The Roots Know More

To celebrate its fifth anniversary, the He Art Museum (HEM) presents The Roots Know More, a large-scale international group exhibition featuring over 100 works by artists from around the world. Rooted in Canton and radiating across the broader “South,” the exhibition reaffirms HEM’s core value of dialogue and marks a milestone in the museum’s five years of growth.

Unit 1: Echoes
Focuses on dialogues within HEM’s collection, bringing together Chinese painting innovations, Asian conceptual practices, and Western confrontations. It reveals how artistic “roots” grew through turbulence, as pioneers endured and emerged as defining voices of their era.

Unit 2: Evergrowing
From the “Great Chain of Being” to the Age of Discovery, the world has long been ordered through classification. This unit reflects on artistic cognition shaped by cultural colonization, while showing how creation opens space for alternative voices.

Unit 3: Song of All Things
Starting from ritual—the oldest vessel of culture—this unit transforms everyday materials and experiences into symbolic acts. These practices draw viewers into a symbiosis with nature, where the “South” transcends geography to embody renewal and self-definition.

Five years is both a milestone and a new beginning. With this exhibition, HEM continues its search for new directions within the context of the “South”—setting out once again between memory and imagination, diversity and openness, like roots that extend continuously beneath the surface.