5TH SAILORS PROGRAM
EXHIBITION
MACA Art Center
Beijing 798 Art District
By the stars above,
and the earth below.
Cartography is no longer just about geography. Today, algorithms and data redraw the world, often reducing lived experience to digital coordinates. Yet a distinct group of creators looks back to older, more tactile ways of wayfinding—navigating by the stars and the earth.
The eleven groups of creators in the 5th Sailors Program, alongside two invited Swiss artists, journey from Beijing’s hutongs to the mountains of Yunnan, from St. Helena to worker archives across transnational renewable-energy supply chains.
Their routes are distinct, yet they share a single star chart: through concrete fieldwork, they recover coordinates scattered by the tide of the times, still glimmering faintly.
The Big Dipper guides us through submerged historical strata—war ruins, colonial scars, diasporic labor and sealed archives. Like night watchmen, artists salvage traces erased by time, from island solitude and POW-camp drawings to industrial landscapes across Eurasia.
The South Dipper evokes life and expansion. Ancient plant knowledge, sacred bee trees, vernacular design and the reweaving of companionship in an aging society reveal ecological vitality and local resilience.
Technology, media and public participation become a star-bridge between past and future. Through images, sound and physical presence, individual experience becomes public memory, and private pain may open toward collective healing.
He Yining is a curator and researcher based in China. Her practice focuses on the entanglement of philosophy of technology, media ecology and contemporary photographic and moving-image practices; the repair of obscured histories; and the agency of Chinese art within global postcolonial discourse.
She is the founder of the journals Floating Island and Starlight, and has curated major exhibitions in China and Europe.
Long Yitang is a curator and writer whose research focuses on self-organization, communality and site-responsive curating. His recent exhibitions, walks and research address mobile historical geographies and environmental media across coastal regions and river basins.
Selected for the 4th Sailors Program with Modeling the Marginal Seas, he continues to explore forms of connection beyond curating through writing and collective practice.
