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.
World Oracles
Zhang Li
College/School: School of Intermedia Art
Supervisor: Gao Shiqiang
Medium: Three-channel Video
Prophecy is the imaginative speculation and future projection that humanity generates in the face of the world's uncertainties. Across different spatiotemporal contexts, humans rely on perceptible information and data to make calculations and judgments about the direction of the world—this is humanity's enduring spiritual practice of exploring the unknown and attempting to deconstruct the future.
From Li Chunfeng and Liu Bowen in the East, to Sophocles, Nostradamus, and Baba Vanga in the West; from Jules Verne and John Titor, who constructed visions of the future through imagination, to Yuval Noah Harari and Kokotajlo, who base their judgments on the patterns of human civilization—thinkers across ages and cultures have interpreted and predicted the future of the human world based on the cognitive frameworks and information samples available to them. Entering the age of AI, the dimensions of data collection have been infinitely expanded, while the complexity and precision of computation and processing have undergone disruptive leaps. Human understanding of the world is no longer confined to individual experience and limited samples. With the intervention of artificial intelligence, we are able to penetrate the boundaries of traditional cognition, approaching ever closer to the fundamental logic underlying the world's operations—making the once-obscure future increasingly analyzable, deducible, and predictable.
Thus, world prophecy has never been mere conjecture; it is the inevitable outcome of accumulated civilizational data and the extrapolation of patterns across eras. Within the new context of human-machine symbiosis, this work re-examines humanity's innate instinct and capacity for predicting the future, explores the reshaping of future cognition by AI technology, contemplates the symbiotic relationship between technology, civilization, and the unknown future, and seeks new ways for humanity to perceive the world and define the future in a new era.
Supervisor's Message
Zhang Li has dedicated himself to new media image creation, using data and video as vehicles to document cultural memory. With a solid theoretical foundation, a distinctive creative perspective, and the patience to engage in long-term research, he holds great promise for the future.
— Gao Shiqiang
Zhang Li
New Media Video Artist, Director
Ph.D., School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art
His work employs moving images to examine interpersonal relationships and the construction of modern identity. His creative practice unfolds across multiple dimensions—local history, landscape geography, and folk art and crafts. Recently, his focus has turned to the role of new media archives and database aesthetics in constructing cultural memory, aiming to cultivate a comprehensive aesthetic experience.
