Co-organized by the One Way Street Foundation and MACA Art Center, the 5th Sailors Program Special Exhibition, Planetary Navigation: As Above, So Below, will be presented at MACA Art Center from September 5 to November 5, 2026. Bringing together 11 groups of creators from the 5th Sailors Program of the One Way Street Foundation along with two invited Swiss artists, the exhibition embarks on a deep artistic exploration of contemporary individual positioning, historical memory, and localized resilience.

Today, as the world is recalibrated by satellites, algorithms, and data, concrete individuals are often abstracted into mere data points. In an era where coordinates are constantly rewritten and memories repeatedly deterritorialized, the 13 participating artist groups refuse to be pinned down by data. Instead, they choose to leave familiar ports for the field, the ruins, and the distant horizon. Navigating like ancient mariners with the stars as longitude and the earth as latitude, they recalibrate their positions on a planetary scale. Their journeys extend from the micro-textures of southern Chinese alleyways to the deep mountains of Yunnan, diving from the isolation of St. Helena into the battery factories of Finland, salvaging memories of labor from ancestral stitches while gazing upon the weight of aging through surveillance footage of the elderly. Divergent as their routes are, they navigate by the same star map—seeking out those spiritual coordinates, scattered by the currents of our time, that still faintly glimmer in the field.

The exhibition adopts the “Big Dipper” (Beidou) and the “South Dipper” (Nandou) from traditional Chinese star maps as its methodological coordinates, weaving a dual narrative constellation of “concealment and continuity,” “the past and the present.” Guided by the Big Dipper—which signifies navigation as well as solemnity and withering—one side of the exhibition focuses on memories submerged deep within geological strata: the ruins of war, colonial wounds, the diaspora of labourers, and sealed archives. Like night watchmen, the artists salvage the fading traces of obliteration swallowed by time from the solitude of St. Helena, the prison archives of Cambodia, and sketches from WWII POW camps. On the other side, the South Dipper symbolises expansion and evolution, surging with vibrant vitality and localized resilience: the ancient wisdom of plants, the divine glow of bees, vernacular design, and the reweaving of “longevity” and “companionship” in an ageing society—revealing symbiosis beneath the sacred bee trees of Yunnan, the wild wisdom growing in hutongs, and time stitched together by two generations.

Between the tension of concealment and continuity lie the connectors, acting as celestial “companion stars” (Zuo Fu and You Bi). Technology, media, and public participation constitute the third dimension of the exhibition. In the artists’ practice, technology is no cold instrument, but an astral bridge connecting the past and the future: a piece of surveillance footage can become an intimate vigil, and a field recording can resurrect the vanished sounds of labour. Through the intervention of images, sounds, and bodies, deeply private individual experiences are transformed into public memory, turning private pain into collective healing.

In an age where everything can be calculated, yet so much of existence refuses to be quantified, the exhibition reclaims ‘planetary wisdom.’ During the exhibition, MACA Art Center will transform into a contemporary ‘observatory.’ We invite every visitor stepping into the gallery to act as a mariner—between the historical gaze of the Big Dipper and the vital flux of the South Dipper, to recalibrate their internal star map and reclaim that slowly revolving spiritual coordinate.

Planetary Navigation: As Above, So Below is co-organized by One Way Street Foundation and MACA Art Center, and co-curated by He Yining and Long Yitang.

Venue
706 Beiyi St, 798 Art Zone, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing

Artists
Chen Yiqing, Chen Yifei, Cui Yuxuan, He Haonan, Lauren Huret, Li Chenchi, Hunter Longe, Lu Wenhui, Cherry Song, Yang Xin & Yang Yingmei, Zhan Youbing, Zhao Yanxian, Zhao Yueting, Will Xie

Exhibition Dates
05 September – 05 November 2026

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Sunday | 10:30 PM – 6:00 PM

Website
https://www.macaarts.org

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/macaartcenter/

Contact
info@macaarts.org

About Sailors

Chen Yiqing is an artist and filmmaker based between London and Guiyang. Working at the intersection of fiction and documentary, his practice spans multiple media, including artist films, game engines, and XR experiences. He approaches time-based media as a loose, interwoven structure. Through multiple timelines, he explores transnational contexts connected by virtual technologies and infrastructures, as well as the individual narratives hidden behind grand narratives of development. In recent years, his work has frequently drawn on field-based observations and family history research to examine how the lives, memories, and social relations of workers and ethnic minorities intertwine with material culture, energy transitions, and globalization within broader historical and economic frameworks. Yiqing holds an MA in Digital Direction from the Royal College of Art and a BEng in Internet of Things Engineering. His work has been screened and exhibited at Guangdong Times Museum; ICA, London; Cromwell Place Gallery, London; Conditions, Croydon; MEET Digital Culture Center, Milan; HIAP, Finland; ESPRONCEDA, Barcelona; among others.

Chen Yifei is a wandering Potehi (glove puppetry) storyteller, a member of the Jasagala art collective, and an editor of Prickly Paper. Beginning with zines as a point of departure, he engages with DIY culture and self-organization and maintains a sustained interest in how art can intervene in processes of social change.. In recent years, he has turned to puppetry as a medium, collaborating with people in different places to recover local memories and weave them into shared narratives and acts of storytelling.

Cui Yuxuan (b. 1999, Changchun) is a visual artist and storyteller based in the Netherlands. Working across lens-based media, she navigates the space between documentary, artistic research, and fiction. Through fieldwork and embodied encounters with landscapes and their material traces, she investigates how geopolitics, historical memory, and colonial legacies continue to shape peripheral territories. Treating archives as an activated and unstable terrain, she develops narratives that reveal obscured histories and destabilize the boundaries between clarity and ambiguity, evidence and imagination.

Born in Yunnan, He Haonan lives and works between Paris and Clermont-Ferrand. At the intersection of research and artistic production, his practice focuses on psychoactive plants and the systems that regulate their use, circulation, and perception. He Haonan holds a master’s degree from EUR ArTeC, Paris (2022). He continued his research in the Post-diploma Art program at ENSBA Lyon in 2023 and is currently a researcher at the École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont Métropole (ÉSACM). His works and projects have been presented in “Culture d’avenir” (Centre Pompidou, Paris, Centre of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, House of World Cultures, Berlin, 2022–2023); Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2024); WHW Akademija, Croatia (2024); the GMS Residency, Thailand (2025); the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (2026), among others. In 2026, his work was acquired by the Fonds d’art contemporain – Paris Collections, the contemporary art collection of the City of Paris.

Lauren Huret is a visual artist whose practice revolves primarily around video, performance, installation, and collage. She is deeply interested in the systems of belief and thought conveyed through technical and media apparatuses. Over time, her work has evolved toward a reflection on the affective power of images, grounded in the idea that our era is marked by an unprecedented level of exposure to them. Huret focuses on analyzing their suggestive power, performativity, and political implications. From 2020 to 2024, she collaborated with artist Maria Guță. Together, they examined the influence of images on the construction of the self, the mechanisms of soft power, media overexposure on social networks, and contemporary forms of identity manipulation. Currently, she is developing her first public artwork (Les schémas-biscuit du monde, 2024), which was recently selected for the École des Vernets in Geneva in partnership with the Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain (FMAC), Geneva. The project is scheduled for completion in 2027.

Li Chenchi (b. 1991) previously studied at the Beijing Film Academy and Pratt Institute in New York, currently living and working in Chengdu. His work often focuses on the flux of images across daily life, memory, and history, transforming perceptions of them into ritualistic acts. His practice integrates methods from painting, photography, and printmaking—through layering, superimposition, collage, and other iterative processes—to push images beyond straightforward narrative expression, creating a space where viewing can slow down, shift direction, and be reimagined. His selected exhibitions include Li Chenchi: Man with Bad Taste (Fotografiska, Shanghai, 2026); Li Chenchi: Caged by the Brightest Night (Tathata Gallery, New York, 2026); White Ground, Abyssal Thicket (Honin Art Center, Chengdu, 2025); Flaring: Li Chenchi Solo Projecting (ART021, Beijing, 2025); Li Chenchi: Symphony No. 2 (Donglai Art, Chengdu, 2025); Empty Stance and Sway: A4 Art Museum Collection Exhibition (A4 Art Museum, Chengdu, 2024); Li Chenchi: ∞ (littles space, Chengdu, 2018).

Hunter Longe (b. 1985) is originally from California and currently lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and an MFA from Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam. His recent solo exhibitions have been at Kunstraum Memphis, Linz (2026); SALTS, Basel (2025); 427, Riga (2024); Kunsthaus Langenthal (2023); Last Tango, Zurich (2023); Sonnenstube, Lugano (2023); Et al. Gallery, San Francisco (2018); LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristina (2017); Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2017). His work has been included in group exhibitions at Bex Art Triennial, Bex (2026); MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2025); Lateral, Rome (2025); Centre d’art de Neuchâtel (2024); Soft Opening, London (2024), among others. In 2021, a book of his writing and drawings titled DreamOre was published by Coda Press, and he was a winner of the Swiss Art Awards. From 2024 to 2025, he was a fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome.

Lu Wenhui is an architect living and working in Beijing. She founded Jí Architects in 2019. Her representative works include the One-Day Tea Pavilion, the expansion of the Nangqian Tsenpo Museum in Yushu, the Sanqieryi Courtyard in Tengchong, Yunnan, and the exhibition design for the Taikang Collection’s Miracle of Life. She was featured in gooood’s “20 Intriguing Young Architects of 2021” and Position’s “2021 Rising Stars – 13 Beijing-Based Architecture Studios.” She was also named to the 2022 AD 100 YOUNG list and won the Popular Choice Award in the Stone Architecture category at the 2022 Architizer A+Awards. Beyond her professional practice, she conducts long-term urban observations centered on Beijing’s hutongs and has launched a personal research project titled Beijing is Boring. This project involves the salvage collection and diagramming of grassroots designs found in her surroundings. In an era dominated by grand narratives and distant concerns, she aims to rebuild a tangible perception of the world through observing the everyday, discovering a meaningful core within seemingly trivial details.

Cherry Song (b. 2000) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores how to make art beyond Homo sapiens, investigating how art can become part of an ecosystem. Her practice operates like a constantly evolving organism, constructing worlds and systems with autonomous mechanisms that allow other life forms to become equal participants in the creative process. Through collaboration with insects, plants, and soil, she employs art as a cross-species medium, creating platforms that offer habitats for diverse life forms. Song graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, before completing her master’s degree at the University of Oxford as a Clarendon Scholar. She later joined the Sarabande Foundation, established by Alexander McQueen, as an artist-in-residence.

Yang Xin (b. 1999, Guangdong) graduated from Renmin University of China and is currently pursuing a PhD at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. She formed the intergenerational co-creation group “Cuag4Cuag4” with her grandmother Yang Yingmei. Her artistic practice is deeply rooted in the observation of invisible labor within social and domestic spheres, revaluing the boundaries of everyday perception through the interweaving of memory, body, material, and labor. Her awards include the China Guardian Xu Bangda Art Education Scholarship, the Huang Piao Art Award, and the RUC Professor Nomination Award. Recent projects include Cuag4Cuag4 (One-Way Street Foundation, 2026); Aranya Winter Art Residency (Aranya Jinshanling, 2026); and Footsteps and Brushstrokes (Aímer Art Museum, 2025).

Yang Yingmei (b. 1950, Guangdong) was formerly a First-Grade Embroidery worker at a drawn-work factory and is a member of “Cuag4Cuag4”. Trained in the family craft from childhood, she is proficient in Chaozhou drawn-work embroidery; the women of her mother’s generation were among the earliest along the southeast coast to learn European white-thread drawn-work techniques. As an intergenerational witness of traditional handwork, she transforms embodied skills, local memory, and women’s life experience into visual narratives, collaborating with Yang Xin to activate the cross-temporal potential of traditional materials and invisible labor.

Zhan Youbing is a photographer and researcher whose practice primarily focuses on the daily documentation and study of migrant workers on the assembly lines of Dongguan’s industrial zones. He has published two photobooks: I Am a Migrant Worker: A True Record of Working Life in Dongguan (2014) and Working Like This for 30 Years (2025). To date, Zhan has captured over 1.7 million photographs, accumulated 14 terabytes of video footage, crafted more than 140 handmade books, and collected approximately 6 tons of physical artifacts related to migrant labor. His works are held in the permanent collections of institutions including the British Library, the Chinese Museum of Ethnology, the Archive of Modern Conflict (UK), the Lishui Photography Museum, the UI Art Museum, and the Guangzhou Library. His photography has been exhibited or screened at Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, and other venues. Zhan was shortlisted for the 2025 Leica Oskar Barnack Award and won the TOP20·2025 Chinese Contemporary Photography New Talent Award. He holds a master’s degree from the School of Management at Northwestern Polytechnical University and currently works as a press photographer in Dongguan.

Zhao Yanxian is a Netherlands-based artist of Taishan origin, China. Her practice centers on three interconnected dimensions: the familial space as a site where memory, power, and ideology are continuously reproduced; the ways diasporic and familial structures shape women’s understanding of labor, responsibility, and selfhood; and how migration and technological mediation reorganize experiences of intimacy, aging, and death within domestic space. Raised within narratives of migration and elsewhere, Zhao’s work engages with the prolonged absences, emotional ruptures, and intergenerational trauma often obscured by the mythology of a “better life.” Working primarily with moving image, archival material, and long-term observation, she collects, reconstructs, and reorganizes personal imagery to transform individual experience into sharable visual structures. She was awarded the EPK Excellent in Research Award in the Netherlands and has received support from multiple art and research initiatives. Her works have been exhibited in China, the Netherlands, and Croatia.

Zhao Yueting is an artist who graduated from the Painting Department at the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently an M.S. candidate in Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT. She approaches artistic practice as a process of becoming that moves beyond fixed forms, emphasizing process, embodied experience, and collaborative relationships. Through her work, she explores how materials carry and reveal their own narratives.

Will Xie is a chef who graduated from Le Cordon Bleu Sydney. His culinary experience spans renowned restaurants including Ensue, EHB, Gaggan, Meta, Odette, Amisfield, Kadeau, Alchemist, and Quintonil. He sees the chef as a translator and communicator of culture, exploring the relationships among food, local knowledge, and contemporary life. Through modern culinary techniques, he seeks to re-express Chinese regional cultures and open new possibilities for contemporary and future Chinese food culture.

About Curators

He Yining is a curator and researcher based in China. Her curatorial and research practice focuses on the entanglement of philosophy of technology, media ecology, and global contemporary photographic and video art practices; the bridging of historical ruptures, the “repair” of obscured historical narratives, and the construction of localised narratives within the context of Chinese contemporary art; and the agency of Chinese artistic practices in reconfiguring global postcolonial discourse.

She is the founder of two journals, Floating Island and Starlight. Her written, edited, and co-authored publications include The Routledge Companion to Photography, Representation, and Social Justice, The Adobe of Anamnesis, The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Studies, The British Photography Classroom, and The Ports and Images series, among over twenty other works. Her current doctoral research focuses on decolonial practices in contemporary Chinese art, examining the connections between artists’ personal experiences, semi-colonial legacies, and global decolonial discourse.

He Yining has curated major group exhibitions in China and Europe, including “Imaging the Future”, “China Imagined”, “Between Mountains, Hills, and Lakes”, “The Adobe of Anamnesis”, and “Ports and Images”. She served as co-curator for the FORMAT International Photography Festival (2027), the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2025), the 8th Singapore International Photography Festival (2022), and the 3rd Beijing International Photography Biennial (2018). She was the winner of the OCAT Research Centre’s inaugural 2018 research-based exhibition curatorial plan and received a nomination for the 14th AAC Art China Curator of the Year Award for her exhibition “The Adobe of Anamnesis”.

Yining co-founded the Decolonial Being Network – a transnational actant network of artists, researchers, curators, and cultural practitioners committed to revealing and communicating the pervasive coloniality embedded in contemporary being(s) while envisioning a decolonial future.

Long Yitang is a curator and writer. Born in Shaoshan in 1992, he received his bachelor’s degree in Arts Management from Xiamen University in 2014 and his master’s degree in Curating from the China Academy of Art in 2021. He is a member of the curatorial team for the 15th Shanghai Biennale in 2025. His current research focuses on self-organization, communality, and on-site curating. In recent years, he has organized and curated multiple projects—including exhibitions, walks, and research—based in Southeast coastal regions and river basins, addressing mobile historical geographies and environmental media. He was selected as a fellow of the One-Way Street Foundation’s 4th Sailor Program for his project “Modeling the Marginal Seas.”

In 2015, he co-founded the AXIS Art Project, which received the Young Curator Award from the Power Station of Art in Shanghai in 2016. That same year, he established the independent space 404 Not Found Lab and organized the Houtian Negotiation Group, carrying out a series of community-theater art practices in Xiamen. Since 2017, he has participated in the Gazetteer-Novel project, curating multiple residencies, exhibitions, and workshops.

Beyond curating, he explores alternative forms of connection through writing.

About MACA

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.

About One-Way Street Foundation

The One-Way Street Foundation (OWSF) was established in 2016 and is accredited as a 4A social organization in China. The Foundation is committed to developing diverse grant-making and public cultural programs that inspire imagination, support creative practice, and foster cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural exchange. We encourage young creators and scholars to stay attuned to the realities of our time, engage with pressing social issues, and respond to contemporary challenges with creativity and insight.

About Sailors Program

The Sailors Program is a creative grant supporting emerging writers, artists, and scholars in developing their projects through fieldwork and on-site exploration. Launched in 2018, it encourages participants to step beyond familiar environments, engage deeply with diverse communities and cultures, and portray the complex realities of contemporary life.The Sailor Program is more than a grant. It is an integrated support ecosystem that nurtures emerging creators through research and practice, bringing works rooted in Chinese perspectives and engaged in global conversations into the public sphere.

(Text and images courtesy of MACA Art Center)