The Grand Tour · 2026 China Academy of Art (CAA) Graduation Season has come to a successful close. Graduates from 20 academic units responded to the times with art and explored the future through creativity, unfolding a youthful narrative of ideals, journeys, and growth across the city and campus, transforming Hangzhou into an open art venue that gathers intellectual power, creativity, and action.
The China Academy of Art is proud to launch the "Youth Insights" series, which continues to focus on topics such as avant-garde experimentation, humanities and technology, rural academies, A better China, rooted construction, people-centered, poetic cinema, visual sinology, Eastern design, and overseas insights. The series closely follows how young creators measure the world with their footsteps and respond to the times with their works. Between every departure and arrival, we jointly witness the grand explorations and boundless possibilities of a new generation of artists.
Young filmmakers approach "poetic cinema" as a boundary-breaking attitude and claim. Rather than trying to fit film history into a single mold, they recognize a persistent core: even the faintest poetic impulse expands the medium's linguistic and perceptual boundaries. By embracing the dual tensions of this expansion, they allow seemingly contradictory forces to coexist organically. Informed by contemporary film philosophy and ongoing theoretical refinement, their work persistently channels creative energy into conceptual vitality and the development of an auteur cinema rooted in poetic aesthetics.
Workers, Haunt My Dream
Artist: Feng Zihan
College/School: School of Film
Supervisor: Xu Xiaoming
Medium: Feature Film (82 min)
Film Synopsis
Set within an aging, labyrinthine parking garage, the film weaves together reality, memory, and imagination to construct a multi-stranded, parallel structure that drifts between the real and the imagined. The film's concern lies not with events themselves, but with the fleeting connections between people in society—and those unutterable emotional echoes that persist nonetheless.
This is a multi-story parking garage. People drift through it as if in a game. Eroded by time, walled off by space. Unresolved dialogues are swallowed by the ambient noise of the structure. As night falls, unspoken emotions turn into echoes. The ghosts of history appear, layer upon layer, spinning and floating.
Advisor's Message
Zihan is an exceptionally distinctive student. His thinking about cinema is realized in practice with precisely the right measure. His works quietly reveal his reflections on life and his relationship with the world—and this natural expression forms his unique narrative sensibility and rhythmic command. I hope that after leaving school, he can preserve this quality and forge a new path and possibility for cinematic aesthetics!
— Xu Xiaoming
Feng Zihan
Graduated from the School of Film, China Academy of Art. His creative works include experimental films and feature narratives such as The Garden of Artifice (Yuanye), Collapse, Normal Valley (Changtaigu), and Workers, Haunt My Dream. His works have received the Silver Award of the China Academy of Art's Lin Fengmian Creation Award and the Best Director Award at the Film School Academy Awards.
