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.
The School of Architecture at the China Academy of Art pursues the academic direction of "reconstructing a contemporary indigenous Chinese architecture," committed to integrating traditional craftsmanship, humanistic reflection, and contemporary art into a cohesive whole, and reviving a holistic approach to local building practices that harmoniously connects nature, city, architecture, garden, and artifact. Led by Professor Wang Shu, the architectural team, with a broad international vision and rooted in traditional Chinese architectural arts, insists on the return of manual craftsmanship. Centered on a hands-on construction experiment curriculum, the school strives to bridge the gap between traditional and modern architectural language and building craftsmanship. With the philosophical depth of the "linguistic turn," it aims to establish an architectural discipline system with distinctive Chinese indigenous characteristics.
Recurrence and Switch: Hangzhou Ceramics Renewal
Wu Zhijing
College:
School of Architecture
Supervisor:
Huang Mingjian
Genre:
Architectural Design
The focus falls on the space between the West Lake hills and the Qiantang River—here, space unfolds between mountain and water, and vistas shift with the viewer's gaze, embodying a visual rhythm of recurrence amidst dynamic transformation. Time, too, flows through the cadence of farming, trade, and daily life, undergoing invisible yet profound changes within cycles that appear the same. The city moves forward precisely in the interplay between long-term recurrence and instantaneous switching.
The Hangzhou Ceramics Market is embedded within the rich urban fabric of Nanxing Street. Confronted with its massive, enclosed volume, the design shifts from reshaping the building's overall form to focusing on the creation of "fragments," transforming the street-facing blocks into a switching hub for multiple scenarios within the site, reimagining them as a ceramic community enveloped by public space. "Recurrence" preserves the site's order and memory, while "switching" activates spatial vitality, returning the passive, enclosed market space to everyday life and transforming it into a continuously generative structure embedded within temporal, environmental, and social processes.
Supervisor's Remarks
Wu Zhijing demonstrated proactive engagement throughout the graduation design process, with strong research capabilities and design thinking. Her work, centered on the theme of "Recurrence and Switch," addresses issues of spatial functional transformation and place vitality renewal in the context of urban regeneration. Through in-depth field investigation and analysis, she sorted out the site's developmental trajectory and spatial characteristics, formulating a relatively comprehensive design strategy. Throughout the design process, she continuously refined the scheme, actively incorporated feedback, and improved the final outcomes, reflecting strong learning ability and professional competence. The final work achieves a high degree of completion with clear design logic, demonstrating both practical relevance and innovation. Her defense performance was excellent, accurately articulating her design concepts and effectively responding to questions.
Wu Zhijing
Born in November 2003, raised in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province. Graduated with a Bachelor's degree from the Department of Environmental Art, School of Architecture, China Academy of Art. Her studies and research focus on the organic renewal of existing architecture in both urban and rural contexts, as well as the artistic regeneration of place. During her undergraduate studies, she received the National Scholarship and was honored as an Outstanding Graduate of Zhejiang Province. Her design works have received awards including the Gold Prize at the 2025 Academy Cup·China Interior and Environmental Design Competition, and her graduation project was awarded the Gold Prize of the 2026 Graduation Creation and Lin Fengmian Creation Award.
