ROTTERDAM.- Ma Yansong: Architecture and Emotion opened last Friday at the Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands’ national museum for architecture, design and digital culture in Rotterdam. The exhibition explores the pioneering vision of architect Ma Yansong and his office, MAD Architects, which is active internationally. Time magazine recently named Ma Yansong as one of the 100 most influential people of 2025 on its renowned annual list of leading individuals in culture, design, politics and society.
Ma Yansong is currently in the spotlight as the architect of Fenix, Rotterdam’s new art museum focusing on migration, which also opened last week and for which he designed its spectacular rooftop Tornado.
The exhibition at the Nieuwe Instituut takes visitors on a journey through Ma’s pioneering ideas and working methods - from his early critiques of modernism to the daring, flowing forms he’s known for today. Responding to what he sees as the dehumanising legacy of modernist architecture, with its rigid rationalism and oppressive grids, Ma draws from classical Chinese aesthetics and philosophies to reconnect architecture with notions of nature that are linked to emotion, and to propose a futurism rooted in tradition.
Through dynamic models, artistic interpretations and multimedia installations, the exhibition bridges the gap between MAD’s revolutionary designs and the profound emotional responses they elicit.
MAD in China
Ma Yansong founded MAD Architects in 2004 and has led the office alongside Dang Qun and Yosuke Hayano ever since. The exhibition begins with the firm’s formative years in China in the early 2000s, a period of rapid social change and unprecedented economic growth. During this period, Ma organised a series of conversations about the role of architecture in this new era. These discussions, published in a 2008 book called MAD Dinner, coincided with Ma’s earliest, speculative projects, which open the exhibition.
These include the Floating Island, an imaginative canopy over the site of the former World Trade Center site in New York; the transformation of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square into a green park; a 800 Metre Tower, bent over itself as a play on the era’s obsession with supertall buildings; and an aquarium designed from a fish’s perspective.
The role of nature
The exhibition then transports visitors back to the early 2010s. In response to China’s alienating urban architecture, Ma sought an alternative to modernism. He found it in shanshui (‘mountain-water’), a philosophical concept from traditional Chinese painting that depicts landscapes as a representation of the relationship between humans and nature. A striking example of this can be seen in the model of the speculative design for the Shanshui City, which is based on the landscape of southwestern China and was inspired by the brush technique used in shanshui paintings.
The Embodied Nature section of the exhibition further explores the role of nature in MAD’s work. The designs for the Shenzhen Bay Culture Park and the Amsterdam Zuidas demonstrate that incorporating greenery into built environments is not the only consideration; the symbolic significance attributed to natural elements in traditional Chinese painting, and the emotional response this evokes, are also integral to MAD’s work.
You can also experience the new piece Unbound Echo by sound artist Aimée Theriot, which evolves in response to its surroundings and audience throughout the duration of the exhibition.
Past and future
MAD Architects’ work is often described as futuristic, but the firm sees the organic forms of its designs as reconciling the past with the future. MAD’s designs are not digitally generated, but instead always begin with hand sketches by Ma. This can be seen in the biomorphic design of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, currently under construction in Los Angeles, and the new Fenix museum in Rotterdam, both of which are featured in the In the Layered Futures section. The futuristic Tornado is integrated into the existing buildings and, like the museum itself, it pays tribute to arrival and departure, and to the past and the future.
Visitors can use an AI installation using algorithms trained on MAD’s archive to have their own sketch rendered into an actual MAD design, referencing the now-famous sketch that Ma Yansong made for the Tornado.
The Connecting Landscapes section delves deeper into the fluid forms of MAD’s designs, by zooming in on the human perspective. During the design process, MAD considers how future users will perceive, use and experience the space, and the emotions this will evoke, in ways that aim to repair ruptured urban fabrics.
For instance, this approach was applied to the Baiziwan Social Housing project in Beijing, where low-cost residential towers are connected by paths and walkways, helping to mend an urban context of large superblocks cut off by wide roads and fostering community spirit through human-centred design.
A large screen shows the video installation Beyond the Wall by Weichao Xu, a filmmaker who lives in the Baiziwan complex. This is the first time that the film has been shown.
Aric Chen, General and Artistic Director of the Nieuwe Instituut and curator of the exhibition: “In an astonishingly short period, China produced some of the world’s most influential and groundbreaking architecture, and now that work is making its mark around the world. Ma Yansong and MAD are at the forefront of this. We are proud to present their first solo museum exhibition outside China in over a decade, offering deeper insight into the work of this increasingly global firm.”
