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.
A Hundred-Year Plan is Happiness
Li Jianjiang
School: School of Art Management and Education
Supervisor: Zeng Xiaoyu
Type of work: Video / Documentation / Installation
China's industrialization has progressed in tandem with urban and rural transformation, and industrial shifts have continuously reshaped the living conditions of local communities. The work-A Hundred-Year Plan is Happiness is grounded in the Boluo Ceramics Factory in my hometown in northern Shaanxi. Combining fieldwork with personal experience, the project explores the relationship between the disappearance of the factory system and the rural community. Initiated in 2023 with long-term on-site research, it adopts a perspective of public aesthetic education and employs multi-media creation to document the micro-aspects of rural industrialization.
The interweaving of documentation and creation in the exhibition space is evidence of my attempt to intervene in this fragment of micro-history. This history is trivial, yet it serves as the thread of my childhood. The surviving objects crystallize the spirit of every factory worker from the past. They have traveled through time to come here, together with us, in anticipation of happiness.
Supervisor’s Message:
This student's work demonstrates a concern for reality and a sense of self-retrospection. The object of this concern and retrospection-a ceramics factory where he spent his childhood-is metaphorically portrayed as an aging, fading figure, gradually disappearing from the historical stage amid urban transformation and becoming a ruin. The author's creation is not merely nostalgic or self-commemorative; rather, through the re-combination of various media such as documentary, oral history, photography, archival documents, and found objects, it soberly reconstructs the "home" in collective memory.
Li Jianjiang
Born in 2004 in Yulin, northern Shaanxi. Graduated from the Public Art Education program in the Department of Fine Arts Education at the China Academy of Art with a bachelor's degree. Founder of the EEBA art group.
