About Mirrored Gardens

The path to Mirrored Gardens

About Mirrored Gardens

Based on research of contemporary living conditions, local history and the actual experience of our daily existence, Mirrored Gardens attempts to construct a “field”. Here, contemporary art practice, quotidian life and a kind of farming-oriented life practice, meet and overlap with each other.

As a “constructed nature”, Mirrored Gardens provides a nurture ground for germination and practicing the creative diversity, which may encourage us to learn the energy that allow us to sense and connect with the system of the universe through our daily contact. It will constantly investigate how contemporary art can become a dynamic media that enhances the transformation between different ideas, materials forms and time-space dimensions—the spatial form of Mirrored Garden reflects the processes and results of the interactions of these fluid ideas, practices and energies.

The architecture of Mirrored Gardens is designed by Sou Fujimoto Architects. Inspired by the natural and traditional character of the surrounding villages, the project seeks to merge with its environment. In order to minimize the impact of the building on the site, the program is broken down into several small buildings that create a village-like ensemble.

Architectural Design: Sou Fujimoto Architects

Location research and support: Quadrant Land, Guangzhou
Lighting system research and support: Yangdong Fitech Technology Co.,Ltd.
Textile research in collaboration with Kvadrat

Address: Hualong Agriculture Grand View Garden (化龙农业大观园), Panyu District, Guangzhou
Tel: +86-20-31043759
Email: mail@mirroredgardens.art

Opening Hours:
11:00 – 17:00, Wednesday to Sunday
Closed on Mondays, Tuesdays, and national public holidays.

Transportation Guideline
By driving:
Please search “Hualong Agriculture Grand View Garden (化龙农业大观园)” on your map app, and follow the GPS navigation.
View on Google Map.

By public transportation:
Please get to the Xinzao Station (Line 4) through metro, then find a taxi near exit A1 from the metro station to the Hualong Agriculture Grand View Garden (化龙农业大观园).

Mirrored Gardens, July 2017.

Mirrored Gardens, March 2016.

Mirrored Gardens, February 2015.

Forgetting Each Other in Mountains and Water (excerpt)

Rather than just a question of the physical formation of landscape, the topography of this place should be understood as being part of a cultural topology, which allows us to imagine the possibility of a “homeopathic architecture” (a kind of architecture that complies with the gravity of the Earth and the human scale of perception).

Spring water, rain water, underground water; drinking, recycling, filtering, purifying, irrigating—the aqueous system here does not aim to create a scenery; instead, it is part of an energy cycle. Civilization tends to mature in river delta, humans always live close to the water because there is a pleasure to sense the transparency of the source of life: we like to be intimate with that which nurtures life.

Here, we try not to block or filter the air by any manmade mechanic system. One of today’s problems is: can we still breathe if there is no manmade mechanic system? We can say that we live soaking in air and here the architecture attempts to create a climate that lets us immerse ourselves in natural air.

While we explore our perceptions of light, we also pay attention to the darkness of night and its disappearance in urban space—how do we preserve the dark night here?

Different models were produced during the process of conceptualizing ‘Mirrored Gardens,’ and these spatial or thinking models not only point towards this place, but also to other places; they not only point towards farmland, villages and the city close by, but also to the mountains, rivers and ancient gardens. When looked at from a faraway star, ‘Mirrored Gardens’ may appear to be a spot point in the complex body system of the Earth; and like a small spot in the meridian systems of the human body, it connects the flow of many different energies. While the reasons behind these energy flows remain obscure, they represent both the aspiration to create and to elapse.

Can art, through the persistent quotidian practice of it, hold the possibility of becoming a kind of collaborated labor with our other essential aspects of life? Can it become a system that can always regenerate values, something similar to sustainable agriculture? Here, art will be experimented in reality through the abstract effects of time (whose results may be forever delayed, however). It will learn from all the wisdom of humankind, and become itself an inspiring and contagious practice of living wisdom. From there, materials, skills, humanness and occasionality interweave, representing a view of a vivacious world.

- Excepts from Hu Fang Towards a Non-intentional Space – About Sou Fujimoto’s Architectual Design for Mirrored Gardens, Koenig Books, The Pavilion, 2016, pp.166,167.

Photo：Zeng Han, 2015,2017; Louise G. Feldt, 2016.
Text © Mirrored Gardens, The Pavilion, 2015,2017
All rights reserved.

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