until Sunday October 12 2025
Het Nieuwe Instituut
T : +31 (0)10 4401200
Museumpark 25
3015 CB Rotterdam
The Netherlands
Contact
T : 31(0)10 44 01 200
info@nieuweinstituut.nl
https://www.nieuweinstituut.nl/en/
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.
