Variark of Many Natures: A Mobile Museum of Art&Education

At the end of 2024, Being Art Museum launched the Art Being Expedition, a long-term initiative to rebalance arts education between urban and rural Shanghai. Within this framework, we initiated Variark: Of Many Natures as an independent, curator-led platform and collaborated with the museum to debut Variark – Issue 1 in 2025 as one of the expedition’s “Moving Museum + Art in Schools” projects. The first tour brings high-quality public art & nature education and resources into 14 rural and peri-urban schools in Pudong, reaching over 10,000 students through exhibitions, art classes, and workshops.
We adapt ecological art and science content from our previous ecological art practices. A refitted caravan and 100 modular wooden displays, teaching kits, and interactive stations turn classrooms and courtyards into temporary learning environments where children can encounter endangered plants, urban species, migratory birds, and nature-based stories without leaving campus. Children step
into small habitats of images, specimens, stories, and interactive elements rather than simply viewing works on a wall. Variark is designed as the first chapter of a broader biocultural atlas: a flexible, growing platform that can continue to travel, adapt, and generate new formats within China and, in the future, across borders. Variark is conceived as a continuing series rather than a single tour. Issue 1 prototypes the core language of the mobile museum—
small-scale, lightweight, modular, and immersive showing how ecological art and natural-history storytelling can travel from museums into everyday school life and bring “zero-distance” encounters with art and nature to young people in under-served communities.