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 practice, 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.
Faced with an ever-evolving technological landscape and shifting social realities, young creators are breaking through established boundaries with an open perspective, actively exploring across media, concepts, and methods. Bringing together interdisciplinary practices, technological experimentation, and conceptual innovation, they engage with the complex issues of today's world through a reexamination of artistic language and creative mechanisms. Through continuous experimentation and relentless growth, they demonstrate a new generation of artists' bold exploration of uncharted territories and their untapped creative potential.
One, No One and One Hundred Thousand
Huang Yingyi
College/School:
School of Intermedia Art
Supervisors:
Mou Sen, Ma Yuanchi, Xin Ge
Medium:
Installation/Scene Installation
In 1926, Italian writer Luigi Pirandello published his final novel, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila).
This work combines the novel One, No One and One Hundred Thousand with the play Six Characters in Search of an Author to construct its narrative, presented in the form of a theatrical installation. The starting point of the script is a small remark: "Your nose is crooked to the right." From this line, the protagonist begins to realize that he is one person in his own eyes, another person in the eyes of each other—adding up to one hundred thousand people—yet none of them is the self he knows. Three doors represent the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story, with the sound of the text echoing through the corridor backstage of the theater. Behind the three doors, the playwright peeps through the peephole; between the recurring scenes and the suspended ladders, audience and character become one. When the audience stands before the doors, experiencing the characters and the plot through the three senses of sight, hearing, and smell, one hundred thousand actors are born. Every visitor who enters this theater can create a drama that belongs exclusively to their own memory.
Supervisor's Message
Huang Yingyi's One, No One and One Hundred Thousand takes Pirandello's novel and play as its point of departure, transforming the question of "how the self is seen and defined by others" into a theater backstage corridor. Through three doors, a peephole, sound, ladders, and recurring scenes, the work allows the audience to enter the process of the protagonist's mental disintegration through voyeuristic observation. The artist does not simply reproduce the literary narrative; rather, she translates identity fragmentation, the gaze of the other, and the generation of roles into spatial, bodily experience.
Huang Yingyi
Born in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, in June 2004. She is currently pursuing her bachelor's degree in the Department of Media and Exhibition, School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art. Her practice encompasses theater, film/video, documentary, and model installation.
