Tiān Gōng Kāi Wù: Rocks, Fire, Thunder
2025.11.11-2026.02.01
Julius von Bismarck’s First Solo
Exhibition in China
ACADEMIC DIRECTOR: YANG TIANGE
Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art presents Tiān Gōng Kāi Wù: Rocks, Fire,Thunder, the first solo exhibition in China by German artist Julius von Bismarck.Drawing inspiration from the seventeenth-century Chinese encyclopedia of technology, Tiangong Kaiwu, the exhibition bridges ancient wisdom and contemporary thought, exploring the interrelations between nature, technology, and humankind.
Bismarck’s artistic practice consistently revolves around the triangular relationship between humankind, nature, and technology. In his art and thinking, “nature” is not external to human, nor does it stand in opposition as a passive material world; rather, nature, for him, is mutually shaped through human perception and experience. Often employing the logic of scientific experiment, he combines satellite data, meteorological instruments, mechanical structures, and moving images, transforming art into a renewed experiment of natural phenomena.
The title Tiān Gōng Kāi Wù (or Heavenly Craftsmanship, Opening Things) carries philosophical resonance: “Heavenly Craftsmanship” refers to the self-generating artistry of nature, while “Opening Things” denotes human creativity that mirrors cosmic laws. The title thus signifies more than a text; it embodies a worldview in which art and technology evolve through cycles of imitation and transcendence, modeling a vision of coexistence and renewal between humanity and the natural world. In Bismarck’s artistic thought and practice, he resists the conventional, narrow definition of “nature” — one that relies on a binary logic to oppose it to “the human,” or to divide the “natural” from the “artificial.” In this sense, Bismarck’s understanding of “nature” resonates profoundly with the philosophy of ancient Chinese technologies. Therefore, the exhibition’s triad—rocks, fire, and thunder—are no longer forms of “nature” external to humanity, but rather isomorphic entities of man and nature, transformed through the artist’s mediation and creative process.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a newly commissioned site-specific work for Beiqiu—a rock sculpture series inspired by the museum’s name, Beiqiu, meaning “North Hill.” These seemingly solid boulders are hollow structures supported by steel
frameworks, revealing the illusion of mass. Inspired by his visit to Lingyin Temple, where worshippers leaned wooden sticks against rocks in prayer, Bismarck extends the metaphor by giving the stones “legs,” imbuing them with a sense of life and humor, and reflecting on the spiritual autonomy of matter.
Across the triad of rocks, fire, and thunder, the exhibition traces humanity’s enduring dialogue with natural forces. Complementing new rock sculptures are Bismarck’s long-term studies of fire and lightning. The Talking to Thunder series, born from his that unites experiment and ritual. In Fire with Fire, slow-motion mirrored images of wildfires turn catastrophe into contemplation, rendering fire as both destructive and sacred.
In Tiān Gōng Kāi Wù: Rocks, Fire, Thunder, Bismarck fuses the precision of science with the sensibility of art to rekindle awe toward the natural world. His works suggest that to “open things” (kāi wù) is not merely to expand the realm of technique, but to rediscover the resonance between the human and the cosmos.
Julius von Bismarck
Artist
Julius von Bismarck, born 1983 in Breisach am Rhein, Germany, grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He currently lives and works in Berlin and in Switzerland.
The artist studied at the Berlin University of the Arts (2005-2013) and the Hunter College, New York (2007). Julius von Bismarck received the Award of the Shifting Foundation, Beverly Hills (2018); IBB Photography Award, IBB Atrium, Berllin (2013); and Prix Ars Electronica Award, Linz (2009), among others.
Spanning a wide range of forms—from kinetic sculptures and photographs to video installations and landscapes—Julius von Bismarck's work is produced in an intense engagement with the world and the physical conditions that determine existence on the planet. His work treats the natural world as a laboratory, a studio or sometimes even as a kind of canvas. Employing optical illusion, elaborate tromp l'oeil or incongruous action, his works can confound viewers, allowing them to experience the world and their place in it from a reoriented perspective. At the core of his practice is the question of how the notion of Nature was constructed: specifically, how the conceptual split stipulated by man from his surroundings, through naming, classifying and creating systems, has gone hand in hand with control and domination of the environment, to increasingly disastrous effects, not just for nature itself but as a consequence of wider notions of humanity’s sovereignty, also for the lives of other beings, human and non-human.
Ambitious and expansive, von Bismarck's projects are rooted in extensive research and experimentation to invent entirely new technological apparatuses that articulate and give form to his ideas. At times grandiose or granular, the works beguile with their originality of thought and execution. Playing on danger—real and implied existential risks for the artist, or his team, for example, by triggering lightning with small rockets, or for the audience who are placed near slowly collapsing sculptures or confronted with what appear to be large quantities of precariously suspended explosives—von Bismarck’s projects reveal an explorer's
adventurousness, tempered by a scientific approach and the artist‘s profound self-awareness of his engagement with the operations of a flawed Enlightenment that his work seeks to critique.
yang tiange
Academic Director
Yang Tiange, a curator and art historian. He serves as an advisory curator at Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art and is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Peking University. He was the inaugural recipient of the “ Ink Connections: Art History Research and Writing Grant ” by the New Century Contemporary Art Foundation in the category of Chinese contemporary art writing. His long-term research focuses on twentieth-century Chinese and international contemporary art, and his recent work explores the body, identity, and the formation of national forms from a perspective of cultural grography.