Exhibition program 2025

Aranya Art Center is pleased to announce its 2025 exhibition program: the group exhibition Modeling the World and a solo exhibition of Chinese artist Payne Zhu will open in the spring, while the group exhibition Lady Meng Jiang, organized by guest curator Yuan Fuca and Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, and the first solo museum exhibition in China by South Korean visual research band ikkibawiKrrr will follow in the fall, and stay on view through early 2026.

Aranya Art Center North will present four exhibitions from May to November 2025, featuring the first museum solo exhibitions in China of German artist David Ostrowski, Algerian artist Massinissa Selmani, and Australian Waanyi artist Judy Watson, as well as a solo exhibition by Chinese artist Vivien Zhang. In the winter, the Aranya Winter Residency Exhibition Series will return with its second edition.

Aranya Art Center
March 15–September 7, 2025

Gallery 1-5—Modeling the World 
The group exhibition Modeling the World presents four parallel projects from Carlos Bunga, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Isa Melsheimer, and Zheng Guogu, inspired by and constructed from architecture and models. Here, models become metaphors for a range of concepts, social phenomena, emotions, memories, and imaginations. From spiritual architecture to public space, Aranya has long used architecture to shape its unique social life, culture, and aesthetic, which is itself a starting point for this exhibition. For this reason, this exhibition also presents models and design drawings from representative works of architecture in the Aranya community. 

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

Gallery 0—Payne Zhu
In addition to continuing his recent exploration of the concept of “derivation” in the financial field, artist Payne Zhu conducts research on the city of Qinhuangdao and its surrounding seas, presenting and creating a series of new video, sculpture, and installation works from the perspective of observing the ocean in its depth.

This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, and Associate Curator Wu Yiyang.

Aranya Art Center
September 20, 2025–March 1, 2026

Gallery 1-5—Lady Meng Jiang
Since the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770-221 B.C.), the legend of “Lady Meng Jiang,” a local tale in the Qinhuangdao region has continuously evolved. From the states of Qi and Lu in present-day Shandong to the Central Plains, and from the Chu region in modern Hubei to the lower Yangtze, the story’s key motifs have migrated and adapted across territories, fostering a rich heritage of theater, literature, and folk traditions. This exhibition takes this enduring tale as an imaginative space to uncover its multilayered geographic, cultural, and emotional symbolism. It also examines the profound potential of storytelling—a universal and deeply rooted folk tradition—for emotional healing and social empowerment. Through a series of commissioned artworks, the exhibition situates the legend within a transregional feminist framework, liberating “Lady Meng Jiang” from her specific historical context. By reimagining the narrative as an open-ended, imaginative motif, it seeks to inspire broader contemporary dialogues.

This exhibition is organized by guest curator Yuan Fuca and Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, together with Associate Curator Wu Yiyang.

Gallery 0—ikkibawiKrrr
ikkibawiKrrr’s name combines the Korean words for “moss”(ikki) and “rock” (bawi) with the onomatopoeic word “krrr.” Their artistic approach reflects aspects of moss as something that expands its world with its surrounding environment along the narrow boundary between land and air.

This exhibition is organized by Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, and Assistant Curator Jiang Ruoyu.

Aranya Art Center North
May 26–November 23, 2025

Gallery 1—David Ostrowski: Let me put it this way
Known for his reduced canvases, David Ostrowski has produced a body of work that relentlessly questions the medium of painting and its constitutive elements – deliberately breaking with painterly codes and traditions.

Gallery 2—Vivien Zhang
Vivien Zhang’s paintings ask us to question the flawed linguistic, visual and taxonomic systems that we use to understand all facets of life. She examines our consumption of images and information in a technologically mediated world. Zhang assembles motifs collected from personal experiences and intensive research into abstract fields within her paintings.

Gallery 3—Massinissa Selmani
By its simplicity as a tool, Massinissa Selmani makes drawing a central medium of his practice. His work, in which the gravity of the subjects is carried by humor, the absurd, and simplicity of means, often presents drawings that depict strange or absurd situations made of improbable assemblages tinged with a certain gravity, short animations, and installations.

Gallery 4—Judy Watson
Born in Mundubbera, Queensland in 1959, Judy Watson is a Waanyi descendant of north-west Queensland. Her ancestry and personal experiences have greatly influenced her artistic practice, which spans a variety of media including painting, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation.

These exhibitions are organized by Assistant Curator Gao Liangjiao and Associate Curator Wu Yiyang at the Aranya Art Center.

Aranya Art Center North
December 6, 2025–May 3, 2026

Aranya Winter Residency Exhibition Series
Aranya Art Center North will continue to focus on community engagement and the transformation of community activities, presenting the second edition of the Aranya Winter Residency Exhibition Series in 2025.

This exhibition is organized by Jiang Ruoyu, Assistant Curator at the Aranya Art Center and Coordinator (Contemporary Art) of the Aranya Winter Residency Program.