In Gallery 2, Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga uses models of various sizes made from cardboard to engage in a dialogue with the space, inviting us to enter a field of play between construction and deconstruction, microscopic and macroscopic. The praxis of Chinese artist Zheng Guogu fuses architecture and landscape design. He has transformed Gallery 3 into an extension of his own home and his conceptual models, rendering invisible ernergies into visible models. The American artist duo Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, born in the former Soviet Union, construct narratives from buildings and models. In Gallery 4, they tell of human dreams of flight, bringing utopian imagination and disillusionment to life within a poetic fiction. German artist Isa Melsheimer’s practice is deeply inspired by modernist architecture. In Gallery 5, a series of her “models” reconstruct specific architectural and natural elements through semi-fictional means, revealing architecture’s gradual shift towards the organic.

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In these artists’ practices, the model is more than just a microcosm of a building; it is a conceptual tool for liberation from limitations. These models interact with space and with the viewer to form a fluid, experiential medium in fusion with the environment and ideas. Spurred by aerial and satellite technology, top-down imagery has flooded our lives and visual culture. In this way, it seems as if the world has been modeled. The exhibition invites audiences in Aranya, a unique community field being constantly shaped by architecture, to ask, is the world itself a model?

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