CHAO Art Center is an innovative way of putting "imagination" into "storage", subverting the usual art exhibition format, breaking the strict "hierarchy" of secular museums, and launching a two-month immersive art exhibition experience in the spacious art space on the first basement level of CHAO in Sanlitun. In the spacious art space on the first basement level of Sanlitun CHAO, a two-month immersive art exhibition experience will be launched. From museums to cryptography, from exotic landscapes to independent cultures, and even those incredible and unpredictable artistic creations will be presented in the warehouse's 50 large-scale shelves through a variety of mediums such as sculpture, painting, photography, and new media art - a unique experience created by CHAO in collaboration with the participating artists, management, and visitors. CHAO and the participating artists, management, and audience have created a unique "Conjecture Warehouse".

About the Imaginary Warehouse

We will construct an Imagination Warehouse on the B1 level of CHAO in Sanlitun—a repository for all kinds of delusions, fantasies, and speculative wonders. Anything imagined may enter.

By “imagined objects,” we refer primarily to artworks whose subjects or contents are singular, subjective in thought, difficult to categorize, or stylistically anomalous—such as family trees, cryptographic systems, erotic iconography, decoherence experiments, perspective boxes, and conceptual models. Yet the category is not limited to illusions or exotic visions. Although imagination often wears the sheepskin of reality, all art is, at its core, a form of fantasy. In addition, objects related to kensetsu-ya (houses of worldly observation), apophenic studies, independent cultures, and spontaneous natural histories—those obscure, unverifiable items that exist only in personal speculation—may also find their place here. As historical products, such things must be preserved, yet cannot be freely used to mislead the public or provoke harmful delusions; thus, they require a special site of containment.

Unlike a museum, the Imagination Warehouse is defined foremost by storage. It comes with its own management rules, its own taxonomy and logic. It offers a labyrinth of shelving, limited space, cards, cataloging, technicians, and storeroom staff. It offers freedom, yet remains non-directive.

—Da Shi & Lu Yue

The Imagination Warehouse is a sealed space—cut off from reality and time—where marvels and anomalies unfold. It is a refuge for fantasies and grand schemes, as well as a transit station for things of uncertain identity. It collects, preserves, studies, and displays all the overflow generated throughout the intellectual history of humankind.

Inside the Warehouse, we no longer follow any art-historical lineage, and traditional exhibition formats are overturned. Works are placed on storage racks spread across the entire space, as if in the artists’ own studios and storerooms. Even works by the same creator may not appear together, but instead be scattered throughout. With the warehouse’s labels and indexing system, searching and discovering become modes of experience in themselves. Beyond the works, we encourage the inclusion of personal objects—whether related or entirely unrelated—balancing display and function.

Works that traditionally occupy center stage may now be pushed to the margins—obscured, tilted, inverted, or piled together with unrelated items. A painting hung upside down or a sculpture placed off-balance is not what visitors expect, yet offers a spectacle in its own right.

In the main section of the exhibition, a total of 52 artists, designers, and collectors from diverse cultural backgrounds and creative fields come together. Through more than fifty large shelving structures and over a thousand works—including installations, sculptures, mixed-media pieces, paintings, photographs, and new media art—the exhibition constructs an immersive and unconventional environment titled Imagination Warehouse.

It offers a maze of shelves, confined spaces, cards, cataloguing systems, and elusive warehouse attendants, complete with its own rules of operation and even an internal logic of classification. Imagination Warehouse grants visitors the greatest possible degree of freedom, though never proactively. One may meander through its labyrinthine aisles or pause among the overwhelming array of works; guided by the warehouse’s signage and index, the acts of searching and discovering themselves become integral parts of the experience.