As 2025 approaches its most vibrant and life-affirming season, the China Academy of Art (CAA) has already been radiating boundless vitality over the past months, igniting the city with one artistic celebration after another. While Black Myth: Wukong Art Exhibition continues to forge its brilliance, CAA now unveils another landmark cultural spectacle for Hangzhou—Metamorphoses: 2025 CAA Graduation Season—a blazing dialogue between art and life, unfolding in the most unrestrained days of summer.

This year's graduation season revolves around the theme "Metamorphoses". The concept is rooted in the traditional Chinese notion of the seventy-two pentads, a temporal framework that reflects a uniquely Chinese worldview and cosmology. It encapsulates our deep-seated understanding of natural rhythms and social order and offers a methodology for navigating both life and creation. In this philosophy, pentad is change, and change is the Dao; through endless metamorphoses, the primordial core persists. "Metamorphoses" thus stand for infinite possibilities, for capacity, for vision, and above all, for spirit. It is through change that CAA students confront the world and life itself; through change, they continually define and refine themselves; through change as a way of being, they cultivate critical insight and creative power.

Metamorphoses: 2025 CAA Graduation Season was officially launched on May 31. This year's edition spans seven major venues across Hangzhou: the Xiangshan, Liangzhu, and Nanshan campuses of CAA; Zhejiang Art Museum; World Tourism Museum; Quan Shanshi Art Center; and a citywide media exhibition zone. A total of 2,971 graduates from 20 academic units, including 1,815 undergraduates, 1,006 postgraduates, and 150 students from the affiliated secondary school, present over 3,000 graduation works for the city. On opening night, the graduation season commenced in brilliant fashion. A themed performance intertwined with a fashion runway show unfolded beneath the rain, transforming the evening into a flowing, poetic spectacle.

President Yu Xuhong of CAA stated, "The 2025 Graduation Exhibition is a concentrated manifestation of CAA's disciplinary development and talent cultivation. It is a grand stage where 2,971 creative young individuals present themselves for society's review, and more importantly, a shared public arena of aesthetic education where the power of creation is collectively felt and understood. CAA students' remarkable works reflect not only a keen insight into the present era but also the profound expression of personal reflection; they demonstrate both a rootedness in local culture and an expansive global vision. At the far end of time, they seek the extension of space; in the entanglement of space, they sense the weight of time. I hope our students will, with the spirit of creators, cultivate the core of life and embark on their artistic journey; and with the actions of creators, drive social innovation and stir the tides of the times. Let us together create the art of our era, write a new chapter in global art history, and shape the new landscape of world art."

Liu Yihong, Artistic Director of the opening ceremony and Vice Dean of the School of Visual Communication noted that this year's stage design breaks away from conventional audience-facing formats. Instead, it unfolds in a four-sided immersive arena, resonating with the thematic spirit of Metamorphoses—a single stroke opens the cosmos, giving rise to infinite transformations. The opening ceremony presents an energetic convergence, a high-frequency field of creative communion. In the days that follow, this space evolves into a total theatre of creation, warmth, and memory. Projected onto this glowing structure are students' thesis defenses, their creative processes, and lived moments at CAA, flickering, reappearing, and ultimately etched into this luminous installation.

A thousand faces, and yet each one is the self; forms may shift, but the heart endures. Professors Chen Peng, Wang Shuying, Wu Jie, and Hu Nan from the School of Fashion Design led a collective presentation of 158 graduate fashion collections. Drawing inspiration from the concept of Metamorphoses, the graduates explored the fragmentation and reconstruction of identity, achieving a deep fusion of spiritual expression through diverse modes of creative transformation. Some works present hybrid narratives powered by digital technologies, blending the virtual and the real; others offer contemporary reinterpretations of traditional craftsmanship. Every experiment in material, every nuance in tailoring, becomes an artistic meditation on transformation and constancy. It is a visual and tactile response to what changes, and what does not. When the fantastical imagination of Metamorphoses meets the rational inquiry of multiplicity with intention, the cultural DNA of ancient mythology undergoes a new metamorphosis in contemporary design, imbuing fashion with a trans-temporal vitality that traverses both form and time.

In 2009, CAA became the first art academy to present its students' graduation works from all disciplines to the public, in the form of the brand-new "Graduation Exhibition Week". The feast also aims to recommend outstanding talents to society. The CAA Graduation Exhibition 2019, the world's largest one, reached beyond the walls of the Academy to the entire city, gathering greater strengths. On one hand, it showcased CAA as an "Unwalled Academy" that integrates internal and external resources; on the other hand, it shared the Academy's educational achievements with society, to promote the common growth of young artists in line with the times. It has become the most influential Graduation Season in China. The CAA Graduation Season has been continually evolving and iterating, resonating with the times and society. Our vision is clear: to help shape Hangzhou into an "Unwalled Academy", a city infused with the spirit of innovation, the energy of youth, and the temperament of the future.

In the face of the boundless cosmos and the ever-shifting global landscape, let us, with the spirit of creators, forge the inner core of our lives and unfold our artistic journeys. Let us, through the actions of creators, drive social innovation and ride the tides of our time. The future of art will surely flourish in the interplay of divergence and convergence, giving rise to infinite possibilities.

    The exhibition will run through June 20.