2024 - Light Passing through Life and Death

The culture of tomb worship is the most mysterious and obscure part of Chinese culture. This traditional culture has a strong influence and permeates every Chinese person’s life in secret. Whether it’s a set of bowls and chopsticks set up during festivals or burning incense paper money, they all reflect the lingering longing of the living for the departed.

Due to the lagging planning and construction management of public cemeteries, the increasingly prominent supply-demand contradiction between funeral needs and funeral land resources, and the preference of citizens for traditional tombs, the phenomenon of private burial and disorderly burial in some cities has existed for a long time, and the problem of ”graves surrounding mountains” is difficult to cure. In some scenic spots, tourists even need to pass through cemeteries, and some of these graves are still unowned, making management difficult. At the same time, the traditional Chinese concept of ”settling in the soil for safety” also made the original burial ground of great significance. How to ensure that the relocated traditional cemetery not only retains a certain degree of commemoration, but also integrates well with the planned park green space, will become the focus of design.

In order to solve the problem of relocation of mass graves, we approach it from the perspective of traditional sacrificial rituals. The green smoke that floats in the sky after burning incense during ancestor worship represents the communication and remembrance of souls in the sky by the living. We represent the connection between these two worlds as an upward beam of light, using mist to create smoke instead of traditional sacrificial imagery, while also enhancing the ornamental value of the installation. We hope to leave an interface for dialogue between two worlds in the place where bones were buried in the past through such a beam of light.