As corporal beings, how can we mitigate the effects of a hard concrete environment on our bodies?
The conundrum has occupied my thoughts for the past years. My passion for it has driven me from the field of physics to architecture, in which I acquired my B.Arch. degree from Tsinghua University, and now to a more interdisciplinary field at NYU ITP.
Compared to solid rational architectural constructions, shapes of our bodies and organisms are the most familiar and foundational materials when we face concrete surroundings. So I tried to bring these materials into reality through architectural and interactive design.
Human beings, in their essence are living creatures and are best protected in their sensibility of fluidity. When human body confronts with external environment, some fluidity emerges, of which the “fluid space” is comprised.
Fluidity has three unique features:
● Nonhierarchical, indiscriminate, shattered. Firstly, feelings are indiscriminately stored in the fluid space, where each individual can express his feeling like releasing bubbles from any corner of the world. These feelings exhibit no hierarchy, spreading through the fluid space in multiple directions with no single motive, principle, or goal.
● Synthesis, distortion, “sensation filter”. Fluid space contains and represents the distortion of different viewpoints. As a medium, fluid space synthesizes cold objective reality with human’s multifarious sensations. It is also the integration of bold imaginations from a wide variety and number of people.
● New materialism. Chemistry happens when human existence is immersed in bodily fluidity. A new meaning of materialism would arise from a subjective, ambiguous living body and metabolized organism.
My Approach
1. Directly expose the form of inner body organs to highlight the essence of living creatures.
Stomach. Firstly, I envisioned a stomach-like structure hanging over the city in an urban museum design project. This delicate and vulnerable organ-like museum could possibly liberate people from overwhelming anxiety and constant shock from of the concrete environment and help them reconcile with their own fragile corporal existence. I explored further via two other objects.
Heart. Imagine holding a heart-like device in hand. It’s wet and warm; it’s susceptible and fragile, it’s ceaseless while unadaptable. It is designed to beat at the same pace with the user’s real time heartbeat detected by the sensor. Through this device one can visualize his own heartbeat and touch his essence.
Ribs. Similarly, I designed two dresses with silicone airbags on them in the 4D-body pneumatic wearable collections, to emulate the “ribs”. This device is placed outside the body, transforming rigid ribs from a protection of interior organs to a soft exterior membrane of the body. As an interactive device and body extension, it also challenges the disciplinary function of the cloth. The inner beating of muscles can therefore become visible from the outside.
2. Deconstructing images and materials of other living creatures to reconstruct a meaningful relationship with the human body.
Unlike anatomically exposing human organs, in several later projects I tried to exploit more intimate and subtler values that lie within human bodies and other living creatures. Image of plants and animals can bring delicacy, elegance and a sense of strangeness to certain extent. Human bodies embody latent living process like breathing, heart beating, and blood flowing than mere physical form. I mixed these two ideas, and translated them into a metaphoric visual system to touch and comfort people.
In a pneumatic wearable workshop, I built a conceptual work of a flytrap-clothing that moves with the wearer’s heartbeat, and made the initial models by laser cutting nylon and air-bag fabrication. Familiar beating rhythms along with tender cirrus of flytrap gave spectators an immersive experience. In another project Swarming Jellyfish I examined the swimming behavior of a cluster of jellyfish, and made robots moved and reacted to environmental changes in the same behavior pattern.
In architectural practice, I designed a bamboo-made Big Carp in an urban village in the city of Shenzhen, where the carp-like figure has auspicious meanings in local tradition. Formerly a long-ignored subculture group with weak role in spatial hierarchy, I’d like to establish the villagers’ common identity by collecting symbolic local materials and assembling them onto the Big Carp. As more villagers infuse their personalized elements to it, the figure of the carp becomes more vivid. It’s a justification of the villagers’ existence and desires. The work is also a metaphor: fluid Space contains different viewpoints from every corner and every one.
3. Demystify the sensation mechanism, and make feelings designable
My obsession with organic forms and feelings leads to my interests in sensation mechanism. With the target to get more knowledge about the mechanism of eating pleasure, I designed and made a device augmenting the sensation of sucking a lollipop with sound wave of specific hertz, named CAN-D, with two other students. By learning the pattern between input signal and the specific sensation it aroused, I was able to reproduce a particular feeling. Feelings can become something designable. Also, this device enables people to have access to exuberant sensations regardless of their social and wealth status.
4. Materialize physical feelings into architectural environment entity.
Furthermore, I want to scale up the subtle psychological feelings into a grand building, materializing one’s inner feelings and projecting it onto large-scale buildings.
The hospital inhabiting the curable and the incurable, for example, consists of two inverted pyramids: one houses the curable patients, and the other one incurable. The middle layer is an intersection of the two mirroring pyramids. It is the only transparent part of the whole building, exposing the contradiction between two groups of patients - the dead and the survivors - to the city in a theatrical effect. In another work Scaffold of Babel, the construction workers have no place to live in the city, so they build their home around skyscrapers with scaffolds, a tool so familiar to them that almost becomes an extension of their bodies.