EN
Shanhai World — the 340 m² sand table in exhibition, thousands of figures on a painted terrain

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 English, china is both the porcelain and the country.

Shanhai World — gold-finished figures on a sand table under raking light
Shanhai World — figures on hexagonal terraces in the dark
Figure studies on hexagonal wood bases — macro
Figure studies climbing stacked hexagonal bases
Shanhai World — gold-finished figures in the studio
Figure studies — overhead view
A row of figure studies
Figure studies with a ceremonial staff
Lu Renjie in the studio among hundreds of unglazed ceramic figures
Unglazed ceramic beast — close view of the modelled surface
A clay beast on the workbench
A clay figure on a banding wheel, with a clay-covered hand
Small clay figures drying on a tray

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.

A · Hospitality, Brand & DestinationB · Architectural & Site-Specific ArtE · Bespoke Objects & Sculpture
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