2025.9.23⁠–11.02

Zhejiang Art Museum

No.138 Nanshan Road, Hangzhou, China

Curators: Jiang Jun, Huang Yan, Assadour Markarov, and Xu Jia

The 5th Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art, curated by renowned curators Jiang Jun, Huang Yan, Assadour Markarov, and Xu Jia, takes “Re-Constellations” as its central theme. It brings together 45 outstanding artists from 17 countries and regions, who will collectively weave a new cultural canopy in Hangzhou—the ancient city of silk—using fiber art as a unique medium. The exhibition explores the cultural rise of the “Global South” and the future direction of contemporary art against the backdrop of global retreat and value reconstruction.

The theme “Re-Constellations” draws inspiration from an ancient metaphor that has run through human civilization: the vast starry sky likened to a woven fabric of interlacing threads. Different civilizations have imagined and interpreted the cosmos in diverse ways, shaping their own distinct worldviews. The ancient Greeks saw in the Orion constellation a hunter wielding a club; the Sumerians perceived it as the “Celestial Bull,” a symbol of strength; while ancient Chinese astronomers constructed a cosmic order of “harmony between Heaven and humanity” through their system of “Three Enclosures and Twenty-Eight Mansions.” However, with the advancement of modernity—especially after the International Astronomical Union standardized constellation boundaries based on Greco-Roman models in 1930—non-Western cosmologies were systematically marginalized and gradually faded from mainstream awareness.

The core mission of this Triennial is to challenge this singular “universal narrative.” We seek to transcend the fixed boundaries of astronomy, transforming “Re-Constellations” into a metaphor for a cognitive revolution—one that not only deconstructs and reassembles the established “constellations” of art history but also collectively awakens the cultural “stars” of the Global South, enabling them to shift from “obscured dark stars” into “self-illuminating celestial bodies.” In an era marked by the ebb of globalization and the erosion of monolithic narratives, this exhibition aspires to emulate our ancestors’ practice of stargazing: to discover connections amid differences, and to forge links across fractures.

Re-Constellations: 5th Hangzhou Trennial of Fiber Art