As If There Were

Year: 2023–24
Role: Mural · Creative research
Team: Fan Xiang · Huiyan Huang
Partner: Adora Magic City cruise ship
Includes: Generative mural · Site-specific work · Paper

A Silk Road–themed generative mural created for the passage outside a theatre, using controlled randomness to translate the elusive atmosphere of ancient art into a contemporary spatial experience.

Recreating ancient art in the present

Commissioned in 2023 for the theatre corridors of the Adora Magic City cruise ship, the mural began with a contradiction: a contemporary work could neither simply copy ancient images nor assume that digital tools alone would make them modern.

Finding a concept in the archive

Research into Silk Road and Dunhuang materials led to the uncertain apparition of the Buddha’s shadow and to the forms of the Deer King Jataka in Cave 257. The project did not reconstruct the cave; it took uncertainty, appearance, and disappearance as conceptual clues. It uses computation to bring ancient reference into a contemporary experience without claiming to reproduce the original sacred setting.

Randomness as metaphor

A random function produces values within defined limits. Here it became more than a generative effect: fixed rules and unpredictable results offered a visual metaphor for something that seems present but cannot be fully grasped—the meaning held in the title As If There Were.

A controlled generative process

Historical silhouettes define the fixed boundary, while code varies the color, position, size, transparency, and sequence of thousands of points. Each run generates a different field; repeated parameter adjustment and final selection balance algorithmic autonomy with the designer’s judgment. Travellers, animals, and Dunhuang-derived forms remain legible from a distance but dissolve into particles at close range.

A mural encountered in motion

One narrow theatre corridor uses a star-field version and the other a sand-colored version. Printed on acrylic panels along uneven passage walls, the murals act as a visual prelude or afterimage to a performance rather than a picture that asks viewers to stop. Walking produces a sequence of partial views similar to the shifting scenes of a garden corridor.