Architecture’s Inscriptions

Architecture’s Inscriptions will open this July at TANK Shanghai, running from July 9 to October 7, 2026. This exhibition 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.

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.

Participating 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

Participating 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