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.
Self-Becoming as Form
Xiao Zihan
College: School of Fashion Design
Instructors: Li Xinyuan, Song Yanlian
Category: Textile Flower Vessels
Dimensions: 60cm×50cm, 80cm×50cm, 100cm×50cm, 110cm×60cm
"The creator has no master, yet things each create themselves."
Guo Xiang's philosophy offers a unique perspective on the individual. He emphasises the self-generating and self-transforming power of all things, viewing their interrelations as a collaborative network of mutual conditioning. Each being exists according to its own nature, harmoniously resonating with others without seeking anything external.
Viewing the imagery of plants and trees in traditional Chinese culture through the aesthetic lens of Guo Xiang's thought, I perceive the self-contained, independent growth and endogenous order of each blade of grass and every tree. I see the daily, unhurried renewal and sedimentation of nature. The beauty of plants lies in themselves alone -never in the context of rites and music, nor in analogies to moral virtue. They do not write biographies for anyone; they simply exist for their own sake.
This series of textile flower vessels reinterprets the forms of bamboo, willow, lotus leaves, palm, and flea bane. Employing traditional techniques such as weaving, split-weaving, braiding, and dragon-whisker tassels with vajra knots, combined with distinctive yarn manipulation and a palette that is both steady and vibrant, it presents the varied images of plants. In its rhythmic vitality, the weight of tradition coexists with the vigour of individuality. The work articulates a contemporary aesthetic of living-one that is not compelled by external forces but is self-sufficient within-and creates a philosophical corner for nurturing body and mind in everyday life.
Mentor's Message
This work responds to the philosophical core of Guo Xiang's "things each create themselves" through the materiality of textiles, giving it concrete expression. The crispness of bamboo joints and the droop of willow branches, for example, are distilled-through differences in weave density and yarn-manipulated textures—into woven forms independent of natural imitation, achieving a creative transformation from botanical morphology to the language of dyeing and weaving, and resonating deeply with Eastern philosophy and contemporary aesthetics. Notably, traditional intangible-heritage techniques such as split-weaving and dragon-whisker tassels are not merely decorative; they are internalized as structural translations and artistic expressions that are self-generating and self-consistent for each plant image. The palette, at once steady and lively, further reinforces the fashion sensibility of the work. On the carrier of flower vessels-which bridge the everyday and the artistic-it constructs a self-sufficient philosophical reflection, maintaining a high degree of integrity and contemporaneity from concept to finished object. This is a graduation piece of exemplary significance in the contemporary translation of traditional dyeing and weaving craftsmanship.
— Mentor Group
Xiao Zihan
Graduate of the Textile Design major, School of Fashion Design, China Academy of Art. During her undergraduate studies, she received the Provincial Government Scholarship for the 2024-2025 and 2023-2024 academic years. Her graduation project was awarded the Gold Prize of the China Academy of Art Graduation Creation Award (Lin Fengmian Creation Award).
