2024 - Canvas of Light

The design uses the interaction with daylight as the pathway of imagination from left-behind children’s inner world, repairing the dilapidated abandoned houses in the hollow villages. This gives the rural children, who are introverted and reluctant to express their emotions due to the lack of parental companionship, an opportunity to express their observation of the world, and at the same time adding vitality to the hollow villages in China.
With China’s rapid urbanization, young rural population has transferred to cities on a large scale to look for jobs, leaving only the elderly and children in the countryside with many places unmaintained. Rural families which once stayed in their hometown villages were like a large tree with deep roots in the land. But many villages in China nowadays have become hollow trunks, guarded by children and the elderly alone. Left-behind children are a by-product of the hollow village phenomenon, referring to those under the age of 16, whose parents have left the countryside for a better live in cities. Statistics released by China’s Ministry of Education in 2023 showed that the number of rural left-behind children amounted to 15.5 million.
Due to financial difficulty, left-behind children seldom leave their hometown along with their parents, and the hollowing village has many negative impacts on their lives and psychological status:
First, with the loss of rural population, many houses in the villages are uninhabited. As a result, there are not many families lighting up, the villages always lack artificial lighting during night because lights in houses are not turned on. This poses a great threat to the safety of children traveling at night. Whether they are playing with their friends in the village at night or on the way home after playing, the lack of light and protection by guardians will make them feel uneasy.
Second, with adults migrating to cities for work, children lack communication with their family members. Psychological studies have shown that such separation has negative effects on children’s self-expression and education. Childhood is a stage with the most vibrant imagination and the desire to express oneself. However, in a village where there are no listeners and no means to convey their thoughts about the world, many children can’t learn how to express themselves.
Therefore, our idea is to repair the unoccupied damaged buildings like ancestral halls in the village. Through light-storing luminescent film technology, these restored ancestral halls become ”lighthouses” in the hollow village. The renovated ancestral halls serve as large ”toys” for the children during the day, providing them with a place to play and storing sunlight. At night, they emit light, providing illumination for the children in the sparsely populated rural nights. The restoration brings the unmaintained and damaged buildings in hollow villages back to life.
At the same time, we use the repaired façade to help children release their imagination, alleviating the problem of left-behind children not knowing how to express their emotions. This help them become aware of to their own inner worlds and psychological health, and find a bridge to communicate with the outside world. We found inspiration in the structure of the liquid crystal drawing board we used to play with in our childhood, disassembled it and designed it as a three-layer membrane structure:
1. the upper layer, a protective plastic film, used to hold the pressure exerted by children’s painting
2. the middle layer, a liquid crystal film, used to control whether to penetrate or impede daylight according to the pressure from painting, forming painting patterns
3. the bottom layer, a white light-storing film, is used to absorb and store sunlight during the day, emitting light at night.
We fix this structure onto revolving doors for the restoration of ancestral hall facade. Similar to traditional Chinese shadow play, during the day, sunlight projects the shadows of trees and other objects of rural environment onto the new liquid crystal film. Children can unfold their imagination and draw around the shadows with their hands. Pressure from their hands changes the optical properties of the liquid crystal film, reflecting sunlight without passing it. While the untouched areas of the liquid crystal film remain transparent, allowing light to penetrate to the bottom luminescent film for storage. At night, the luminescent film below the areas without drawings emits light, providing illumination for the village while highlighting the artworks created by children during the day. This ”canvas” can be reused, and the drawings on the film can be erased and redrawn by applying electricity.
The Canvas of Light not only fills the hollows in the countryside but also fills the void in the hearts of left-behind children.