This season’s exhibitions, installations, artist residencies, and public projects make wondrously evident the interdisciplinary, multimedia, and digital forms of expression that shelter under the “visual arts” umbrella.

Throughout the Lower Mainland, local, national, and international artists present everything from radio-wave-generated sound installations to video animation, puppet theatre, portrait photography, and social research.

Subjects include affordable housing, ancient imperial privilege, beat poetry, hip-hop culture, and our relationship with the natural world—or what’s left of it.

Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983–1993 (until November 30 at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery)
More than 220 black-and-white photographs chronicle the revelatory decade that the man who would become China’s most famous dissident artist spent in New York City. Arriving in the United States after coming of age during the Cultural Revolution, Ai Weiwei immersed himself in an entirely new artistic, social, and political milieu. The photos, selected by the artist from over 10,000 negatives, function as a journal not only of the relationships he forged while in New York but also of his awakening to the possibilities of free expression and the exercise of human rights.

The Draw: Under ongoing restrictions and surveillance by the Chinese government, Ai Weiwei is not allowed to leave his homeland. His art, however, travels on.

Requiem For A Glacier: Paul Walde (until October 25 at the Evergreen Cultural Centre)
This sound and video installation immerses us in a performance of Paul Walde’s deeply moving oratorio, staged in the summer of 2013 atop the Farnham Glacier in eastern British Columbia. Conducted by Ajtony Csaba and performed by a volunteer orchestra and chorus, Requiem for a Glacier registers grief at the decline of the five Jumbo or Qat’muk glaciers, remnants of the last ice age.

The Draw: Given recent news reports of rapidly melting glaciers in our overheated province, this exhibition could hardly be more timely.

Life And People: Mark Delong, Barry Doupé, Lorna Mills (September 12 to October 25 at the Western Front)
Sculptures by Mark DeLong and animated GIFs by Lorna Mills create a lively dialogue with a film by Barry Doupé, made during his Western Front production residency last year. All three Canadian artists work at the quirky margins of popular culture, engaging their audience with their energy and imagination while challenging narrative conventions.

The Draw: Trust the Front’s press release on this one: “these works embody the funny, scary and banal qualities that make up the messy performance of daily life.”

Harry & Jessie Webb: Artists In Vancouver’s Jazz Age (September 17 to December 6 at the West Vancouver Museum)
The late Harry and Jessie Webb produced paintings and prints that drew their forms and rhythms from the jazz music, neon signs, and gritty street life of Vancouver in the 1950s and ’60s. Through many spheres of cultural activity, from magazines to murals, they participated in the emergence of West Coast abstraction and expressed the beat sensibilities of their time.

The Draw: This show illustrates what the West Vancouver Museum does so well: bringing forward the many social and cultural components of our region’s recently past modernist history.

Flora And Fauna: 400 Years Of Artists Inspired By Nature (September 20 to December 14 at the Surrey Art Gallery)
Organized by the National Gallery of Canada, this big exhibition of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculptures, and applied art reveals our shifting engagement with and understanding of the natural world. From botanical drawings and taxidermy specimens to documentation of clear-cuts and collaborations with bees, this show leaves no plant, animal, or earthwork unturned.

The Draw: A stellar lineup of historic and contemporary artists and designers, from Charles Rennie Mackintosh to Shary Boyle.

The Forbidden City: Inside The Court Of China’s Emperors (October 18 to January 11, 2015, at the Vancouver Art Gallery)
Located in the heart of Beijing and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Forbidden City was, for five centuries, the seat of imperial power in China. Its nearly 10,000 rooms housed not only emperors and their families, servants, and entourages, but also more than a million ceremonial, diplomatic, and domestic artifacts, including paintings, ceramics, calligraphy, jade, and bronzes. Some 200 of these objects are making their way to Vancouver this fall, courtesy of Beijing’s Palace Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum.

The Draw: This show has “blockbuster” written all over it. Many of the objects on view, some dating from AD 500, have never been seen outside China.

Catherine Pulkinghorn: Home Dream Home (November 29 to January 10, 2015, at Access Gallery)
Catherine Pulkinghorn takes on the issue of affordable housing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. During the course of her social-engagement project, she will invite property developers, managers, bankers, builders, planners, engineers, and members of the public to meet with her at the gallery and engage in a dialogue.

The Draw: Definitely the other end of the spectrum from the Forbidden City, this research project should demonstrate the intersection of art and social activism.