Flowing Zen Garden

Exhibited: 2025 Design Shanghai

Dimension: 18x3x3m

Year: 2025

The exhibition space designed for Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Design School was featured at Design Shanghai 2025. The exhibition explores the fusion of digital fabrication technology with Eastern Zen aesthetics, presenting a serene yet technologically immersive space.

Inspired by ‘water ripples’, the space adopts fluid, wave-like forms symbolizing how digital technology spreads like water waves, resonating softly with nature. Floor ripple patterns and 3D-printed art walls resembling splashing water define the spatial flow, while subtle water-ripple textures on background walls enhance the ambiance. Visitors meandering through these fluid curved spaces feel as though they’re stepping into an ever-evolving digital interpretation of an Oriental garden.

Within the exhibition area, parametric-textured 3D-printed art walls simulate natural surfaces, creating a Zen-inspired interplay of reality and illusion through dynamic light and shadow. Soft-curved 3D-printed walls echo ground formations, blending functionality with artistry.  Algorithm-generated organic surfaces reflect dynamic lighting to produce ethereal light effects, conveying transcendental beauty

This design digitally reinterprets the traditional garden concept of ‘scenery changing with every step’. With technology as the brush and Zen as the ink, visitors experience the tranquility and poetry of digital construction within this undulating space. Through evolving lightscapes and forms, the entire space manifests the poetic beauty of nature-digital integration, showcasing the contemporary allure of Eastern aesthetics.