How to Reconstruct our Garden?






During my graduate studies at Fudan University, my friends and I often spent our evenings at a livehouse just outside the campus called Air Garden. It was a sanctuary where we could briefly step outside the order of school life, a place that brought together people who loved music, literature, and film, and where feelings of affection and confusion, intimacy and escape intertwined. Over three years, we gathered there countless times until, at the end of 2024, this space too quietly disappeared. In the past four years, two other similar venues also closed, prompting me to reflect on why we need these informal gathering places so much and why they seem so difficult to preserve in our environment. Is it only because of economic reasons?

Livehouses, a form that originated in the West, gave us a space to express ourselves through music and to respond to our emotions and reality. As these spaces vanish one after another, I began using 3D scanning, AI, and installation to reimagine Air Garden, bringing back those fleeting moments that once held our shared resonance and intertwining them with imagined classic venues from Western music culture to evoke an atmosphere suspended between the real and the illusory. This is not about recreating the past, but about responding to our longing for lost places and a sense of spiritual belonging, and about reconsidering how these fragile, informal spaces might endure and how we can reimagine new cultural and emotional spaces of our own.