2026.7.9–10.7

TANK Shanghai, 2380 Longteng Avenue

Architects (alphabetical by last name): Bu Bing, Yung Ho Chang, Chen Yifeng, Guo Liaohui, Huang Wenjing, Li Hu, Liu Jiakun, Liu Yichun, Lu Lijia, Shui Yanfei, Xu Tiantian, Zhang Ke, Zhu Xiaofeng, Zhuang Shen/ARCHMIXING

Artists (alphabetical by last name): Ding Yi, Liu Dan, Liu Ren, Su Chang, Xu Bing, Yang Yongliang, Zhan Wang, Zhang Ruyi

Curators: K Michael Hays, Sun Shi Ning

Exhibition Designer: Yung Ho Chang / FCJZ

Academic Support: Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Faculty of Architecture, University of Hong Kong; College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University; School of Architecture, Southeast University

Architecture Consultants: Li Xiangning, Gao Changjun, Wang Junyang

Art Consultants: Fan Jingzhong, Lu Fengchuan, Sun Tian, Wu Yishen

Architecture’s Inscriptions brings together works by contemporary architects and artists alongside ancient Chinese manuscripts, rubbings, scholar’s rocks and paintings, exploring various forms of synthetic poetics grounded in inscription.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Since the 1990s, Professor K Michael Hays at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design has pursued in-depth research on architecture’s inscriptions as a sustained theoretical project. At the invitation of Tongji University, his years of teaching and research on the relationship between architecture, poststructuralist thought, and the writing of history led to multiple colloquia focusing on the current conditions of design practice, especially in China, and recent developments in theory that hope to map those practices into diagrams of thought for possible futures. This work was further developed at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where the joint research and seminar led by Professor Hays and Dr. Sun, in collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums, allowed students to engage with various historical objects and material agencies that produce wide-ranging conditions of inscription. These ranged from ancient Chinese manuscripts, paintings, handscrolls, ink rubbings, and scholar’s rocks to contemporary artworks by Chinese artists, including Liu Dan, Zhan Wang, and Xu Bing, as well as an in-class discussion on “digital shanshui” with Yang Yongliang.
This inquiry now finds expression at Shanghai’s West Bund, where the architecture of this riverside district provides a generative site for industrial building heritage and modern culture, analyzing the vectors of habitation already inscribed on the site, and expansively reinscribing possible supports for our future lives. All this led curators Hays and Sun to the proposition of a synthetic poetics that becomes conceivable when architecture no longer begins with idea, representation, and determination, but rather with situation, process, propensity, and reiteration.

The exhibition Architecture’s Inscriptions opens a space for the exploration of a contemporary synthetic poetics that not only organizes and propels the imbricated machinery of the different Chinese arts of inscription but also enables it to set into its structured field the discipline of architecture. A longstanding Chinese art tradition emphasizes the interconnectedness of calligraphy and painting, which share a common technê of presentation in their use of ink and brush and an association with the scholar’s rock, focus of the literatis’ meditation and inspiration for their art forms. But the use of language and graphic codes also presupposes a retention of preformed differences (letters already written, marks that subsist through time) and a spacing out of these—a play of traces. Producing epistemic things means engaging in the potentially endless production of traces, where any referent is but a reiteration, always already occupied by another inscription. Inscriptions thus move across genres as well as through time.

The Exhibition: Four Frames of Inscription

Allographics: The works in the “Allographics” category are closer to musical scores or ideograms than original pronouncements or mystical messages; algorithmic and infrastructural, they are neither personal nor monumental. An allographic work is one whose identity does not depend on the presence of a single author or original object but, like the ancient ink rubbings also on display, on acts of focused marking and remarking.

Singular Trace: Where allography traces variations of the same, the “Singular Trace” uses the operation of a single generative “primordial line” or yi hua, conceptualized by the philosopher-painter Shitao as the material support and expressive pulse of all his paintings. The letter and the line are core concepts in the theory of inscription, formalized trace-traits opening onto issues of material, place, and memory.

Parataxis: “Parataxis”—an operation found in much of the work in the exhibition—denotes the placement of intensely different formal objects in ways that evade the grammatical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax. François Jullien notes that the Chinese language (and thought itself) is “ideographic and has never known alphabetic composition. In its brush strokes, it alternates and correlates the ‘void’ and the ‘full,’ the ‘high’ and the ‘low,’ the ‘thick’ and the ‘thin’… Through parataxis… it favors ‘parallels.’ As ‘Heaven’ responds to ‘Earth,’ ‘mountain’ responds to ‘water.’”

Geoglyph: And finally, if the single brush stroke is the smallest of inscriptions, then the other end of the scale is the “Geoglyph,” the architectural marking of the earth, of which the architecture of Tank Shanghai on West Bund is itself an example.

Drawings and models of recent architectural projects interact with a variety of works by other contemporary artists, and all share gallery space with ancient manuscripts and scholar’s rocks. To experience architecture’s inscriptions is not just to ponder aesthetic objects in a narrow sense; it is not only to concur that any account of architecture is composed of technical readings, adjustments, ideologies, and affects. Rather, it is to see the world, the earth, the environment—unities that are presently witnessing as being changed utterly—as effects of complex systems of relations that are irreducibly multiple and deeply rooted in history.