In the seaside community of Beidaihe, China, Aranya Art Center North presents the first museum solo exhibition of Australian Waanyi artist Judy Watson in China. On view from May 27 – November 23, 2025, the art exhibition spans large-scale paintings and video works produced between 2019 and 2023, including nine paintings, a video installation and a reinterpretation of a work she originally etched into the glass façade of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris in 2006. The works draw deeply from Watson’s personal and cultural lineage, tracing interconnections between land, water, the body and ancestral knowledge. “This spatial and emotional context resonates strongly with Judy Watson’s ongoing practice of the relationship between bodies of water and ancestral land,” Gao Liangjiao, assistant curator and Wu Yiyang, associate curator at Aranya Art Center, told STIR. “Her works often draw from matrilineal memory, ancestral knowledge and collective histories—threads that echo the deep sense of bonding and shared awareness found within the Aranya community.”

Born in Mundubbera, Queensland, Watson is a descendant of the Waanyi people of northwest Queensland—whom she describes as ‘running water people’, owing to the prevalence of water bodies in the community. She works in painting, printmaking, video and installation, channelling matrilineal memory and archival research. She gives form to invisible narratives shaped by colonisation, displacement and environmental change through a process of staining, layering and mark-making, echoing layers of land and history. Watson’s visual language has evolved to be simultaneously lyrical and political, offering impactful meditations on memory, survival and the relationship between people and place.

At Aranya, indigo and ochre dominate the colour palette of the Australian artist’s paintings; indigo serves as a repository of familial memory while ochre is reminiscent of the enduring ties between blood and earth. “In curating this exhibition, we selected pieces that reflect these interwoven connections between land, water, body and memory, with particular attention to rivers, freshwater sources and spiritual landscapes. By doing so, we hope to bring the cultural experiences of Australia’s Indigenous peoples into dialogue with a site like Aranya, where natural and human relationships are profoundly entangled,” the curators said.

The exhibition’s spatial design thoughtfully mirrors the conceptual depth of Watson’s practice, emphasising the physicality and ‘layeredness’ of her materials and ideas. Large-scale artworks hung throughout the space reveal her ongoing engagement with water systems. “The fluid and meditative nature of the video work aligns with Watson’s ongoing engagement with water systems. Meanwhile, images affixed to the glass walls create an interface between the private and the public, symbolising histories shaped by outside observation,” the curators explained.

Watson frequently incorporates graphic motifs such as temperature curves, topographical maps and soil erosion patterns into her compositions. In a large canvas suspended in the centre of the gallery, flinder’s chart, terra australis 1803 with cotton tree leaf and string (kunda yilaka, walkurrji) (2021), a fragment of the Australian map is covered in hues of ochre and blue. In lost islands of the seine with temperature chart (2022), a detailed map of the Australian coast is overlaid with a glaring mass of ochre, indicating the patterns of climatic and ecological change. These graphic forms, though scientific in origin, are rendered expressive to allude to the environmental degradation wrought by colonial expansion and industrial extraction. Other evocative symbols, such as the ‘standing stone’ and ‘spine’ motifs in standing stone, ochre net and spine (2020) and other works double as sacred forms and parts of the body.

Water, a recurring symbol in Watson’s work, flows through the exhibition both visually, in the subtle indigo tones in her paintings, and metaphorically, in the ideas the works reaffirm. It links ancestral memory and environmental consciousness. Aranya’s coastal landscape, brimming with human rhythms, becomes an ideal context for the multimedia artist’s practice.

For Watson, whose works are held in major collections including the British Museum, the National Gallery of Australia and the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, this exhibition emerges as a significant opportunity to foster cross-cultural exchange in a region with its own layered histories of displacement and resistance. “Although her voice emerges from the Southern Hemisphere”, the curators noted, “it resonates with emotional undercurrents present in local Chinese histories—experiences shaped by migration, rupture and rewriting.” The exhibition offers a space where visitors contemplate what it means to remember collectively, across (and despite) distance and difference. It foregrounds the urgencies of ecological stewardship, historical reckoning and cultural survival shared across geographies.

Judy Watson's solo exhibition is on view at Aranya Art Center, China from May 27 – November 23, 2025.