Case study

Mountain Seaing

Jingdezhen

A book every child in China knows. Nobody had been inside it.

Every child in China grows up with the Classic of Mountains and Seas, a book of mythic geography packed with strange lands and even stranger beasts. Everyone knows it. Until Mountain Seaing, nobody had ever walked around inside it.

The audience steps into darkness, lit only by an eye socket with dry ice pouring out of it. Three masked musicians play somewhere behind them, and a nine-tailed fox appears in the pupil to invite everyone in. Nobody looks for a seat, because there aren't any. The piece opened in May 2021, inaugurating a new David Chipperfield building in Taoxichuan, the cultural district of a city that has been making porcelain for a thousand years.

What we built

The source

Director Chen Shi-Zheng built the piece on that ancient book. Together with Studio Leigh Sachwitz, our job was to create the world it happens in: media concept, video design, interactive development and production, all around the audience and across two LED walls.

The space

The content is no backdrop. Made in Notch, it reads dancers and visitors and responds to them, so patterns bloom across the walls wherever people actually are. And because the audience stands inside the frame from start to finish, every image has to work from every angle at once, for a crowd that never stops moving.

The scenes

There are eight scenes. A spaceship explodes around the audience. The Yellow River pours in from one wall while a Pacific vortex swallows it on the other, with the crowd standing right in the collision. A sun trapped in a block of ice drops from the ceiling, and the world cools from warm to white until it snows. A pocket watch swings overhead and splits the crowd in two. After the eclipse, ultraviolet light reveals monster patterns on the masks, a camera picks them up, and the walls fill with the faces of the people watching. Finally, a clay plate spins and flings muddy water, curtains fall, four suspended figures appear, and the fox returns to sing the last song.

The challenge

No stage, no seats. The image wraps around everyone, the dancers move through it rather than in front of it, and every interaction has to feel intended, never accidental. All of it was designed in Berlin for a building on the other side of the world, opening its doors for the very first time. One premiere, no second chance.

By the last song, nobody has sat down. They're far too busy spotting their own masked faces on the wall.