Walking into an exhibition hall at the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University (AADTHU), visitors are met by innovative and prophetic art pieces, such as a space wedding dress, robots, and even art installations examining the future of the world. These works were created for the International Art & Design Workshops, a part of the ongoing 2021 Tsinghua International Conference on Art & Design Education (ICADE 2021).

"Outer space is a ceiling for art and science, and we want to explore such cutting-edge things," Genifer Zhao told China.org.cn. Zhao is a student in the Department of Information Art & Design at AADTHU who was involved in creating the artworks for the "Zero Gravity Fashion - A Guide to Wearing in Space" workshop. She explained that tutors and students from Tsinghua University, Hunan University and the Berlin University of Arts worked together with professionals from outdoor clothing enterprise Toread to explore ideas of fashion and practicability in a zero-gravity environment.

"We wanted to find out about routines and daily designs, what changes will they go through when they are in a totally different situation and environment? Like a 30-meter-long wedding dress - you might feel like it's too big and not convenient for walking in, but in space, it's not really a problem," she said. 

Zhao explained that their designs for the workshop are crossover pieces, with aerospace teachers acting as consultants on the works. They are also not just artistic concepts, but can also be used in different space application scenarios, as all the materials and textiles they used are actually able to be used in space and on a Mars base. 

In another corner of the exhibition, the world could end soon, but hope still exists. Dong Runshi, a student from the Department of Painting at AADTHU showed an art piece titled "Live" inspired by the traditional Chinese concept of "bagua" ("eight trigrams") for the "Crisis Countdown" workshop. He explained that the work focuses on the separation and fusion of the eight trigrams, expressing the reverence for natural ecology, and using the form of strata to express the indiscriminatory nature of "human-made" and "natural" things.

He shared the vision of collaborating with other creators for this work: "Even in the technological present-day, when the yin and yang of heaven and earth are in chaos, nature will still have its own law of change, and new life will still survive amid the crisis."

Qin Yexuan, a doctoral student at AADTHU who studies contemporary public art, also showed China.org.cn the art piece she and her fellow workshop participants and teachers had worked on, which is a miniature display of a desert oasis. "We're trying to express our concerns for ecology through an artistic creative language, as no one can stand alone in the face of global climate change. We wanted to explore the relationship between humanity and nature from the internal perspective of human beings. As people live in big or small ecologies, and in complex and diverse backgrounds, many internal problems inside our human society have affected the human-nature relationship," she said.

The "Crisis Countdown - Ecological Expression of Locality and Globe" workshop is a crossover and cross-university collaboration, involving AADTHU associate professors Feng Fan and Fu Bin, as well as professors from Tsinghua's Department of Earth System Science and Carnegie Mellon University's School of Art in the United States.

Qin said the creators had left room for the audience to think and find their own answers. "The most important thing for contemporary art is asking questions. Here we raise questions for every member of humanity, such as issues of paying attention to ecological environment, how we can live naturally, and whether the weakness of institutions and systems will lead to the failure of mankind's overall destiny."

There are a lot of artworks, designs and imaginative art concepts on display for the International Art & Design Workshops, which is being held in Tsinghua University in Beijing until Nov. 15. The workshop and exhibition sections have gathered multiple international universities and experts from frontier disciplines of art and design, to form five trans-disciplinary and intercultural workshops. All of the workshops aim to amplify the voice of the youth, in order to echo with the theme of ICADE 2021: "ASK: Our Diverse World."

Besides the "Zero Gravity Fashion" and "Crisis Countdown" workshops mentioned above, another three workshops were held. The "Robot Carnival - From Characters to Characteristics" workshop provided advanced modular robot creative platform components to support members with fast implementation of realistic robot design, and explored the innovative form of future robot design through comprehensive application of knowledge and skills across many disciplines such as robot technology, new media, interactive design and animation. "Communication at a Distance - Designing Across Space and Time" explored the use of software and hardware to eliminate the obstacles of time and space, in order to provide a more intimate and real communication experience. Finally, the "Super Digital Scenes" workshop consisted of two modules - "New Space Economy: City Change Maker" in Beijing and "More than Games" in Shenzhen - which explored the digital content on economy, space, city and the bigger value of video games in the virtual world.