The Shanhai Map
Eight metres of mineral pigment holding two worlds — one seen in daylight, one revealed only under ultraviolet.
- Year
- 2015 – 2019
- Status
- Exhibited · Private collection
- Form
- Painting · Installation
- Materials
- Mineral pigments and fluorescent media on canvas
- Dimensions
- 800 × 220 cm
The work
Under ordinary light the Shanhai Map is a landscape: mountains, seas, weather, the colours of ore. Switch the light and a second painting surfaces from inside the first — thousands of bronze-script characters, totems and diagrams that map the Classic itself. The visible world is what the eye can reach; the hidden world is what the text actually says.
"If you see that all appearances are not appearances, you see the Tathāgata." The painting was built on that line: the surface is only the surface.
The Shanhai Map with a person for scale, ordinary light
IMG-061
Cultural source
Shanhai Jing — geography, rivers and mountain ranges; the atelier's 420-phrase bronze-script lexicon and totem system.
The artist's transformation
The map is not an illustration of the book; it is a reading of it as a cosmology. The two-state structure — appearance and what lies beneath — became a method the atelier now offers for commissioned works: a private layer of meaning that only the owner knows how to reveal.
Making
Dream manuscripts → composition drawings → mineral underpainting → fluorescent notation layer → varnish. The painting is shown with a programmable light cycle.
Scale & variation
Commissioned map-paintings can be made from 1.5 m to architectural scale, with a hidden layer written for the owner — a family genealogy, a company's founding story, the geography of a place.
Placement
A wall that owns a room: hotel lobbies, private libraries, headquarters, cultural venues with controllable light.
Certificate & provenance
Every completed commission is delivered with a certificate of authenticity, a unique work ID, a cultural source note and a making record, and is entered into the atelier's private provenance archive.
Commission
Commission a work in this direction
Made to order, price on request; installations are project-based.
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