Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition of the Art and Geography Series, Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses, co-curated by architect Naitian Yang and curator Lin Liu. This exhibition will open on September 8, 2023 and run through December 10, 2023.

Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses delves into the historical and present context of BMCA’s site – Beijige Mountain, and investigates the pivotal role it has played in the evolution of meteorological science in China. Departing from the spectral atmosphere of the museum’s locus, the exhibition brings together about 20 artists, architects, and researchers from 6 countries to create a constellation of artworks engaging with this historical lineage and offering different perspectives towards the omnipresent reality of climate crisis.

Beijige serves as a point of convergence for the history and reality of Nanjing and China. It weaves together various elements, including ancient myths/Daoist traditions, solar terms/agricultural activities, modernmeteorological science/intellectual individuals in China’s modernization process (such as Zhu Kezhen, the founder of the Central Meteorological Observatory in Beijige), as well as civil defense projects/consumer spaces, collectively producing a complex, ambiguous, and romantic environment. The museum’s existing spaces further consolidate this essence, blending together mountain terrain, air raid shelters, and the “white cube” gallery environment. The exhibition seeks to portray this compressed moment through image and sound, and to extract the dynamic imagery of wind, rain, cloud, etc. It evolves from the perception of such phenomenon to the intangible existence of data clouds, and ultimately to the cultural and political weather and climate at large.

Architect Naitian Yang’s choreography of the exhibition space creates an experience that negotiates with the existing concrete structure and resonates with the oscillating cadence of weather itself. In a time when weather and climate issues have transcended theoretical discourse and become an urgent reality, the exhibition endeavors to integrate people and weather into the same fluid, precarious, and crucial state. The artworks within the exhibition allude to what might conventionally be termed “bad weather”, yet the binary idea of “good / bad” is no longer applicable to our judgments of weather. Beyond a human-centered perspective, the synthesis of chaos emerges as the norm of weather, where “good” and “bad” coalesce. It pervades every aspect of existence, whether living or not.