Aranya Art Center is pleased to present the exhibition To Ask by Touch, opening on September 19, 2026.
Marking the fifth year of the Aranya Winter Residency, the exhibition revisits the residency archives of more than forty participating artists, while inviting six former residents to present a series of solo projects. Tracing practices developed during the residency, the exhibition brings together works from their broader practices alongside more than ten newly commissioned works.
The exhibition considers how artists draw upon embodied experience and individual perspectives to establish relationships with the mountainous landscape and its surrounding communities. They do not seek to arrive at an accurate understanding of the local. Instead, through wandering, collecting, labouring, misrecognition, and imagination, they generate personal realities shaped by projection and embodied experience. Working across distinct media and methodologies, their practices nevertheless converge in a shared proposition: that worlds can be produced through perception.
From this perspective, the exhibition further asks how we encounter our environments through bodily perception; how, through such encounters, we continuously reinvent reality; and how we might, through an attitude of practice, continually reposition ourselves within a reality in constant transformation.
This exhibition is organized by Assistant Curator Jiang Ruoyu, Assistant Curator Gao Liangjiao, and Curatorial Assistant Sun Fanxi at the Aranya Art Center.
This exhibition received support from the Foundation MV and Natasha Sidharta.
Marten Bayuaji
Hou Zichao
Hashel Al Lamki
Li Hanwei
Xu Sanhuang
Xue Ying
