The Big Dipper Formation: Fu Xiaodong’s Cosmos

The Chu-Griffis Asian Art Collection at Connecticut College presents The Big Dipper Formation: Fu Xiaodong’s Cosmos, a new exhibition in the Charles Chu Asian Art Reading Room at Charles E. Shain Library. On view from October 28, 2026, through February 1, 2027, the exhibition marks the first solo presentation in North America of the work of Fu Xiaodong, a prominent contemporary Chinese artist and curator.

Taking the classical Chinese cosmological framework of the “Three Powers”—Heaven, Earth, and Humanity—as its spatial grammar, and the Big Dipper as its pivotal axis, the exhibition brings together Fu’s major ink works from 2020 to 2026 and organizes them into an epistemological inquiry: How do we diagram the cosmos?

From 2012 to 2020, Fu initiated and directed The Eighth Day: Artists Visit Scientists’ Laboratories, an interdisciplinary project that brought artists into observatories, geological research institutes, and biological laboratories, exploring how the visual languages of contemporary science might be translated into painting and image-based installation. This sustained eight-year fieldwork became an important experiential foundation for the ink works presented in the current exhibition.

The Big Dipper Formation proposes a spatial model of relational thinking. Visitors entering the exhibition are not simply looking at a series of individual works; they are invited to experience an interconnected field, a total score of relationships. Each work functions not as an isolated “art object,” but as a component within a larger formation: seven stars, seven orientations, seven modes of knowing.

Fu renders this relationality as a spatial, physical, and embodied experience. In her ink works, traditional Chinese shanshui, or landscape, may become an internal map of the body; astronomy may lead toward experiences of gender; and scientific imagery may reflect and illuminate ancient cosmologies. Fu is neither simply importing an Eastern tradition into contemporary art nor repackaging Chinese tradition through the frameworks of Western contemporary art or feminism. Instead, she allows different systems of knowledge to encounter and question one another, generating new meanings precisely where they cannot be completely translated into one another.

The Big Dipper Formation is therefore not an exhibition about a fixed or definitive “Chinese cosmology.” It is an experiment still in progress. It invites viewers to enter into a dialogue with the artist: Are we depicting the cosmos, or projecting order onto it? Is the cosmos out there for us to measure? Or is it here, with its scales already inscribed upon our own bodies? Which proposition is more “real”? Perhaps “reality” is the diagram itself?

The exhibition is curated by Yibing Huang, Curator of the Chu-Griffis Asian Art Collection and Professor of Chinese at Connecticut College.

Press enquiries
Yi Sun, The Broadgate & Partners, yi.sun@thebroadgate.com.