Installation view of the exhibition Architecture’s Inscription, July 9, 2026 – October 7, 2026. Photograph by Runzi Zhu.
SHANGHAI, July 27, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Architecture's Inscriptions, a major scholarly exhibition curated by K Michael Hays and Sun Shi Ning, opened at TANK Shanghai on 8 July 2026. The opening was followed by an international symposium at the West Bund Museum on 9 July, where participating architects, artists, and scholars expanded upon the exhibition's central themes through a series of public conversations. The exhibition remains on view through 7 October 2026.
Bringing together works by leading contemporary Chinese architects and artists alongside ancient Chinese manuscripts, ink rubbings, scholar's rocks, paintings, and calligraphic works, Architecture's Inscriptions presents architecture as part of a broader tradition of inscriptions that unfolds across materials, media, and historical periods.
The opening ceremony was attended by the curators; exhibition designer Yung Ho Chang; participating architects such as Huang Wenjing, Li Hu, Liu Jiakun, Liu Yichun, Zhang Ke, Zhu Xiaofeng, and Zhuang Shen; participating artists such as Ding Yi, Xu Bing, and Zhan Wang; and several hundred guests from the fields of architecture, art, and culture.
Since the 1990s, Professor Hays has pursued architecture's inscriptions as a sustained theoretical project, developed through his colloquia at Tongji University and advanced through joint research and a seminar with Dr. Sun at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. By bringing architecture in conversation with ancient and contemporary art practices, Architecture’s Inscriptions proposes a different approach to engaging with design discourses – one that is not bound by singular ideas, representation, or determination, but is instead the result of iterative processes and situational propensities.
The exhibition unfolds through four thematic sections – Allography, Unary Trait, Parataxis, and Earth Marks – tracing inscription from graphic notations and Shitao's "singular brushstroke" (yi hua), to the juxtaposition of heterogeneous forms, and finally to architecture as an inscription upon the earth. The symposium at the West Bund Museum further brought together the exhibition's curators, participating architects and artists, and invited scholars for a day of discussions organized around the themes "The Letter, the Line," "Technics | Poetics," and "Earth Marks." Together, the exhibition and symposium examined inscription as a productive framework for architecture, art, and cultural history, extending the exhibition beyond the gallery into a broader interdisciplinary conversation.
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