Installation, 2026
Hangzhou, China
Design: ZHANG Jie
Special Thanks: SHI Yuxin, WANG Yu
For PlantB
Visitors are invited to enter, climb, crouch, and pass through the rings, engaging with the structure through movement and physical exploration. Rather than prescribing a fixed path or function, the work remains open-ended. People are encouraged to discover their own ways of interacting with the space, creating their own moments of engagement and encounter.
Through this openness, the installation becomes a field of shifting bodily experiences—where architecture, landscape, and movement intersect, and each visitor briefly composes their own spatial narrative.
The installation invites multiple ways of engagement. It becomes a bodily theatre of movement and swaying, a space where play is constantly redefined. What might resemble a whack-a-mole-like game turns into shifting bodily negotiations; imagined “tree-planting” unfolds as a collective act of make-believe; and a field of improvised ball-throwing emerges across countless baskets, reconfiguring rules through use.
Flexible bamboo rings are connected through knotted joints, forming a continuous, yielding surface that behaves less like a fixed structure and more like a responsive membrane. As visitors move through and interact with it, the installation subtly shifts and oscillates, as if the entire surface were gently disturbed by currents of movement. It recalls the surface of water touched by fish—constantly registering, absorbing, and translating bodily presence into waves of motion.
The installation is suspended between five trees, making only minimal interventions in the site and leaving no trace after the three-day event. It is assembled using reusable, everyday materials—such as S-hooks and hemp ropes—adopting a deliberately low-tech approach to produce a theatrical spatial intervention.
Throughout the installation period, I remain on site as a facilitator, guiding interactions and observing how people engage with the work. Interestingly, both adults and children intuitively understand and follow an implicit “rule” of play—to protect both themselves and the structure while fully engaging with it, as one parent described it. This shared awareness allows for a surprisingly open yet careful mode of participation, becoming an unexpected observation and insight for the designer.
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