Aranya Art Center—three venues in two cities
Guangzhou Guangdong Province
China
One year after inaugurating its first branch—the Aranya Art Center North, Aranya Art Center will officially open the Aranya Art Center Guangzhou at CTG-Aranya-Jiulonghu in October 2025. As its first branch in a different city, the new venue marks a significant milestone, establishing Aranya Art Center's presence across both northern and southern China.
“With the expansion of its network of venues, Aranya Art Center’s programming will evolve from a primary focus on contemporary art to embrace a broader spectrum of contemporary visual culture. It aims to become a platform that brings together diverse disciplines and media, including art, architecture, design, music, and film.” —Damien Zhang, Director of Aranya Art Center
Architecture
Aranya Art Center Guangzhou was designed by Chinese architect Dong Gong. Situated on the riverside within the CTG-Aranya-Jiulonghu community, the center covers an area of 2892.93 square meters. It is the latest collaboration between Vector Architects and Aranya, envisioned as a hub for art exhibitions and cultural activities for the local community. The building links five exhibition halls around preserved banyan trees through alleys, gardens, plazas, and covered walkways. This clustered layout is a unique response to the climate and natural elements of the Lingnan region, as well as a poetic reimagining and innovative exploration of museum typology.
Opening exhibitions
Gallery 1–3
The first solo exhibition in Asia of Wiebke Siem brings together nearly one hundred works across such mediums as sculpture, installation, and paper, spanning various phases of the artist’s multi-decade career.
With sculpture at the core of her practice, Wiebke Siem extracts everyday objects from their original contexts while warping their form and meaning. Since the 1980s, she has been using fashion as a point of entry, transforming clothing into unwearable sculptures. Hand-sewn dresses, coats, and hats hang suspended without wearers, becoming the outer garments of cultural gender constructs. She has also been reconstructing traditional 18th and 19th century furniture from the German countryside, painstakingly restoring their structure and details while intentionally diminishing their practical function, stripping them from reality to become fixed cultural heirlooms imbued with the collective memory of modern Germany’s national narrative.
Siem’s focus is not limited to objects themselves but is directed at the symbiotic relationships between objects and people. In her meticulously-designed home scenes, life has been quietly dismantled and reconstituted, with objects and bodies permeating each other. The furniture grows limbs, while the kitchen implements and home spaces are silent and static as a stage backdrop, implying regimented rehearsal. The “figures” within are silent, unbalanced, dislocated, but lifelike, awakening the viewer’s alertness and isolation from once familiar surroundings, thus transforming everyday life into a field revealing the structures of power. In this way, the artist emphasizes that the body is a tool shaped by cultural systems, revealing the reality that everyday labors and gender divisions have long been shaped and maintained by social order.
This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, in collaboration with Assistant Curator Gao Liangjiao, and Exhibition Coordinator Zhao Da.
Pavilion—Isamu Noguchi
Located at the end of the tree-lined boulevard, the semi-open outdoor Pavilion connects the museum’s interior and exterior architecture, drawing the gaze of visitors from both the street and the garden. It will serve as a ongoing platform for the display of public art.
For its debut, the Pavilion will present Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture Giacometti’s Shadow (1982–83).
Recognized as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Isamu Noguchi, in his later years, played between the traditional Japanese paper crafts and the techniques of industrial metalworking to create a series of galvanized steel sculptures, of which the work on view is one. Giacometti’s Shadow offers an abstract response to the iconic elongated figures in the sculptures of Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti. Through the tensions between the natural and the manmade, the light and the heavy, the soft and the hard, it reveals Noguchi’s unique artistic vision that bridges East and West.
The exhibitions will be on view from October 2025 through March 2026.
