Cloud Theater

Cloud Theatre, originally published on 16 December 2015 and developed by Zelin Huang, Xiaomeng Wang, Zihui Huang, Qian Chen and Sensen Zhu, is an exhibition project that asks how environment, identity and architecture ought to coexist. If people always live inside an "environment," the project argues, one must first ask what environment means; the most objective and basic synonym for environment, it suggests, is nature. If building an artificial environment means creating something nature-like, then the question becomes whether the artificial environment should try to transcend its manufactured materials and appear as a natural phenomenon in its own right. Cloud Theatre takes up the theme of re-living the city, and proposes the notion of a "theatre" — a composite assembled from everyday fragments — as an urban theatre whose weather, behaviour and landscape continually change over time. By rethinking behaviour and ideas, and by taking the "building" and the "room" as the basic units that compose a city, the installation tries to expose the relationships beyond material and form: through the body's interaction with space, it encourages dialogue, imagination and the possibility of (re)building environment and city. In the end, the theatre offers a relative, evolving vision: its spectators continue to develop their own observations, feelings and thoughts, and the building itself becomes a proof for landscape and people that they are living inside a spatial landscape. Cloud Theatre is also framed as a form of compensation, reminding visitors that architecture is not merely an image but a way of re-understanding the city, its forms, its spaces and its time.