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.

Panta Rhei

Liu Mengqi

College/School: 

School of Intermedia Art

Supervisors: 

Wu Qiong, Tang Xiaolin

Medium: 

Multi-screen Video, Installation

Between the damp earth, a giant frog that defies biological classification wanders between the South and the North. Like a drifter in the city, it traverses unfamiliar rivers, rain, and crowds, briefly encountering different individuals.

This work takes the fictional creature "Giant Frog" from the novel Tide Chart as its core image, intertwined with my personal experience. Through shifting urban landscapes, the flow of diverse populations, and the bodily metaphor of amphibiousness, I attempt to respond to the rootlessness and uncertainty faced by individuals in modern society. Within ever-changing geographical and emotional spaces, we inhabit a temporary dwelling. And the individual, like a single drop of water in a river, grows and dissipates through encounters with the world...

Supervisor's Message

Liu Mengqi's work Panta Rhei takes the fictional novel Tide Chart as its guiding thread, unfolding through a three-channel video an exploration of rootlessness and uncertainty in modern life. The work integrates the transformation of urban landscapes, the flow of crowds, and the bodily metaphor of amphibiousness into a cohesive whole. The visual language is rich in poetic and philosophical resonance, demonstrating the artist's profound literary sensibility and sophisticated capacity for spatiotemporal narration.

— Wu Qiong

Liu Mengqi

Born in Beijing. She is currently pursuing her bachelor's degree in the Department of Experimental Art, School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art.

As an artist, her practice spans experimental film, installation, and photography. Her work often focuses on the conditions of individual and collective existence in modern society, as well as broader human circumstances—concerns that are interwoven with personal memory and historical narrative. Her work also engages with the age of artificial intelligence and the emergence of post-human society, employing a visual language and narrative approach inclined toward poetic cinema to reflect upon and explore pervasive issues in contemporary life.