On the occasion of its fifth anniversary, Aranya Art Center is pleased to announce the launch of its first affiliate branch, Aranya Art Center North, featuring three solo exhibitions by Chinese artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun, Ma Hailun, and Zheng Haozhong, along with two special artist talks.
Aranya Art Center North is located at Aranya North Coast, in Qinhuangdao’s Beidaihe New District. Spanning youth culture, athletics, fashion, the arts, and children’s development, Aranya North Coast explores expanding possibilities for avant-garde culture, and for riverine and coastal lifestyles. It is built along the banks of the Dapu river, with the vibrant Riverain town center at its core.
Aranya Art Center North is a comprehensive art venue designed by renowned Japanese architect Kazunari Sakamoto (Kazunari Sakamoto Architectural Laboratory) and Chinese architect Liu Yichun (Atelier Deshaus). Occupying 3,843 square meters with a total interior area of more than 5,000 square meters, it will serve as a hub for future exhibitions and cultural activities at Aranya North Coast. The center features an indoor plaza of over 2,000 square meters, surrounded by six box-like galleries that open out from the center like "vitrines" to connect the interior and exterior space and catalyze artistic encounters for those who pass by.
In the initial phase, four of the galleries will be activated first as exhibition spaces. Aranya Art Center North will continue to focus on the works of pioneering contemporary artists from China and abroad with an emphasis on community engagement and the transformation of community activities into exhibitions, with a rich offering of artistic and cultural programs including the Aranya Winter Residency Exhibition Series.
Aranya Art Center North is pleased to present the first museum solo exhibition of Chinese artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun, as well as the eponymous solo exhibitions of Chinese artists Ma Hailun and Zheng Haozhong.
The exhibitions are organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, together with Exhibition Coordinator Wu Yiyang and Curatorial Assistant Wang Jiaming. The exhibitions are on view from September 22, 2024 through February 9, 2025.
This exhibition features the latest video, sound, and installation works from the “Water System Project,” an ongoing art project begun a decade ago. The “Water System Project” sets out from the historical flows of the water ecosystem up- and downstream of Dujiangyan, engaging in field observations, research, and dialogues as working methods, and emphasizing interaction and collaboration with local residents, community practitioners, and multidisciplinary scholars. Most of the works in this exhibition are appearing in Mainland China for the first time, revealing how the pastoral residents of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in the Ruo’ergai Region, at the headwaters of the Dujiangyan watershed, employ traditional knowledge to adapt to a changing environment, establishing living relationships and spiritual connections of mutual care with other forms of life in the highlands (the grass, the sand, the black soil, pikas, yaks, and Naga).
From ritual to folk ballad, even down to a single stone, Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun’s creations have always focused on specific people, things, and practices. They have done away with the romanticized vision of the creator as investigator on the scene, and use simple, powerful aesthetics to reveal the complex, invisible web of connections between these concrete things. Aside from the spatial dimensions Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun have traversed in their travels, the two artists have further broken down the limitations in the dimensions of time and life, keenly and sincerely recognizing the current ecological reality and its seemingly distant yet inextricable connections to the substantive presence of the immaterial, as well as to systems of non-modern traditions and wisdom, revealing for us an approach to unified, living connectedness through which to confront environmental issues.
Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun
Elegy of Animals，2023
Sound installation and woven yak hair
Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary
Produced by Aranya Art Center in 2024 (woven yak hair)
Courtesy of the artist
This exhibition features the artist’s portraits of friends, self-portraits, and studio-themed paintings. Zheng Haozhong’s works have always focused on people and settings connected to his life. These scenes are almost exclusively drawn from his everyday field of vision, particularly from his studio space. Though artists’ homes and studios have constantly shifted, dispersed, and even disappeared in recent years, Zheng’s painting studio is still frequented by his friends, many of whom are artists, musicians, and writers. These friends are his models, while the artist in turn serves as performer, photographer, or musician in their creations. When the subjects of the painting are close friends, trust and understanding allow the artist to overlook the identity of these people and focus on the construction of the setting and the (anti)narrative, allowing him to unfurl a vast and unfettered portrayal of the inner self on the canvas.
When viewing Zheng Haozhong’s paintings, we are often drawn in by his bold use of negative space and the freedom of his lines, aspects that are intimately linked to his emphasis on improvisation. The negative space symbolizes the “beginning of time.” Against the backdrop of this detemporalized vacuum, the free-flowing lines carve out the trajectory of his mind during the act of painting. By capturing the people and scenes around him, he breathes a dynamic energy and an emotion reminiscent of jazz into his pictures, using different subjects to explore diverse expressions of the same self. For the artist, painting is about how to return to the self, how to paint the self.
Zheng Haozhong
Self-Portrait 2，2015
Oil on canvas
200 × 300 cm
Courtesy of the artist
This exhibition presents works from the artist’s iconic Uruklyn Public Project alongside her most recent works regarding middle class families in Xinjiang. While studying in New York, Ma Hailun came to recognize certain similarities between Xinjiang and Brooklyn in terms of their levels of openness and cultural diversity, so she combined “Urumqi” and “Brooklyn” to draw connections between the two most important chapters in her life. Since its launch in 2021, Uruklyn has been inviting local residents of Urumqi and Kashi to join in this ongoing photography project. Recently, with the support of Aranya Art Center, the city of Yining has been added as a third location. The project has brought together participants from different ethnic groups and backgrounds, revealing the ethnic diversity and cultural fusion of urban life in Xinjiang. For this exhibition, the artist has chosen to print the photographs on fabric and hang them in space, calling to mind Xinjiang’s Etles silk and distinctly local scenes of textiles hung out to dry, creating a space with an aesthetic touch of the artist’s hometown.
In her latest work created for the exhibition, the artist has broken through people’s preconceived notions of Xinjiang’s traditional culture, turning her lens on scenes from often-overlooked contemporary family life. Inspired by the triptych narrative style, she depicts an ordinary moment in a summer picnic. Through intricately designed settings and interactions of the characters, this blend of everyday life and fictional narrative weaves a sense of pseudo-documentary, giving the viewer an alternative perspective on Xinjiang.
Ma Hailun
Uruklyn in Kashi，2023
Photography
Courtesy of the artist
Ma Hailun
Uruklyn in Yining，2023
Photography
Courtesy of the artist
Black Tent Meetings #5, devised as a series of workshops and dialogues, is a part of the public program of Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun’s solo exhibition. It brings together researchers, artists, curators, and local collaborators working in different mountain regions, water systems, and locations to engage in dialogue on the topic of “Water Sources, Indigenous Knowledge, and Holistic Life Technology,” as proposed by the artists.
2024.9.21, 10:30-12:30
Hall 5, Seaside Cinema
Guest speakers: Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun, Konchok Rapten, Gao Yufang, Palden Tsering, Hai REN, Xi Lei
In the Fall of 2023, Aranya Art Center presented the exhibition Videos by the Sea: Nguyễn Trinh Thi, the first solo exhibition of Vietnamese filmmaker and artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi in China. The exhibition presented two video works, Letters From Panduranga (2015) and How to Improve the World (2020-2021), the first and last installments in a trilogy on indigenous cultures. This event will feature a screening of Fifth Cinema (2018), the second installment in the trilogy, and a conversation between the artist and Singapore Art Museum Curator Hsu Fang-Tze.
2024.9.22, 10:30-12:00
Hall 5, Seaside Cinema
Artist: Nguyễn Trinh Thi
Guest speaker: Hsu Fang-Tze, Curator, Singapore Art Museum
Aranya Art Center officially opened on May 24, 2019, and is celebrating its fifth Anniversary this year. Over the past five years, Aranya Art Center has presented a total of twenty exhibitions, including the first solo museum exhibitions in China by internationally renowned artists such as Anselm Reyle, Sylvie Fleury, Gabriel Kuri, and Yuko Mohri; comprehensive solo exhibitions of Chinese artists such as Tao Hui and Jiang Zhi; first-in-career solo exhibitions of emerging artists such as Michelle Wang Yiyi and Han Qian; and research-oriented group exhibitions such as Long Day, Études, How Far, How Close, and Studio Visits.
In five years, Aranya Art Center has welcomed over 850,000 visitors and hosted more than 200 public events involving more than 5,000 participants. With the addition of the new venue, Aranya Art Center North, Aranya Art Center will continue to present high-quality exhibition programs, further connecting people, art, culture, community, and space.
