Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, My Grandfather’s Shed, 1998 (interior)
Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp
16 Installaties, Muhka, 17 Apr 1998 — 23 Aug 1998
© Ilya & Emilia Kabakov
Photo: M HKA
Courtesy of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov Art Foundation

Models are not only the starting point of construction, but also the extraction and reconstitution of reality, allowing us to see the world anew through changing perspectives and scales. The group exhibition Modeling the World presents four parallel projects from Carlos Bunga, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Isa Melsheimer, and Zheng Guogu, inspired by and constructed from architecture and models. Here, models become metaphors for a range of concepts, social phenomena, emotions, memories, and imaginations. From spiritual architecture to public space, Aranya has long used architecture to shape its unique social life, culture, and aesthetic, which is itself a starting point for this exhibition. For this reason, this exhibition also presents models and design drawings from representative works of architecture in the Aranya community. Modeling the World attempts to explore how the model exists in the contemporary artist’s practice as a tool, medium, and way of thinking, and to provide new perspectives to help us understand the world.

This exhibition is organized by Assistant Curator Jiang Ruoyu and Project Manager Wang Jiaming at the Aranya Art Center.

Payne Zhu, Promises from the Futures (still), 2024
Two-channel video (color, sound)
11:11 min.
Courtesy of the artist
Commissioned by the Soil Collection for the exhibition
The Show Must Go On in 2024 at Simple One,
curated by Leo Li Chen

In addition to continuing his recent exploration of the concept of “derivation” in the financial field, artist Payne Zhu conducts research on the city of Qinhuangdao and its surrounding seas, presenting and creating a series of new video, sculpture, and installation works from the perspective of observing the ocean in its depth. Payne Zhu probes into different economic systems and works in between the rheology of finance, competing bodies, and the flooding of images. Aspiring to become an exile from within, Zhu manages to create an alternative economics. Often taking unconventional moving images as a point of departure, Zhu’s works celebrate the unmatchable nature of the subject through the mismatch of different technological media.

This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, and Associate Curator Wu Yiyang.

Nadiah Bamadhaj, Ketidaknyamanan (Insecurity) (still), 2023
Digital video
4:25 min.
Courtesy of the artist

Since the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770-221 B.C.), the legend of “Lady Meng Jiang,” a local tale in the Qinhuangdao region has continuously evolved. From the states of Qi and Lu in present-day Shandong to the Central Plains, and from the Chu region in modern Hubei to the lower Yangtze, the story’s key motifs have migrated and adapted across territories, fostering a rich heritage of theater, literature, and folk traditions. This exhibition takes this enduring tale as an imaginative space to uncover its multilayered geographic, cultural, and emotional symbolism. It also examines the profound potential of storytelling—a universal and deeply rooted folk tradition—for emotional healing and social empowerment. Through a series of commissioned artworks, the exhibition situates the legend within a transregional feminist framework, liberating “Lady Meng Jiang” from her specific historical context. By reimagining the narrative as an open-ended, imaginative motif, it seeks to inspire broader contemporary dialogues.

This exhibition is organized by guest curator Yuan Fuca and Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, together with Associate Curator Wu Yiyang.

ikkibawiKrrr, Tropical Story, 2022
Two-channel HD video  (sound)
12:34 min.
Installation view at Museum of Natural History Ottoneum
Courtesy of the artists

Aranya Art Center is pleased to present South Korean visual research band ikkibawiKrrr’s first solo museum exhibition in China. ikkibawiKrrr’s name combines the Korean words for “moss”(ikki) and “rock” (bawi) with the onomatopoeic word “krrr.” Their artistic approach reflects aspects of moss as something that expands its world with its surrounding environment along the narrow boundary between land and air. As the members meet with farmers, divers, scholars, and many others, ikkibawiKrrr learns about plants, natural phenomena, human beings, and ecology through their ways of life. The band has also explored phenomena relating to tropical life and seaweeds, which grow independently while also expanding their boundaries to become part of the environment.

This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, and Assistant Curator Jiang Ruoyu.

David Ostrowski
Installation view
© David Ostrowski
Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers
Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Aranya Art Center North is pleased to present German artist David Ostrowski’s first solo museum exhibition Let me put it this way in China. Known for his reduced canvases, Ostrowski has produced a body of work that relentlessly questions the medium of painting and its constitutive elements – deliberately breaking with painterly codes and traditions. On some of his paintings there is simply a sprayed line while others show traces of dirt or glued-on paper remnants from his studio. Thus, the artist’s light-handed and complex approach to the non-motif opens up the space of the canvas for unique breaks in perception and an unexpected freedom of vision.

Vivien Zhang, Geogrid 3, 2024
Acrylic and oil on canvas
180 × 200 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery

Vivien Zhang’s paintings ask us to question the flawed linguistic, visual and taxonomic systems that we use to understand all facets of life. She examines our consumption of images and information in a technologically mediated world. Zhang assembles motifs collected from personal experiences and intensive research into abstract fields within her paintings. Precise, seemingly digitally constructed sections of painting sit with expressive washes which drip and pool. Her paintings straddle the tension between the perfection of edges, boundaries, and an image, and the chance of painterly composition.

Massinissa Selmani, La place et le lieu (still), 2022
Looped animation, no sound
© ADAGP Paris
Courtesy of the artist, Selma Feriani Gallery,
Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou and Jane Lombard Gallery

Aranya Art Center North is pleased to present Algerian artist Massinissa Selmani’s first solo museum exhibition in China. By its simplicity as a tool, Massinissa Selmani makes drawing a central medium of his practice. His work, in which the gravity of the subjects is carried by humor, the absurd, and simplicity of means, often presents drawings that depict strange or absurd situations made of improbable assemblages tinged with a certain gravity, short animations, and installations.

Judy Watson,
‍standing stone, kangaroo grass, red and yellow ochre, 2020
Acrylic and graphite on canvas
250 × 181.5 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery
Photography: Carl Warner

Aranya Art Center North is pleased to present Australian Waanyi artist Judy Watson’s first solo museum exhibition in China. Born in Mundubbera, Queensland in 1959, Judy Watson is a Waanyi descendant of north-west Queensland. Her ancestry and personal experiences have greatly influenced her artistic practice, which spans a variety of media including painting, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation. She often addresses the complex history of colonialism and its impact on Indigenous communities. She explores themes of migration, survival, and recovery, seeking to bring awareness and understanding to these issues. Her work is a powerful means of storytelling and a form of cultural preservation.

Installation view, Aranya Winter Residency Exhibition Series, Aranya Art Center North
June 20 - September 8, 2024
Photography Zaiye Studio

The Aranya Winter Residency Program, now in its third year, has welcomed more than 30 groups of artists to the Aranya communities in Beidaihe and Jinshanling under its contemporary art initiative. These artists have observed and experienced the local environment from various perspectives, engaging with both the communities and its surroundings. Through their documentation and practice, they continuously reinterpret the locality of Aranya. The residency serves as a platform for connection and exchange, fostering new possibilities for project development. Aranya Art Center North will continue to focus on community engagement and the transformation of community activities, presenting the second edition of the Aranya Winter Residency Exhibition Series in 2025.  

This exhibition is organized by Jiang Ruoyu, Assistant Curator at the Aranya Art Center and Coordinator (Contemporary Art) of the Aranya Winter Residency Program.