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.
OREAD Tea Mirror
Yun Han, Weng Kaijie
School: School of Industrial Design Partner
Company: Sunseeker
Supervisors: Wu Peiping, Wu Wenqi
OREAD Tea Mirror is a collaborative robotic system designed for tea plantations in unstructured environments. Breaking through the limitations of single-machine operation, it reshapes management efficiency through a “centralized scheduling + multi-machine coordination” architecture. Its “wheel-track composite” chassis and large-curvature body significantly enhance all-terrain mobility; combined with highly expandable modular cutting and picking assemblies, it achieves “one machine, multiple functions,”precisely covering the full-cycle maintenance needs of tea plantations across seasons. On the emotional experience level, the integration of local imagery-such as “straw hats” and “cloud patterns”-into the CMF (Color, Material, Finish) design effectively softens the industrial coldness of large agricultural machinery. The product not only delivers robust functional adaptability but also integrates cutting‑edge technology gently into the traditional rural context.
Supervisor’s Message:
The era of artificial intelligence brings new trans-formative opportunities for the traditional tea industry. OREAD Tea Mirror, grounded in the trends of smart agriculture, explores the innovation of traditional tea plantation work modes through multi‑machine coordination and intelligent scheduling-an exemplary design practice that empowers traditional industries within rural contexts. The work addresses industry pain points directly, using smart technology to solve problems of low efficiency and weak adaptability in traditional operations, demonstrating a profound understanding of industry needs and forward‑looking thinking. The design balances technological innovation with humanistic expression, blending the power of technology gently into the rural context and achieving a unity of functional value and emotional experience.The work is complete in its system and clear in its logic, reflecting solid professional foundations, good engineering thinking, and innovative capability. It offers positive reference value for the intelligent transformation of traditional agriculture. The proposed solution features feasible technical pathways and clear application scenarios, with promising prospects for implementation and continuous iteration. We hope to see further research, improved system performance, and the promotion of technological outcomes, contributing innovative strength to the high-quality development of the traditional tea industry.
Yun Han
Born in October 2003, from Changzhou, Jiangsu Province. Graduated from the China Academy of Art with a bachelor’s degree in Product Design. In this project, he was primarily responsible for research on the physical product and structural feasibility analysis, undertaking the main tasks of modeling, rendering, and product form design, while also assisting in the logical organization of the online system and the overall product chain.
Weng Kaijie
Born in 2003 in Quzhou, with ancestral home in Fuqing, Fujian Province. Graduated from the China Academy of Art with a bachelor’s degree in Product Design. In this project, he was primarily responsible for product research and overall process coordination, completing the online system setup and digital-intelligent design. He also collaboratively participated in product appearance optimization and structural feasibility analysis, contributing to the implementation of the physical products.
