Location: Guangzhou, China
Year: 2025
Architects: JXY Studio
Photography by: JXY Studio
Exhibition Design for "The Extended Art-chitecture"
Held in the North Gallery of SCUT School of Architecture, the exhibition showcases recent interdisciplinary works of design and art by alumni across experimental architecture, art installation, and conceptual furniture. In response, the exhibition design introduces a lightweight, modular spatial system that emerges from the conceptual common ground shared by the exhibited works. Through a calibrated interplay of visual perception, bodily scale, and curatorial logic, the design invites exploration and subtly choreographs the viewer’s experience, offering a spatial metaphor for the exhibition’s intellectual framework.
The installation consists mainly of five regular octagonal structures, each defining a distinct experiential field. These modules mediate between the architectural space of the gallery and the individual exhibits, forming perceptual and spatial transitions while linking together along a continuous circulation path. The geometry is derived from the walls on the north side of the gallery, expanding into octagons that integrate with the existing column grid. The columns themselves are repurposed as structural and spatial boundaries, emphasizing how functional spatial elements can actively shape both display and experience.
Constructed from prefabricated steel and wood components, the spatial system is designed for efficient assembly, disassembly, and reuse. Translucent mesh curtains delineate space without obstructing movement, allowing for layered visual and physical engagement through touring within. Each octagonal unit features a single, asymmetrically positioned opening that suggests a possible set path for experience, while still leaving room for improvisation. Visitors may bypass, repeat, or redefine the intended route through reappropriation of spatial elements, generating personal trajectories through the exhibition.
"The Extended Art-chitecture" foregrounds the intertextual dialogues between architecture and art embedded in the exhibited works themselves, while more than a backdrop, the exhibition design seeks to reflect and amplify the given theme. Through its raw material expression, exposed construction details, and rigorous spatial logic, the design reexamines the long-standing tension, or perhaps the potential overlap, between utility and experience. Within a precisely orchestrated system, function itself becomes a vehicle for expressive meaning, which is not separate from art, but contrarily, its very form: function is art. Text description by the architects.
Source: www.jxystudio.com
Artists: Jiaxun Xu + Yue Xu
