JUMP Urban Electric Field Public Art Installation

JUMP City Electric Field is a 2023 temporary public-art installation by the Ohnishi Yoshiko Design Studio for the second Ranran Art Season, jointly presented by Xintiandi and the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art under the theme City Jump. It sits in Taipingqiao Park, east of Xintiandi Phase One and next to the site of the First National Congress of the CCP, and is commissioned by UCCA, built by Pico, structured by Xia Bin, art-directed by Xie Qiongzhi and led by chief designer Zeng Zhenwei, with sound by the artist Zhi. The project imagines art as a generator for the city: a large interactive light tower, twelve smaller companion pieces and citizen-co-created figures together tell a story in which art pumps energy into urban space. The main installation is a 9.7-metre-high, 7-metre-diameter light tower on the open eastern lawn, surrounded by three trampolines. Its central structure is a double-walled, hollow seven-sided tower in silver stainless-steel scaffolding, anchored about one metre into the ground, and wrapped in four stacked rings of frosted translucent membrane that read like a capacitor. Eighty-four outdoor LED tubes, arranged in three layers per ring, run parallel to the membrane in a fully programmable matrix drawing orange, yellow, purple and green from the electromagnetic spectrum. By day the tower is a smooth, rounded object; after dark the membrane breathes slow, coloured light over the lawn. When visitors jump on the trampolines, sensors trigger the tower: each trampoline is three metres wide and sixty centimetres high, with a mirror-lined elastic net that transmits jump intensity to the light matrix, so that one jumper lights one ring from bottom to top and several jumpers light multiple rings, producing a spectrum of expressive light faces. An ambient electronic score by the sound artist Zhi weaves through the city's background noise. Along the roughly one-kilometre park path, twelve smaller JUMP Electric Pups are inserted beside trees, steps, flowerbeds and lampposts, built from lightweight everyday materials such as swim rings, reflectors, telephone wire and yarn, and fully recyclable after the exhibition. A blind-box workshop invited citizens to make their own Electric Pups, and in 2024 the installation travelled to the OCT-LOFT creative park in Shenzhen. The project treats jumping as a bodily way of re-sensing the city: visitors are no longer passive spectators but generators of energy, and the installation becomes a connector that reactivates the park, the shopping street and the everyday rhythms of urban life.