Shanhai World
A civilisation made physical — over eight hundred hand-built figures, a 340 m² terrain, a world you can walk around.
- Year
- 2012 – ongoing
- Status
- Exhibited · Ongoing
- Form
- Ceramic · Sculpture · Installation · Spatial
- Materials
- Hand-built ceramic; gold-finished figure studies; painted terrain; light
- Dimensions
- 809 figures to date · sand table 340 m² · scalable from a single tabletop terrace to a hall
The work
The Classic of Mountains and Seas is not a bestiary. It is the record of an early people surveying heaven and earth — mountains, rivers, minerals, plants, peoples and the creatures that stood at the edges of what they knew. Shanhai World takes that survey and makes it physical: every place, animal, plant and ancestor in the text is given a form, and the forms are set on a terrain so that the book can be walked.
The first 809 figures were modelled by hand in clay, scanned at 0.02 mm and re-materialised so that the same form can be produced in ceramic, bronze, resin or stone at any scale. The complete world will be ceramic — because in Chinese the word for porcelain and the word for the country are the same.
Unglazed ceramic figures — close-up
IMG-043
Cultural source
Shanhai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), the Five Treasuries of Mountains and the Classic of Seas — geography, fauna, flora, minerals and ancestral genealogies.
The 809 forms constitute the atelier's Form System; the 3,407 totems and 420 bronze-script phrases painted on the terrain are its Totem and Bronze-script Systems.
The artist's transformation
Nothing here is a reproduction of a historical image. Each figure is Lu Renjie's own reading of a line of text — the posture of Yan Di, the tail of Zouyu, the nine tails of the fox — rendered in a single, consistent sculptural language that reads as one world rather than a collection of illustrations.
Making
Clay → laser scan → master model → mould → ceramic / cast bronze / resin → finish (gold, patina or unglazed) → hexagonal timber terraces → terrain painting → light.
Scale & variation
A single terrace with three figures for a desk; a 2–6 m terrain for a lobby or private gallery; a full hall for an exhibition, hotel or museum. Every scale uses the same forms.
Placement
Lobbies, private galleries, boardrooms, cultural destinations, hotel public spaces.
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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