Ma Yin created the Aranya,
It is a good life practiced by a group of people,
It is also a source of spiritual life.
The name "Aranya" derives from the Sanskrit transliteration of Aranya, which means "secluded place, place of practice", and the name emphasizes the objective sense of distance, but also emphasizes the subjective psychological alienation, and Aranya's geographical location is also in line with this interpretation. Anaya is located in Qinhuangdao City, Changli ⻩ Golden Coast, more than three hours away from Beijing, and the city life to maintain a safe distance, it is not too far from Beijing, to Aranya can be a day outing; it is not particularly close to Beijing, you can live for a while, in the seaside community to relax a life of escape and escape.
Anaya Auditorium
After several years of development, In addition to sea-view villas, apartments and sea entertainment projects, Anaya has a variety of cultural and artistic facilities in addition to the Lonely Library. Aranya's construction of a better life is from simply producing a house to meeting the all-round needs of customers at the material, emotional and spiritual levels, of which spiritual products are the highest product forms of Aranya. We interviewed Ma Yin, founder and CEO of the Aranya brand, about what he understands as a beautiful community life.
Create a warm and community space
Experiment with the good life
In the first half of his life, Ma Yin has been in the traditional real estate industry, taking land, developing, building, selling... Like most people living in Beijing, he will lack a sense of security and belonging to the city, and his daily life will be anxious.
Regarding Aranya, at first Ma Yin got a rotten project in Changli County, Qinhuangdao, and wanted to sell it in the short term, but he did not expect to sell it for a long time, and had to force himself to think about this project back.
Under intense pressure, he began to rethink the definition of real estate. When the Haiju project is still oriented to the standard of "rich and compelling sea-view villas", Ma Yin keenly smells that people's consumption concepts have been quietly changing, and more and more people have begun to realize the sacrifice and lack of spiritual life after meeting material needs, and began to look back at the true desire of their hearts.
Founder of Anaya, Ma Yin.
He still remembers that 8 years ago, standing on the beach of Aranya, nearly forty years old, he also began to think about what he really wanted to live, and his heart seemed to be re-aroused with a calm courage. At that moment, he thought of the hutong alley where he lived when he was a child, and the kind of life that the neighborhood space organization brought to people was happy and harmonious, and the life that could breathe freely was extremely nostalgic. So he decided to stay, boldly according to his own plan for the ideal life, personally built a "self-reserved land" by the sea, and shared his dream and understanding of life with his peers who liked beauty through Aranya.
As Mr. Fei Xiaotong summed up in "Native China", China is a human society, and Chinese is more willing to live in the warm pulse of the world in terms of emotions. Ma Yin hopes that the Aranya he built himself can provide a new way of life of integration, where the house is just a carrier and the community space is the essence. People can rediscover the beautiful relationships they had in their neighborhoods as they were young, rebuild the intimate relationships between people, and at the same time, create avant-garde cultural and artistic experiences, and encourage the exploration of independence and individuality.
Aranya Auditorium, designed by Dong Gong.
Therefore, Aranya's success is not so much the success of values. If the past was an era of industrialized, function-oriented materialism, we are entering an era of the mind with multiple values and experiences and feelings at its core. What Aranya advocates, on the material level, is quality simplicity and restrained abundance; from the spiritual level, it advocates a return to the family, to nature, to tradition, to a spiritual authentic life. Aranya not only advocates freedom and inclusiveness, but also practices caring, caring and warmth through architecture, space, content and community through architecture, space, content and community, and is a true seaside peach blossom source.
Simple but of quality
Temperance, but more abundance
Ma Yin likes to share Peking University Professor Wang Dingding's understanding of a happy life - a happy life consists of three parts, one is material life, one is social life, and the other is spiritual life.
The core competitiveness of Aranya, Ma Yin is very sure, is spiritual life and culture and art. Many of Aranya's spiritual buildings are associated with a beautiful scene that Ma Yin experienced or longed for in his heart. There is a word called "decisive moment", Ma Yin believes that capturing inspiration not only requires mobilizing intuition, but also a long-term accumulation of a person who loves life, recognizes the world, and practices aesthetics.
An ideal state, from the perspective of material space, there are spiritual buildings that are sufficient to carry a good life. Culture and art are as ubiquitous as air, integrated into people's daily lives, and people, space, and things are completely harmonious and unified, which is a simple state of life aesthetics.
The Aranya Auditorium is home to community concerts, art exhibitions and other events, and is a cultural and artistic space full of rituals.
From the "Lonely Library" that initially became popular through a public account platform, to the Aranya Auditorium, along the 2.5-kilometer coastline, these spiritual spaces connected by the seaside jogging track are truly lonely fields shaped by the extraction of complex social life and excess social needs. And this way of enjoying the beauty of solitude and the way of quietness in noisy times became one of the spiritual themes of Aranya.
Lonely library
In fact, the original intention of building the library was because Ma Yin, who was engaged in real estate, was actually a graduate of Chinese language and literature, so he first thought of building a library. He wanted the library to return to its natural state under the modern architectural techniques, looking like a reef growing on the beach. The library faces the sea, unique caves for chatting with people, exclusive meditation rooms provide space to spend time with yourself... Regarding feelings and loneliness, Ma Yin did not think about it at first.
A close-up view of the Lonely Library
And when he saw a passage in "Good Solitude": "Loneliness is not the deliberate self-cultivation, self-requirement, and self-transformation of human beings, not the product of human civilization, but the oldest truth of nature, the most primitive "original face" of all things, and only then do we have a new understanding of "loneliness" and "personality" and complete the recognition of the name of the lonely library."
Over the past few years, the Aranya Art Center, the One-Way Space Aranya Store, the Dossier Bookstore, the Dune Art Gallery of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, and the Ceremonial Theatre, the Meng Jinghui Theatre, the Cui Jian Music Studio, the DDC Rehearsal Hall and other ceremonial entertainment and performance venues have been built here.
The Anaya Art Center, Neri & Hu, is the director of the Design Lab.
In addition to the cultural activities held in the spiritual landmarks, the owners of Aranya will spontaneously organize community festivals, such as poetry festivals, life festivals, drama festivals, coming-of-age ceremonies and so on. In the future, Aranya will become a boundless cultural and artistic holy land, an ecological community with a beautiful way of life, and the people involved in it will continue to enrich and expand the boundaries of life, so that daily life will be artistic and artistic life will be daily. Aranya has upgraded from a seaside humanistic community to a cultural and artistic town, and is growing towards a cultural and artistic brand.
Youth is an infinite state of life
It is also a group of people who illuminate each other
There are more than 100 groups of owners in Aranya, and Ma Yin has been active for a long time, affectionately known as the "village chief", and from the beginning, the owners group has established an atmosphere of equal, open and transparent discussion, which makes it easy to establish a relationship of trust between each participant in the community. Now, the community in Aranya is becoming more and more "out of control", becoming a "self-organization" for neighbors to organize themselves, get to know each other, and develop interests. In 2019, the Aranya community hosted more than 1,000 community events, half of which were self-organized by the owners.
A spiritual world unique to Aranya is the best interpretation of the value of Aranya's "Quiet Way".
Ma Yin believes that Aranya is a spiritual gift from heaven to himself, and the modern city that is more and more isolating and "atomizing" people has gradually lost the steaming state of life, but in fact, our whole life needs to find ourselves and be ourselves in the interaction and relationship with others. And a community is a state of life that a group of people live together. The biggest feeling of this community is "the infinite youth and vitality of life". Many people are engaged in sports all year round, willing to learn new skills, enthusiastically devoted to art, and their enthusiasm for life has inspired and infected the people around them. Many artists, designers, and architects who are associated with Aranya exude vitality and passion, and with them, you can feel their exuberant creativity and vitality. Not to mention, there are a large number of young people who have their own dreams and retain their passion for creation. People are illuminated by each other's light, so they retain a youthful spirit.
Tucked away on the coast and under the beach, the UCCA Dunes Museum combines heaven and earth, and hosts a large number of high-level art exhibitions every year.
Youth is a proposition of life, representing a state of life, related to curiosity, not to age. Being young is also a worldview, how you see the world and how you relate to it. As Mu Xin said, "Life is a return to the basics after a long journey", and anyone who has experienced life in Aranya may be able to feel this profound but young, peaceful but fearless spiritual atmosphere.
UCCA Dune Art Museum, designed by Li Hu of OPEN Architects.
In 2020, Aranya North District was newly unveiled, and the community extended northward on the existing basis, and the overall area expanded from 3300 mu to 6500 mu, gradually developing into a future-oriented seaside town. The North Shore, the most important component of Aranya North, will present a younger, more international, trendier and more dynamic lifestyle.
At the same time, Ma Yin's team is also developing projects for two mountains, Wuling Mountain and Jinshanling. "The benevolent leshan, the wise enjoy the water", in the emotional world of Chinese, the mountain is a special existence. If the sea has an attribute of natural joy, especially on a summer beach, then the mountain gives people a sense of calm, solemnity, gentleness and humility, which can bring infinite spiritual comfort. Mountains are the complement of the sea, which together constitute the closed loop of life, which is what Aranya has always advocated - to construct the way of joy and quietness of life. Wuling Mountain's project will also focus on hot springs and make China's real hot spring culture.
UCCA Dune Gallery, interior.
In addition, Ma Yin's team has also prepared projects for Beijing customers and Aranya customers in Sanya, in addition to weekends and holidays to go on vacation, Aranya's community customers can also choose to fly to Sanya in winter for winter.
This year, Anaya will carry out project cooperation with several cities to explore a richer and more diversified brand growth method in the form of operation management and brand output.
Renderings of the "North Shore Phase IX" of the Aranya Project, Aerial view of the port of St. Blue River.
Renderings of the Aranya project "North Shore Phase IX", Square.
Aranya's value proposition is that "life can be more beautiful", which is different from the traditional concept of "creating a better life", the concept of "more beautiful" is based on the heart, and it needs to be constantly explored, pursued and defined by oneself. The 8 years of Aranya cannot be copied, it is a group of people who also hope for a better life to grope together.
Any beauty to pursue in the world,
It must all have to go through reality,
A long, painful groping, and finally firm in the original intention,
Only those who keep running can reach "beauty".
This, perhaps, is Aranya as a kind
Spiritual life is the source of inspiration for everyone.
Text / Tsuen
Photo / Courtesy of respondents
Edited by / Shi Weiwei
New Media Executive / JESSICA
Editor-in-Charge / LENNY