del Mundo – the combined work of Korean artists’ Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho. Their 13-minute 2-channel HD ‘documentary’ is a subtle insight into a post-apocalyptic world. The two films are run adjacent to one another and each focus on an artists’ attempt to relocate his or her identity in this new world through reflecting on the one that they have lost.

The artist on the right exists in an artificial world of hazmat suits and scientific test-tubes. Her world is one of careful analysis where she systematically treats each artifact of the lost world with unfailing scrutiny. Though the artist on the left exists in a world that is more familiar to our own, it is perhaps the more confronting. With him, we are trapped in a closed apartment filled with junk – seemingly the last remaining sanctuary in a broken world that he peers at through slatted blinds.

The point is to make us consider our relationship with the world. The artist on the right’s engagement with familiar day-to-day objects takes on a slow, childlike wonderment. One image, which continues to resonate with the audience long after they have stepped out of the darkened video room, is when she wraps herself in fairy lights. Her slow and precise movements, her curiosity of their purpose, her fascination at their strangeness – it forces us too to question our own definition of aesthetics. What is it we still find beautiful?

El Fin del Mundo reminds us of just how much we have to lose. It was originally shown as part of the News from Nowhere project at dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012. The underlying theme of this project was the threat that climate change poses to our environment. While the world represented is neither utopian nor dystopian, the characters seem unsettled and nostalgic. ‘Our world is precious,’ Kyungwon and Jeon seem to be screaming. ‘See afresh the unremarkable as remarkable!’

All five artists of the Multitude Prize remind us how imperative artistic dialogue is in shaping and fine-tuning our understanding of the world that surrounds us. There are no false lulls of security; they are challenging us to make a difference.