A mesmerizing temporary art installation recently turned Shanghai's Century Park into an otherworldly lunar landscape, captivating visitors with its ethereal glow and deep cultural significance. The "Osmanthus Moon," created by HCCH Studio, presented a translucent dome structure that appeared as if someone had captured the full moon and gently placed it on the park's semicircular lawn.
This extraordinary installation represented far more than visual appeal, embodying a sophisticated fusion of traditional Chinese culture and contemporary architectural innovation. The framework consisted of an intricate bronze lattice patterned with osmanthus flowers, those tiny golden blooms that perfume Chinese autumns and carry centuries of cultural meaning in Chinese tradition. The bronze vines appeared to twist and intertwine across the dome's surface, creating dynamic shadows and light patterns that shifted throughout the day.
Designers at HCCH Studio stretched lightweight, elastic fabric across this bronze skeleton, resulting in a structure that seemed to breathe and glow with life. During daylight hours, natural light filtered through the translucent material, creating a soft, diffused atmosphere inside that felt almost meditative. Visitors entered through irregular openings – deliberately avoiding perfect circles for a more organic feel – and found themselves cocooned in a luminous space where the outside world felt both intimately close and mysteriously distant.
The installation held profound cultural significance, commissioned specifically by the Power Station of Art in Shanghai for the Mid-Autumn Festival, the traditional Chinese celebration when families gather to admire the full moon and share mooncakes. The choice of osmanthus flowers was deeply intentional, as these tiny golden blooms are practically synonymous with autumn in Chinese culture, appearing in everything from traditional tea to classical poetry and folk tales about celestial moon palaces.
What distinguished this project was its meaningful connection to China's folk art heritage through collaboration with a Zao Hua artist, a practitioner of traditional stove flower painting recognized as intangible cultural heritage. The patterns painted on the ground beneath the dome mirrored the bronze lattice overhead, creating a visual conversation across space where each element served as a reflection of the other, grounding the ethereal structure in both literal earth and cultural tradition.
As night fell, the Osmanthus Moon truly came alive through its sophisticated lighting design by ADA Lighting. Internal illumination transformed the pavilion into a semi-transparent beacon that appeared to float in the darkness. The bronze framework cast shifting shadows across the glowing fabric, creating gradients of light that changed as visitors moved around and through the space, making it feel less like a building and more like an immersive experience existing between sculpture and shelter.
The installation's temporary nature – lasting only twelve days – felt both generous and tragically brief, though this temporariness was integral to its meaning. Like the Mid-Autumn Festival itself and the brief season when osmanthus blooms fill the air with fragrance, this installation was deliberately designed to be a moment rather than a monument. Measuring 7.2 meters in diameter and 3.6 meters high, it avoided dominating the landscape or making grand permanent statements, instead creating an intimate space for contemplation and celebration.
HCCH Studio, a Shanghai-based practice gaining recognition for their innovative approach to materials and form, achieved something genuinely special by taking cultural symbols that could have felt heavy-handed or purely decorative and weaving them into a structure that felt contemporary without abandoning its roots. The technical execution, from the precise fabric tension to the sophisticated lighting design, served the conceptual vision rather than overshadowing it, demonstrating how traditional motifs can be brought to life through modern techniques.
The Osmanthus Moon successfully found that elusive balance where beauty, meaning, and accessibility intersect, avoiding the common pitfalls of public art that is either too obscure or too obvious. This temporary installation proved that ephemeral structures can create lasting impressions and that looking backward to traditional cultural elements doesn't prevent moving forward in innovative ways of bringing them to contemporary life.
