Hasta La Ideas

French architect Serge Salat has designed an infinite labyrinth of shapes and colours for a touring exhibition in China.

Visitors to Beyond the Infinity amble though a series of enclosed rooms, each lined with mirrors and illuminated by an assortment of brightly coloured lights.

Three-dimensional timber grids spread across the walls and ceilings of the spaces and are endlessly reflected in the mirrors.

Perforated panels of anodized aluminium wrap some timber frames to create a square honeycomb of boxes, which glow beneath ultraviolet lighting.

The exhibition began in Shanghai and will be exhibited in 10 different Chinese cities for 3 days at a time.

Another interior recently featured on Dezeen also uses mirrors to create the illusion of an infinite room – see the project here and see all our stories about mirrors here.

Here are some more details from Salat:

Serge Salat – “Beyond the Infinity”

French artist Serge Salat’s multi sensory installation “Beyond the Infinity” reveals new and astounding cosmic visions to the audience. The artwork will travel 10 cities of China, including Shanghai and Beijing, from September to November 2011. General Motors China sponsors the tour exhibition.

Inspiration

Since 1988, Serge Salat has built multi-sensory art spaces interweaving virtual reality and fractal art.
The installations are full-scale rooms, closed private cosmos in which the audience penetrates and participates to a mystical journey through its physical and emotional stimulations.

Serge Salat’s work blends Eastern Chinese philosophy and cosmic visions with advanced contemporary techniques. His inspiration has deep roots in Chinese Taoist philosophy, Western Renaissance, Neo Platonism and in the most advanced art thinking of the XXth century about the fourth dimension such as Duchamp, Malevich and Klee’s.

The installations bring in a single whole electronic art, music, sculpture and architecture. The manipulations of space and time go beyond traditional manipulations, with a skilful use of fourth dimensional cubic geometries. It confronts the audience with a media world in a moving pattern of change.

The Journey – Beyond the Infinity

The journey into the art space evolves in deep layers of dreams endlessly nested in each other, in which the visitor progresses into reflected layers.

The work layout uses spatial techniques of Suzhou gardens in order to create a mystical journey in an abstract version of the world of Chinese courtyards, interconnected by infinite galleries: still visions and vision in movement, borrowed sceneries, framing. But also and in particular, the collapse of a whole cosmos in an enclosed space is explored through manipulations of the space and time of the audience’s experience.

Constant transformation and mutation is one of the strong themes of the work: in this perspective the objects are two yin/yang faces of the same concept but shapes and colors are reversed.
The main pattern is the trigram of the Yi King that is framed in three dimensions and organizes the whole space.

Salat said: “Entering the work is also entering the world of the dream of the red mansion transposed to the 21st century”.

Beyond the Infinity constitutes an encounter between creativity and a world in the middle of its mutation. It mixes past and future and it creates a dialogue between real and virtual worlds.

This is probably a strong message of hope: the possibility in the contemporary world to create new beauty and dream through a fusion of classical culture and innovation.

The exhibition was launched in Jinan, China, by August 28, 2011 and it will travel 10 Chinese cities in three months:
Jinan (08/28) – Suzhou (09/09) – Shanghai (09/16) – Beijing (09/23) – Chengdu (10/01) – Dalian (10/14) – Xi’An (10/21) – Zhengzhou (10/28) – Shenzhen (11/04) – Hangzhou (TBC).

The artwork will be exhibited 3 days in each city.

See also:

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Zuo Corp by Super Super and Inside/Outside	LN-CC by Gary Card	Master Designer’s Garden by Martha Schwartz Partners