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.
A Breath
Hong Yu,Zhang Wanling,Tian Siyu
School of Innovative Design
Supervisors: Lin Cun, Chen Weibo
Work Type: Interactive Installation (400x250x200 cm)
Work Statement
This work explores the aggregation, amplification, and dissipation of emotional public opinion in collective events. A wearable installation locks participants into intense physical postures, transforming personal physiological tensions into a socially audible force through guiding mechanisms. The work visualizes "discourse dissipation" as a real-time interface where voices generate bubbles that constantly emerge and burst, briefly occupying sight before vanishing—shifting the gaze from personal resistance to a panoramic perspective. Evoking Zhuangzi's imagery—"The mist and dust, the living beings, are blown about by the breath of each other"—the piece re-examines the contemporary information ecology through a Taoist lens: individual fervor ultimately dissolves into fragile vapors, inviting the audience to reflect on the ephemerality and vulnerability of public emotional transmission.
Supervisors' Message:
This wearable installation visualizes the rise and fall of sound as an interactive and observable experience—an exploration of how intelligent technology mediates human perception, behavior, and daily life, fostering a more intuitive human-machine relationship. The project is distinguished by its clear conceptual framework and strong alignment between idea and execution. By incorporating the Taoist notion of "wild horses and dust," it deepens the work's symbolic resonance. The group demonstrates a sharp problem focus, a coherent interactive logic, and meaningful potential for further inquiry in embodied interaction and intelligent sensing.
Hong Yu
Graduated from the Studio of Embodied Intelligence, School of Innovative Design, China Academy of Art. Their work engages with digital art, visual narrative, installation and spatial design, and the intersection of art and technology. They are dedicated to exploring the possibilities of integrating artificial intelligence into visual storytelling and emotional expression.
Tian Siyu
Graduated from the School of Innovative Design, China Academy of Art. Throughout her undergraduate years, she received the Zhejiang Provincial Government Scholarship three times in a row. Her research has been published at leading HCI venues, including DIS and SIGGRAPH ASIA. She has also presented her work at the Super Large Screen at Tianmuli in Hangzhou. Working across video, installation, and painting, she constructs spaces that are at once absurd and grotesque, marked by visual spectacle. Her artistic practice engages persistently with themes of rural migration, bioethics, and subcultures, drawing inspiration and narrative momentum from local lifeworlds, natural environments, and vernacular imagination.
Zhang Wanling
A graduate of the School of Innovative Design at the China Academy of Art, working across media in contemporary art practice.
