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.

When the digital tide intermingles with the warmth of the handmade, and when Eastern civilization redefines its own coordinates in global dialogue, young creators have long since transcended the boundaries of function and object, regarding design as the flow of aesthetic will and the extension of life's ideals. Rooted in a century of Sino-foreign mutual learning, they delve deep into the soil of geo-cultural identity, echoing the China Academy of Art's Eastern design philosophy of "pluralistic interaction and harmony without uniformity." Carrying forward the wisdom of their forebears, they reshape a Eastern foundation for contemporary design—one that nurtures both body and soul.

HEY YO HEY

Zhao Chonghao, Li Yuhan, Hong Zheyu

College: School of Visual Communication

Instructors: Wang Zhilei, Cai Wenchao, Qiu Haiping

Category: Social Innovation Design (780cm x 150cmx 250cm)

A "hao" is a loud shout.How does language emerge and become organized in labour? And if sound cannot be reproduced, how can it be read and understood? The work HEY YO HEY takes the work chants of boatmen on the Tongzhou Canal as its subject, deconstructing the chants to explore the artistry of phonetics, syllables and rhythm, and innovating in the form of sound. If documentation is the basic approach to understanding work chants, HEY YO HEY aims to create an "unconventional" entry point, allowing audiences to enter through the sonority of the chants and experience their beauty and power through embodied perception.

Mentor's Messages

HEY YO HEY represents a kind of design that does not create explanatory models or truths, but rather distils a visual form and a style from intangible cultural heritage. It transforms viewing into "gaze," and turns reading and interpretation into "identification."

— Wang Zhilei

The team took the canal work chants as their research vehicle, employing semiotic analysis for translation and, based on the internal order of the chants' sound patterns, reconstructed an editorial system and visual framework. Looking back on the entire creative process, the team conducted in-depth fieldwork and oral interviews in the early stages, accumulating abundant raw material. During the creation phase, they continuously dissected the semiotic logic and repeatedly refined and adjusted the form and content of the editorial system. The final work, through dynamic visuals and sound media, vividly integrates ten canal chants, fully restoring the waterborne workflow from casting off to sailing. At the same time, they built an editable design logic based on the chant texts, constructing a clear and systematic creative model, truly establishing "editable design" as the operational mechanism and practical paradigm that drives the agency of the subject creator.

— Cai Wenchao

This is a project on the preservation and translation of local intangible cultural heritage. Grounded in the real predicament of transmitting and disseminating the canal chants as intangible heritage, the work attempts to break through the limitations of media, studying the semantics, structure and logic behind musical scores, and constructing a multi‑sensory system with visual entry points. The audio‑visual integration is highly charged and offers an innovative path for the revitalization and translation of intangible cultural heritage.

— Qiu Haiping

Zhao Chonghao

Born in 2003, from Zhejiang, graduate of the School of Visual Communication, China Academy of Art, Class of 2026.

Li Yuhan

Born in 2004, from Zhejiang, graduate of the School of Visual Communication, China Academy of Art, Class of 2026.

Hong Zheyu

Born in 2004, from Zhejiang, graduate of the School of Visual Communication, China Academy of Art, Class of 2026.