2024
Aquatic Theatre
Shanghai
ADS 12, RCA
Aquatic Theatre
Shanghai
ADS 12, RCA
JHSY（镜花水月）: Flower in mirror, moon on water. ("an illusion", "a mirage")
This conceptual theater reimagines Jiangnan’s floating opera stages through a water-based architectural language. Four intelligent rail-mounted modules reconfigure diurnally: coalescing into a crystalline glass pavilion by day, then transforming into an immersive aquatic stage at night. The steel-glass framework achieves ethereal buoyancy, mirroring celestial patterns by daylight and dramatic chiaroscuro by night—materializing the Taoist dialectic of zhen (reality) and huan (illusion). Beyond mutable staging, the design interrogates Eastern aesthetics’“seeing/being seen” paradox through fragmented forms and mist-mirror interplay, where architecture itself becomes both performer and optical apparatus in a kinetic meditation on perception’s fluidity.
*Southern Branch Dream* adapts the classic Chinese allegory recounting a drunkard’s dream of a lifetime of power and turmoil in a foreign kingdom, only to awaken discovering this “civilization” was but an anthill beneath a tree. This absurdist narrative embodies the Zen philosophy on “life’s illusory nature”. Leveraging this textual framework, I crafted an animation sequence to articulate the aquatic theater’s luminous scenography. Through dynamic light refraction and aquatic projections to materialize Eastern metaphysics—where water-glass interfaces dissolve boundaries between tangible and imagined, rendering reality a permeable, ever-shifting construct.
