Tiny Big Ideas

Tiny Big Ideas is a month-long art co-creation and curatorial practice. This exhibition not only shows the works born in the Flying Bee art co-creation programme, but also presents the recent creations of British artist James Lang. This is a cross-cultural, cross-age and cross-media artistic collaboration between Chinese young creators and British artists. In this process, art is not defined by a single identity, but generated in joint exploration, mutual inspiration and companionship, making creation itself a language of communication.

Tiny Big Ideas is a practice of imagination and a journey of watching, expressing and constructing meaning. The works on display this time come from the reading of texts, the observation of life experience, and the distillation of fantasy and self-narration. They grow in cross-cultural contexts and cooperation mechanisms. Art does not take skills as the threshold, but with curiosity as the starting point. Creation is not limited to results, but is a way to understand the world.

“How can a small idea become huge?” This is the core question that the exhibition is trying to answer. Those fleeting spiritual lights are reorganised by the carrying of art. As a co-creation mechanism, the text is transformed into images, the story is broken into fragments and re-assembled, and emotions, symbols and materials grow in the picture. Each work is a young creator's annotation of the world. It is an action that externalises reading experience, daily thoughts and subconscious experience. It is small but weighty.

James Lang's intervention is not a simple guidance, but an open artistic co-creation methodology. His cooperation with the participants broke the traditional one-way teaching structure and formed a cross-cultural and cross-experience dialogue relationship. In this process, different ways of thinking, narrative paths and visual languages collide in a common field, resulting in a new artistic expression structure. Art is no longer regarded as a static achievement here, but a kind of curatorial practice, a set of process thinking framework, and a way to re-examine the relationship between meaning, subjectivity and creation.

Tiny Big Ideas is both a showcase and an invitation. When we watch these works, we may also reimagine the intuition and courage that we once had but gradually lost. Those tiny ideas have never disappeared. They are waiting to be activated, recognised, and become new possibilities.

Featured Artist:
James Lang

Participating Artists:

Danyang Hu
Haochen Ma
Jiayi Wang
Jiayu Zhang
Lin Lv
Linya Li
Mingzhen Xu
Muyang Chen
Qingtong Zou
Qingzhuo Zou
Ruining Wu
Ruohan Peng
Ruiyang Wang
Shuran Zhang
Shuyi Zhu
Simiao Zhou
Siyu Zhou
Wenda Gao
Wenqin Wang
Xi Liu
Xiaoying Wang
Xinyan Ji
Yetong Liu
Yichen Yan
Yihe Chen
Yuehan Wang
Yuanfan Cui
Yuanyuan Qi
Youran Zheng
Yuxin Liu
Zaizhen Piao
Zhan Yu
Zhe Che
Ziyang Gao
Ziyu Li

Organizer: Flying Bee
Programme Director: Yanan He
Artistic Advisor: James Lang
Curator: Weiwei Zhang