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 educational philosophy of “taking the countryside as the academy” transforms a tradition of folk-song collecting that reaches back to the age of the Book of Songs into contemporary actions for perceiving society and rebuilding rural communities. It sets up workstations across cities, towns, villages, and hamlets, weaving art curricula into social projects, so that disciplinary knowledge, social observation, and the breath of daily life interpenetrate one another, allowing teachers and students to repeatedly reflect on art and the self through the pulse of the land. At the heart of this practice lies a profound inquiry into how art education can take root in China’s soil and truly engage with the lives of ordinary people-they regard the main battleground of the era and the front lines of “Beautiful China” as the grand arena for self-realization, enabling art education to grow into a purposeful discipline that is deeply infused with local life and closely connected to society.
Yanchuan Paper-Cut Culture Museum -A Proposal for a Permanent Museum in Yanchuan County
Jiang Huai Liying
School: School of Intermedia Art Supervisors: Lu Jie, Liu Tian
Type of work: Curatorial proposal (variable dimensions)
This is a proposal for a permanent museum in Yanchuan County, Yan’an City, Shaanxi Province. Drawing on research and fieldwork, the proposal anchors the experiential legacy of contemporary art in “paper-cutting,” an art form deeply interwoven with the lives of the people of Yanchuan. Yanchuan is one of the most representative counties for paper-cutting art and an indispensable reference point for understanding the spiritual structure of northern China’s agrarian civilization. For generations, the people of Yanchuan have used paper-cutting to record seasonal changes and farming schedules, to pray for childbirth and safety, and to decorate weddings, funerals, and dwellings. A single pair of scissors runs through the life experience “from birth to death, with both love and hate”: from cutting the umbilical cord at childbirth to cutting out “age paper” at funeral rites. What it carries are universal human themes concerning land, migration, emotion, inheritance, community, and artistic expression.In addition to the rich materials of Yanchuan paper-cutting itself, another core resource for this project is the archive of 15,006 paper-cutting items produced by the “Yanchuan Paper-Cutting General Survey” initiated between 2004 and 2009 by the contemporary art organization “Long March Project” in collaboration with the Yanchuan County government. The survey covered all 180,000 residents of the county and ultimately established the world’s largest county-level paper-cutting archive, including paper-cut samples, fieldwork photographs, and villagers’oral accounts. Using this archive as its thread, the museum proposal attempts to connect multiple issues—rural reconstruction, folk arts, education, cultural tourism, and local economy—across exhibition, research, and daily life, exploring the possibility of folk arts giving back to the countryside and continuing to grow in the contemporary era.The proposal adheres to the pragmatic principle of “no new building, revitalizing existing resources,”prioritizing the integration of Yanchuan’s existing public space resources to achieve maximum cultural and economic benefits with minimal construction investment. This logic aligns with the national policy directions of rural revitalization, living transmission of intangible cultural heritage, and integration of culture and tourism, while also responding to the practical needs of Yanchuan County’s cultural development. The museum will integrate permanent exhibitions, a research archive, workshops and residency programs, digital platforms, and collaborative production units to form a continuously operating comprehensive generator that supports the creation, education, and circulation of Yanchuan paper-cutting. The core of the museum lies in the construction of working methods—through systematic mobilization, archival building, visual presentation, and educational transformation-to form a sustainable curatorial mechanism, making Yanchuan a site where action can start anew.
Supervisor’s Message:
This graduating creator has thrown herself with great passion into social and historical fields: she rode a motorcycle 1,300 kilometers deep into Yanchuan and various parts of northern Shaanxi to conduct research on paper-cutting culture, visiting over 30 museums, villages, and cultural sites related to Shaanxi paper-cutting. Based on her thesis research on the “Yanchuan Paper-Cutting General Survey” and its archive of 15,006 items, she organized the scanning and archiving of 4,287 original survey forms. She also moderated the “Long March Project Archive Exhibition 1999–: 100-Day Dialogue · Yanchuan Paper-Cutting Workshop,” inviting key participants and researchers to discuss the foundation of folk arts in contemporary society and their future development…On this basis, she developed the proposal to establish the “Yanchuan Paper-Cut Culture Museum” as a permanent museum, submitted to the Yanchuan County government: integrating permanent exhibitions, research archives, workshops and residencies, digital platforms, and collaborative production units to form a continuously operating comprehensive generator supporting the creation, education, and circulation of Yanchuan paper-cutting. Furthermore, during fieldwork, she exchanged ideas with the Director and Deputy Director of the Yanchuan County Bureau of Culture, Tourism, and Sports, the Director of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Center, and the Director of the Cultural Center, among others, receiving positive feedback, and she will continue to push forward its implementation.The full exhibition proposal presents the complete trajectory of the above work, integrating historical context, fieldwork, archival close-reading, policy proposals, academic dialogues, curatorial outlines, and implementation plans. This curatorial plan not only grasps the paper-cutting culture intimately tied to the lives of local generations-with its life experience “from birth to death, both love and hate” (a pair of scissors from cutting the umbilical cord at birth to cutting out “age paper” at funerals)-but also strives to connect multiple themes including cultural tourism, cultural and creative industries, intangible heritage, folk arts, rural reconstruction, education, and local economic development. It explores the possibility of traditional culture feeding back into the countryside and continuing to grow in the present, fully demonstrating the author’s academic research ability, patience, perseverance, and action, as well as her determination and method of treating curatorial action as a long-term, sustained “social project.”
Jiang Huai Liying
Jiang Huai Liying is a curator and designer, born in Xi’an at the turn of the 21st century, and a motorcycle enthusiast. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees respectively from the Institute of Society and Strategy and the Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thought at the China Academy of Art. She has long been concerned with the role of contemporary art in educational systems, curatorial institutions, and the context of folk art exhibitions, and explores its modes of practice in public culture.Her curated and participated projects include the selected exhibition of the first Center Art Museum “ECP-Star Curator”program, the 21st Century Art/Education International Forum “Entr’acte: Curatorial Education?”, the public art project of the 4th Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, and the planning of the Jingdezhen Taoxichuan Art Museum cluster, among others. Her works and research have been exhibited or published at institutions and platforms such as West Bund Art Center (Shanghai), Zhejiang Exhibition Hall, China Science Fiction Convention, and ARTFORUM.
