Ma Yansong: Architecture and EmotionMa Yansong: Architecture and Emotion

The exhibition takes you on a journey through Ma Yansong’s ideas and working methods: from his critique of modernism and globalisation to his bold, fluid designs – from homes and artistic installations to large-scale cultural and commercial complexes.

You experience the exhibition not only with your eyes, but with all the senses. You enter a spatial, dynamic landscape of models, art and multimedia, where you can feel for yourself how MAD Architects’ architecture influences the emotions and its surroundings.

Ma Yansong sees the repetitive patterns and uniformity of much modern architecture as alienating people from their surroundings. He counters this with expressive, organic forms that reconnect people to city and landscape.

With the two elegantly undulating Absolute Towers near Toronto, completed in 2012, Ma Yansong became the first contemporary Chinese architect to win a major architectural competition outside China. Since then, his work has resonated around the world. MAD Architects has received commissions in the United States, Japan, France, Italy, the Netherlands and other countries.

Ma Yansong’s work is often described as futuristic, but his vision is strongly rooted in tradition, particularly in the classical Chinese painting style of shanshui (‘mountain-water’), which focuses on the relationship between people and nature. With his concept of the ‘Shanshui City’, Ma Yansong has developed a design language that explores this relationship on an architectural and urban scale. A Shanshui City is not an eco-city or a garden city, nor is it a city whose architecture is simply based on natural forms. Rather, it is primarily about restoring an emotional connection with the built environment, and reactivating our intuitive, sensory relationship with nature.

The exhibition at the Nieuwe Instituut shows the development of MAD Architects' work since the early 2000s in China, a period of unprecedented economic growth and rapid social change. During this time he organised a series of MAD Dinners, conversations with people from different sectors of society about these changes and their consequences. Ma Yansong responded with speculative proposals that were both critical and playful, such as Floating Island, an imaginative roof over the site of the World Trade Center in New York. There was also the transformation of Tiananmen Square in Beijing into a green park, and an aquarium designed from the perspective of a fish.

The exhibition divides MAD Architects’ recent work into three chapters: Embodied Nature, Connective Landscapes and Layered Futures. These recent projects embody his design philosophy of enhancing individual experience, restoring disrupted urban structures and building a future based on the past. They range from a kindergarten in Japan and social housing in Beijing to the ambitious Quzhou Sports Park, with a stadium that blends into the landscape like a hill, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, co-founded by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, and designed by MAD Architects.

The exhibition also features the Tornado, designed by MAD Architects for Fenix, a new museum that tells stories of migration through art. A double, spiral staircase takes visitors from the atrium of the former Fenix warehouse up to the roof. From there, there is a view of the Katendrecht peninsula – once one of the first Chinatowns in Europe. Fenix is open to the public from 16 May.

The exhibition is an initiative of the Nieuwe Instituut, in collaboration with MAD Architects, and curated by Aric Chen, general and artistic director of the Nieuwe Instituut, and Tijn van de Wijdeven. The spatial design is by Ma Yansong, MAD Architects, and the graphic design by Joris Kritis. The exhibition has been made possible by a contribution from Stichting Droom en Daad.