“ Engine is roaring, ship starts to vibrate, and sail swells out in the wind.
- Ship smoke · curl upwards.
Adventure is going to start! ”
Ship Smoke is selected for Harbor City’s Worldwide Public Art design competition. The jury concludes Jean de Loisy, director of the Palais de Tokyo Museum, Andrea Schlieker, director of commissions and special projects at White Cube, independent curator Fang Zhenning, art director Fram Kitagawa, government recommended experts and client’s representatives. Ultimately, 17 out of 500 artworks were officially selected to be made and located on the Shanghai Lujiazui Harbor City street in 2020.
Currently, under the globalization situation, we wish each place could be more localized to reflect their culture and specialization. The new masterplanning of the Harbor City will be localized in Shanghai, a city that is full of culture, memorization and internationalization. Thus, we wish to have proposals that can reflect the contemporary culture and diversity of the world. The application requirements are quite open, we are looking for some fun and high practicability artwork designs.」Fram Kitagawa, curator of the exhibition, he declared the competition theme is “Exploration Ship Travels through the Space and Time” .
Ship Smoke is located on the north entrance of Shanghai Gala Mall (near to the Yincheng Road) and in front of the main building. We wish to connect to the oldship yard history while keeping its functionality.
The concept was inspired from the ship smoke's dynamic air current. We retain the smoke on the basement of ship voyaging eastwards, keeping the ground and skyline horizontally, with a feeling of moving forward. The blank line, providing people with an upper and lower latitude imagination, symbolized a changing and developing city.
Mimicking the floating current artificially is an ideal natural romantic process. The stainless steel implies the immortal material world. Expressing the vivid air with a solid object and emphasized this magic city's general changes in business through time. In Addition, it shows a reflection ofEastern culture’s reverence of nature and history. These provoking thoughts are derived from the way that people deal with the current living situations and corresponding responsibilities towards the future.
As a result, Ship Smoke symbolizes the inheritance of Oriental culture. Through this new artistic expression in architecture, we provide people with an aesthetic feeling and emotional experience toward the space. The combination between architecture and installation has stimulated its vitality, highlighting humanism in city development, achieving a comprehensive functional and spiritual utility.
Public art is the prospects of the future city, as well as an expression in the city's individuality. As the only non-artist perspectivethat was selected among all the submitted works. We wish people could be acknowledged with the avant-garde architecture views, in addition, opening up new conversations between public and society.
Tracing back, we've created eight design works in total, besides “Ship Smoke”, including “Glisten”, "Through", "Existing", "Floating", "Home Harbor", "Soft Air", "Wave Imprint" and "Impression".
With a fun vision to echo Shanghai its unique charm. We try to bring out different views toward life, expecting to create a lively environment for people to live and encourage them to participate into the city artwork creation, furthermore, crossing boundaries between architecture and art.
Material Used :
- Stainless Steel
