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.
Speculative Aesthetic Education Cooperative
Chen Fanyu, Jin Xiao, Chen Zhouwei
School: School of Art Management and Education
Supervisor: Chen Liang
Type of work: Installation (Dimensions: L 569 cm × W 571 cm × H 800 cm; video 48 min 41 sec)
Speculative Aesthetic Education Cooperative is a comprehensive work rooted in long‑term fieldwork, rural aesthetic education practice, and artistic creation. Taking Shangyang Village in Yiwu City as its site, the cooperative responds to issues of local culture, inter-generational relations, educational evaluation, and public life through courses, interviews, collection of old objects, handmade production, and spatial exhibition. Mountains and Moon in the Bosom uses Shangyang’s pearl lanterns as a thread, transforming traditional lantern-making into a participatory aesthetic medium; Staff Chasing discusses power, community, and symbolism through a flock of sheep chasing a dragon-headed staff; Medicine addresses intergenerational care through elderly medicine boxes and interviews; and Success?! reflects on educational evaluation and the notion of “success.” Together, these works enter real life through minute objects, bringing to light the culture, emotions, and issues often overlooked in daily life, and generate an aesthetic education methodology based on speculation, with local value, extensibility, and potential for dissemination.
Supervisor’s Message
The work takes Shangyang Village in Yiwu as its fieldwork site. Through two years of rural work, the students gradually established the Speculative Aesthetic Education Cooperative, organically integrating long‑term fieldwork, rural aesthetic education practice, and artistic creation to produce a multi‑dimensional body of work that combines concept and practice. The project covers not only calligraphy classes, school event planning, collective installations, found‑object sculptures, and creative work, but also in‑depth investigations into the health and family relationships of elderly left‑behind residents, demonstrating social concern that starts from the micro‑level of everyday life. Works such as Mountains and Moon in the Bosom, Staff Chasing, Medicine, and Success?! each engage with issues of traditional culture, symbolic power, inter-generational care, and educational evaluation, revealing cultural and emotional relationships that are often ignored. In terms of methodology, the work displays solid fieldwork and speculative abilities; in materials and form, it shows creativity and participatory potential. The overall practice possesses both academic depth, local relevance, and dissemination potential-an excellent and implementable case of aesthetic education practice.
Chen Fanyu
Born in September 2002, from Ningde, Fujian Province. Graduated from the Public Art Education program in the Department of Fine Arts Education, China Academy of Art, with a bachelor’s degree. In this project, she was primarily responsible for overall coordination and promotion, liaising with the Shangyang Village committee, local school teachers, and villagers, and coordinating various practical activities of the cooperative. She participated in fieldwork, curriculum design, event planning, artistic creation, and exhibition implementation, and was in charge of book design, panel design, physical artwork production, and related text writing.
Jin Xiao
Born in January 2004, from Taizhou, Zhejiang Province. Graduated from the Public Art Education program in the Department of Fine Arts Education, China Academy of Art, with a bachelor’s degree. In this project, he was primarily responsible for video documentation and visual presentation, including event photography, video editing, and material organisation. He assisted in fieldwork, course activities, and physical artwork production, providing technical support for project practice and exhibition presentation.
Chen Zhouwei
Born in June 2003, from Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province. Graduated from the Public Art Education program in the Department of Fine Arts Education, China Academy of Art, with a bachelor’s degree. In this project, he was primarily responsible for fieldwork and data compilation in the direction of inter-generational relations, including conducting villager interviews and related research. He mainly undertook the material collection, installation procurement, fabrication, and installation for the work Medicine, and assisted in advancing the project’s practical activities.
