A nasty gash across the skull of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is evidence of a recent emergency brain haemorrhage operation. The bleeding may have been caused by a blow to the head by police in Chengdu, where Ai is running a project on the Sichuan earthquake.

“I've told him to watch his back,” says the Flemish superstar artist Luc Tuymans who, together with Ai, has co-curated The State of Things, Brussels/Beijing, an intriguing exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. It is Tuymans' second curatorial experience at the PBA – his first was 2007's Forbidden Empire, a visual dialogue between Flemish and Chinese masters that travelled to China.

Tuymans says the first show was a stepping stone to this new one about contemporary artists from China and Belgium. In spite of tough financial restrictions, the selection of artists is an ambitious attempt to evoke underlying stories of marketing, branding and creative ferment through various forms – paintings, sculpture, scale-models, video, installations, works on silk.