Artist uses mirrors to show lines blurring between real and virtual

Standing inside artist Deng Guoyuan's installation Noah's Garden, visitors see many reflections of themselves, leaving them confused, while they smell the flowers and can touch the rocks in the garden.

The 58-year-old artist has built a 53-square-meter glass garden with mirrors to create a space where people experience reality and the virtual world simultaneously.

The garden is divided into six spaces by walls of mirrors. Each space has different plants and rocks of various shapes and sizes.

The garden is named after Noah in a nod to the "great flood" referred to in the Bible, says Deng.

Zhu Qingsheng, the curator of Deng's show in Beijing's Red Brick Art Museum, says the work is an experiment in an era when people are being overcome by the deluge of information and technology.

"After the fourth industrial revolution, people's anxieties have increased as the line between reality and the virtual world. The garden is an ideal space to remind us of that," says Zhu.

Before the show in Beijing, Noah's Garden was put up in an exhibition hall at the Summer Davos Forum in Tianjin in June.

Deng says he was surprised when he was requested to put up the installation at the economic meeting. But after he learned that the theme of the event was the "fourth industrial revolution and its transformational impact", he understood why he was called upon to show his work at the event.

"People now worry about our environment that is being destroyed by industrialization. My garden is a kind of spiritual return and else a warning," says Deng.

Deng first developed Noah's Garden in 2014, but it was much smaller than the one displayed in Beijing.

Then, in August, when the installation was at the Tianjin port awaiting shipment to Japan for an art biennial, it was destroyed in a massive warehouse explosion.

Deng received the remains of his work five months after the explosion, then repaired the ruins and showed it in Tianjin.

Every time his installation is put up, he redecorates it with local plants. He says he enjoys the process of creating a localized Noah's Garden for people in different cities. "Every time it's an experiment and reinvention."

Before turning to installations, Deng made traditional ink paintings based on Chinese gardens. But now he sees his installations as a three-dimensional way to present his paintings.

Speaking of his work, Deng, who is also the head of the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, says: "For the Chinese, gardens are far more than nature. We integrate our philosophies into the gardens. It's a kind of spiritual world."

dengzhangyu@chinadaily.com.cn