The Vanished House

The Vanished House was created for the second East Lake International Ecological Sculpture Biennale in Wuhan in 2021, sited in Shimenfeng Memorial Park, a cemetery of beautiful setting and tranquil atmosphere where the deceased rest and remembrance lingers. The work is intended to resonate with this special condition. It depicts a house wrapped in rampant ivy; the house is a symbol of home and native place, and once the house itself is withdrawn, the enveloping ivy becomes a memory of the vanished living space, and thus a remembrance of the people and things of the past. It is a memorial space that visitors can enter and experience. After settling on a vanished house as the response, the team first considered a locally characteristic Wuhan house, but research showed that old Wuhan residential buildings lacked obvious regional traits, while representative public buildings would have been inappropriate in this setting. The final choice was the simplest image of a house, stripped of locality and symbols, resembling a child's drawing, whose simplicity and purity are enriched by the texture of the rampant ivy. To express the sense of disappearance, the team made a 1:10 cardboard model and hand-drew the ivy growth on it, controlling density, vine thickness, and turns on the walls. The hand-drawing was the most emotional and passionate stage, lending the work a distinctive handcrafted and painterly quality. The tedious work followed: converting the drawing into vector files for laser cutting in Corten steel, disassembling the model for high-resolution scanning, and manually tracing every line and their junctions. The material is two-centimeter-thick Corten steel, chosen because its rusted dark-red tone expresses the vine texture and because the self-supporting plates can form an enterable space without additional structure. Over time, the steel darkens under sun and rain, and the work's intention deepens. Measuring 9.8 by 5.1 by 4.8 meters, the piece becomes more vivid with every season.