Exhibition program 2024

Aranya Art Center is pleased to announce its 2024 exhibition program featuring: Chinese artist Jiang Zhi’s solo exhibition Life, organized by guest curator Sun Wenjie, a special group exhibition titled Studio Visits, celebrating Aranya Art Center’s five-year anniversary, as well as the group exhibition Paint from Life, organized by director Damien Zhang and artist Chen Xiaoyi.

In Gallery 0, Aranya Art Center will present the first solo museum exhibition of Chinese artist Wang Zhibo, the first exhibition of Japanese artist Yuko Mohri in China, and Hong Kong artist Trevor Yeung’s solo exhibition, in partnership with Gasworks (London) and Para Site (Hong Kong).

March 16–June 30
Gallery 1–5: Jiang Zhi, Life
Jiang Zhi works across a wide range of media, including photography, painting, video, and installation. Fiction and poetry have also been an important part of his artistic output. Consistently engaging with contemporary social and cultural issues, Jiang consciously positions himself at the intersection of poetry and sociology, while weaving mundane social and personal experiences into his works.

Gallery 0: Wang Zhibo
Wang Zhibo’s practice explores the potential to stretch, condense, and twist the dimensions and complexity of time and space in painting, thereby investigating the possibility of the two-dimensional medium (painting) in depicting multi-dimensional spaces. Her work considers how the evolution of human visual experience is reflected within the pictorial frame.

July 14–October 13
Gallery 1–5: Studio Visits
Aranya Art Center, which opened its doors in May 2019, will be celebrating its five-year anniversary this year. Visiting artist studios is a key component of our curatorial practice, which often does not immediately translate into visible projects. Which studios has the team visited in recent years? Why did we want to visit them? What did we take from these visits? Unlike a retrospective anniversary show, this exhibition invites five artists from our recent visits to highlight the institution’s working process and program direction in an attempt to envision our future.

Gallery 0: Yuko Mohri
Yuko Mohri is an artist who creates installation and sculpture not to compose (or construct) but to focus on “events” that constantly shift according to various conditions, such as the environment. In recent years, she has also explored this idea through video and photography. In 2024, Yuko Mohri will represent Japan at the 60th Venice Biennale.

October 27, 2024–February 16, 2025
Gallery 1–5: Paint from Life
In 1975, during the Cultural Revolution, artists from the No Name Group (Wuming Huahui) visited Beidaihe twice for outdoor sketching. Taking this specific historical event as a starting point, this exhibition strives to reawaken the sensibility and creativity associated with “painting from life” as an artistic method. This exhibition engages with this action’s revolutionary and rebellious historical significance, which has largely been forgotten as it has gradually become an ossified academic coursework for fine art students in China. In recent years, amidst a global public health crisis, the concept of the “outdoor” has been progressively appropriated as a stress response system, awaiting reflection and reconsideration. This exhibition looks at “painting from life” as both an artistic practice and a survival strategy, with a view to manifest its potential to stimulate individual self-awareness and to respond to the dramatic changes of our time.

Gallery 0: Trevor Yeung
The practice of Trevor Yeung consistently excavates the inner logics of closed systems and the way in which such systems contain and create emotional and behavioural conditions. In his mixed-media works, carefully staged objects, animals, and plants function as aesthetic pretexts that delicately and ironically address notions of artificiality and the processes of human relations. In 2024, Trevor Yeung will represent Hong Kong at the 60th Venice Biennale.

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Media contact: Liangjiao Gao, gaoliangjiao [​at​] aranya.cc / T +86 138 1143 1757