The art installation Drilling in the temple originated from my attention to protection of historical architecture and old urban areas. The Hongen Temple built in the Qing Dynasty is in the vicinity of the Bell and Drum Towers in Beijing. The temple’s structure remains intact through years of neglect of reparation. The traditional courtyard dwellings in the neighborhood have been demolished because of development of new real estate projects. As an architect, I have tried to do something with my professional ability for the vanishing old city.
The value of the Chinese traditional architecture lies in the singular wooden structure and the
imperial roof above the structure. The exquisite structure hides in the gloom, which is not easy to be known by people. The way to experience the structure by looking up weakens the emotional
connection to visitors.
The installation projects the intersection of roof structure to the ground by using over two
thousand elastic threads and a roof plan is drawn by the threads. Sunlight streams down to these
threads like drizzling in the temple.
When visitors walk through the threads and look up the traditional wooden structure, they will
see tie-beams and ridges connecting each other in order; when they look down to the ground, a
projection of the roof drawing shows up. Meanwhile, the visitors in the installation experience
the dimensions of the traditional building by their senses and bodies to revoke or reconstruct the memory and understanding of the traditional architecture and realize the emotional connection and cultural identity between time and spaces.This is a creation for an assigned subject—the Beijing Design Week invited ten architects, and each architect must use four identical cubes of laminated bamboo lumber in the length of 2.5 meters to create an installation. Although the material was limited, there was a space to express.
