Arena of Mist

2025.04.26 Saturday 14:00

Location

MACA Art Center

Speaker: Zishi Han

In the ongoing lecture series "Arena of Mist," Han explores the major themes of his artistic practice, which derive from the duality of 器(qì, vessel) and 气(qì, air), and how the sensory experience emerging from materials and forms produces complex spatial narratives beyond straightforward reading. Han brings together a selection of research fragments and exhibitions from the past five years, in which he observes and investigates various registers of relationships between visible structures and invisible forces through a practice centered on the affective potentials of exhibition-making. On this specific occasion, Han opens up the conversation with Yang Beichen on his most recent project, Echoes from the Gaps of Walls, which is currently on show at Guangdong Times Museum.

 

About the Speaker: Zishi Han

Zishi Han is the winner of the inaugural 2024 E.A.T.PRIZE Annual Artist Award. He currently lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. Han probes masochistic attachment to power structures through installation, sculpture, video and performance. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at saasfee*pavillon (2023) and MEWO Kunsthalle Memmingen (2021). Han's work has been featured in group exhibitions, screenings and performance programmes at Busan Biennale (2024), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (2024), and West Den Haag (2024), etc.

 

About E.A.T.PRIZE

The E.A.T.PRIZE, initiated by Guangdong Times Museum in collaboration with MACA and the Rockbund Art Museum, and supported by core funding from the MOORDN Institute, aims to foster emerging art through resources and exhibition opportunities. After six months of nominations, preliminary reviews, and peer evaluations in 2024, the E.A.T.PRIZE selected five finalists from a pool of 25 outstanding artists. Following careful deliberation by the final jury panel, Zishi Han was awarded the inaugural 2024 E.A.T.PRIZE Annual Artist Award. His solo exhibition, Zishi Han: Echoes from the Gaps in the Wall, was presented at Guangdong Times Museum in March 2025.

MACA Art Center is a non-profit contemporary art institution housed in a standalone building of minimalistic industrial style and futuristic design in Beijing's 798 Art District, a major hub for arts and culture in the city. Through forward-looking and experimental content, MACA aims to enable communication traversing disciplinary boundaries while forging international dialogues grounded in the specificities of a Chinese perspective. Our programmatic scope, which spans exhibitions, research initiatives, pan-performance practices, and alternative communal engagement, signals a commitment to exploring ideas outside established epistemic frameworks. MACA seeks to position itself as a new institutional mode, proposing an alternative coordinate within the topology of Chinese contemporary art. Through art, we address our radically transforming times.