Over the past few years, people have been heading outdoors more often, exploring their interactions with the outside world in a new light. This exhibition aims to rekindle the practice of painting from nature, an activity open to everyone, but also a creative method that has grown increasingly rigid—as artistic praxis, and as a strategy of response, it catalyzes individual creativity and the potential to confront reality.

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Setting out from the two Aranya communities at Beidaihe and Jinshanling, this exhibition gathers more than 50 works spanning a range of mediums from painting to paper, video, sculpture, sound, and installation. Remarkably, 11 artists and 4 artist groups were commissioned to create new works this time. They have all physically come to this seemingly ordinary place on the edge of the north China plains, drawing from their keen insights and powerful vitality to break outwards and penetrate inwards, with the goal of expanding notions and mediums of painting from life, and the contemporary relevance of this framework for action.

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Here, painting from life is more than just a form of technical training; it is an act of creation that transforms embodied experience, the spiritual practice of the construction of subjectivity, an endeavor at once quotidian and courageous.

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This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, together with artist Chen Xiaoyi and Curatorial Assistant Gao Liangjiao.