In Qinhuangdao and Guangzhou
Aranya Art Center is pleased to announce its 2026 exhibition program.
In the spring of 2026, Aranya Art Center Guangzhou will lead the season with In Absence and in Presence: Works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, alongside the first solo exhibition in China by Lebanese artist Haig Aivazian. Meanwhile, Aranya Art Center in Qinhuangdao will, for the first time, bring historical collections into dialogue with contemporary art through the group exhibition After Fire. Concurrently, Swedish artists Nina Mangalanayagam and Marie Dilmaya Bergqvist will present their first exhibition in China, A Song from Across the Sea.
In the fall of 2026, Aranya Art Center Guangzhou will launch the group exhibition Towards the Land, which departs from the Pearl River Delta to engage in a global discourse on the complex interplay between land and humanity. At Aranya Art Center, a number of artists from the Aranya Winter Residency will unveil parallel new solo projects within the group exhibition To Ask by Touch. Additionally, the first museum solo exhibition of Chinese artist Liu Fujie will open to the public and stay on view through early 2027.
Aranya Art Center Guangzhou March 22–August 30, 2026
Gallery 1-3, the Pavilion—In Absence and in Presence: Works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection
Aranya Art Center Guangzhou is honored to present an exhibition of works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection, UAE. In Absence and in Presence features more than 70 works by 28 artists from West Asia, South Asia, the African continent, and its diaspora. Spanning art movements from the 1950s to the present, the exhibition follows some of the unique trajectories of artistic practice and experiments in these regions, expressed in painting, sculpture, photography, and video. While these regions’ history has often been challenged by loss and rupture, the works testify to the undeterred artistic reimagining that has continued to inspire its viewers and enable new outlooks into the future. The exhibition marks the largest presentation of the Collection in Asia to date.
The exhibition is organized by the Aranya Art Center Guangzhou, in collaboration with Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE.
The exhibition is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation, and Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, along with Assistant Curator May Alqaydi and Senior Researcher Souraya Kreidieh from Sharjah Art Foundation, as well as Curatorial Assistant Li Fangwen and Curatorial and Research Fellow Li Xinyang from the Aranya Art Center.
Gallery 4—Haig Aivazian
Aranya Art Center Guangzhou is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in China by Lebanese artist Haig Aivazian, featuring his video installation from his ongoing cartoon series You May Own the Lanterns, but We Have the Light (2022–2025). Aivazian’s practice grapples with the metamorphic nature of three technologies: artificial light, computation, and law. He examines ways in which the administration of light and darkness makes and unmakes persons and transforms material conditions of architecture and geography — how they are inhabited and moved through by humans, animals, objects, machines, and other strange creatures.
The third episode of the series, Children of Darkness (2025), is co-commissioned by Thailand Biennale, Phuket; Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Art (IKSV); and Aranya Art Center; with additional support by The French Academy in Rome, Villa Medicis and La Galerie, Centre d'Art Contemporain Noisy-le-Sec.
This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, and Assistant Curator Gao Liangjiao.
Aranya Art Center April 3–September 6, 2026
Gallery 1-5—Group exhibition: After Fire
Fire is one of the earliest natural forces that humanity learned to harness, yet it has never been fully tamed. The group exhibition After Fire takes nearly a hundred fire-making tools—spanning several centuries and originating from all over the world, collected by Mr. Tian Jiaqing—as a point of departure to initiate a dialogue with works by more than ten contemporary artists from diverse cultural backgrounds. By retracing the history of fire control, the exhibition explores the complex and often contradictory relationship between fire and human society. In an era that is being constantly “ignited,” After Fire invites viewers to reflect on the metaphors of fire and the pressing realities it presents today.
This exhibition is organized by Assistant Curator Jiang Ruoyu and Associate Curator Wu Yiyang at the Aranya Art Center.
Gallery 0—A Song from Across the Sea
Aranya Art Center is pleased to present the first exhibition in China by Swedish artists Nina Mangalanayagam and Marie Dilmaya Bergqvist. United by their own diasporic backgrounds and a shared focus on displacement, the artists present an audio-visual work featuring a transnational choir of Swedish adoptees, The Whale. Through the collective humming of an 18th-century score from Sweden’s colonial history in Saint Barthélemy, the choir enacts a call-and-response of remembrance—exploring themes of belonging and the unseen wounds of adoption, while reflecting on colonial legacies through an intuitive conversation born of collective memory.
A Song from Across the Sea (2026) is co-commissioned by Colomboscope 2026 and Aranya Art Center, and supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet).
The exhibition is organized by Curatorial Assistant Li Fangwen at the Aranya Art Center.
Aranya Art Center Guangzhou September 19, 2026–February 28, 2027
Gallery 1-4—Group exhibition: Towards the Land
Situated at the confluence of China and the world, land and sea, tradition and modernity, the Pearl River Delta inherently embodies the most intricate land-human relations of a changing era. Here, the land is more than a resource, a boundary, or a vessel of history, but a site continuously being reconstructed, consumed, and re-inscribed. It stands as a symbol of guardianship, yet bears witness to departure. Using “landscape” as its trajectory, the exhibition departs from the Pearl River Delta to engage in a global discourse on the complex interplay between the land and human—a relationship that transcends mere aesthetic gazing. By unearthing the histories, labors, bodies, and emotions hidden beneath the scenic surface, the exhibition invites us to re-examine the ground beneath our feet and to seek a way of coexistence with the land.
The exhibition is organized by Curatorial and Research Fellow Cyril Kuizhen Rao and Curatorial Assistant Li Fangwen at the Aranya Art Center.
Aranya Art Center September 25, 2026–February 21, 2027
Gallery 1-5—Group exhibition: To Ask by Touch
The Aranya Winter Residency Program is approaching its fifth year and has welcomed more than forty groups of artists from China and around the world to work within the seaside and valley communities of Aranya. During the quieter winter season, artists’ relationships with their immediate surroundings become more pronounced. They tend to lean into embodied experience and sensorial response rather than conceptual or methodological approaches. Beyond supporting short-term research and production, the program has gradually evolved into a sustained engagement with individual artistic practices. Building on this foundation, Aranya Art Center invites a number of residency alumni to present a series of parallel solo projects, collectively forming the exhibition To Ask by Touch.
This exhibition is organized by Assistant Curators Jiang Ruoyu and Gao Liangjiao at the Aranya Art Center.
Gallery 0—Liu Fujie
Aranya Art Center is pleased to present the first museum solo exhibition by Chinese artist Liu Fujie. The artist works across multiple media, with this exhibition taking sculpture and installation as its primary threads. Through these works, she investigates the various possibilities that emerge from the blurred boundaries between matter, materiality, and sculptural language. She further explores installation as a form of scenography, examining how it rearticulates our layered perceptions of space and material through shifts between the everyday and the extraordinary.
This exhibition is organized by Assistant Curator Gao Liangjiao at the Aranya Art Center.
