Architecture's Inscription

Architecture's Inscriptions will open this July at TANK Shanghai on the West Bund. Running from July 9 to October 7, 2026, this exhibition brings together works by contemporary architects and artists alongside ancient Chinese manuscripts, rubbings, scholar's rocks and paintings, exploring various forms of synthetic poetics grounded in inscription.

Since the 1990s, K Michael Hays has pursued in-depth research on architecture's inscriptions as a sustained theoretical project. At the invitation of Tongji University, his years of teaching and research on the relationship between architecture, poststructuralist thought, and the writing of history led to several colloquia focusing on the current conditions