The place of spirituality in the Western art of our time is more or less clear: innovative art has consistently defined itself in relationship to mainstream religion, and the heritage of symbols and sensations of affect from the Christian tradition remains steady across the board, even given the onslaught of new ideas and systems of belief toward this core set of religious understanding. This status now provides a workable framework for contemporary artists wishing to make reference to broader spiritual and political hierarchies and aesthetics, as with market-topping work from the likes of Koons and Hirst throughout the past two decades. Such work, obsessed with an aesthetics of consumerism, often positions transient objects as monumental figures of idolatry: the former is probably best known for his transformations of balloons into large-scale steel sculptures, as with “Balloon Dog” (1994-2000). Although the imagery is mundane, the method is indubitably marked by notions of worship and immortality. Lest there be any doubt, Hirst spells out the equation in the most blatant terms: “The Golden Calf” (2008) literally crafts the figure of its title within the tinted vitrine that has come to characterize a certain tendency in scientific spirituality in contemporary art. More recently, emerging art has come to approach spirituality through the aesthetics of new age practice: altars, magic, crystals, and communication with the supernatural have become standard features in low-key showcases of new art. Jen Denike’s “Crystal Forest” (2010) presents one such vision, a tower of crystalline objects atop a mirrored table surrounded by concentric rings of stone.

Interestingly enough, this supernatural aesthetics also appears in the contemporary art of greater China and its diaspora, perhaps as a stand-in for certain spiritual inclinations in view of the lack of an overarching organized religious tradition. Singaporean artist Michael Lee, for example, made an impact with his “Consulting the Supernatural” (2009), a large-scale wall diagram that analyzed relationships (potential and otherwise) between the participating artists and curators at an exhibition in Taipei. That particular project, which included methodologies drawn from Western and Chinese astrological systems alike, had the side effect of comparing the possibilities between these various cultural ways of understanding the social world. In Hong Kong, American-born artist Adrian Wong is interested in the opposite function: confronted with the potential haunting of his studio, he organized a public exorcism that ultimately became the work “Bless All Ye Who Enter Here” (2007), indulging in the visual culture of Taoist tradition but also providing a litmus test of spiritual belief for visitors, many of whom remain disturbed in some way by the atmosphere in that particular studio. Pak Sheung Chuen, also based in Hong Kong, often makes more sincere reference to religious sentiment in his work, one of the few artists working from an explicitly Christian perspective to do so with a respectable degree of subtlety–he once found a quotation from a verse of scripture in the vertically-aligned characters of his grocery receipt.

In mainland China, on the other hand, references to spiritual tradition often take the form of obscene allusions to a certain aesthetic of pseudo-Daoism (including, of course, elements of Confucianism and folk tradition, among other things, here referred to as Daoism because of its major philosophical leanings) that many seem to identify with the literati heritage in Chinese painting. More often than not, however, this highly aestheticized set of practices functions most often as a foil, as when Huang Yong Ping facetiously adopted the mantle of Xiamen Dada in order to produce an exaggerated collision between systems of thinking, or else as a universal sign of Chinese identity, as with the abstracted mythological signifiers of Cao Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder paintings. Last year in Shenzhen, during the marathon conversation organized by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist entitled “The Chinese Thinking,” many participants agreed that religious belief in China has been replaced, after the upheavals of twentieth century modernist ideology, with a reverence for history; this notion may prove more productive for the place of spirituality in art. Many major artists already deal with the cartography of cultural systems through time: Dong Wensheng, Qiu Anxiong, Gao Shiqiang, and Qiu Zhijie all continue to pursue large-scale projects in which rosters of iconography, historical texts, and the capacity for belief all congeal in a melting pot of identity definition. Increasingly, the spiritual is the register on which this action–critically or not–comes to occur.

Doreen Heng Liu, the principal of NODE Office and a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, began her architectural career with something rare in that field: a blank slate for the design of a new urban space, located on the Nansha peninsula south of Guangzhou. Now, she maintains a level of independence for her Shenzhen-based office, investigating and responding to the changing conditions of urbanism in the Pearl River Delta through urban planning, building design, installations, and research. Her work is based largely around a series of keywords that delimit the theoretical problematic of her practice: abstraction, antigravity, assemble, average, collage, concrete, contradiction, contrast, critical, crowded, dimension, double meaning, experiment, frame, installation, lightness, multi-viewpoints, neutralism, node, research, slowness, solid, space, temporary, texture, transparency, uniform, and void.

Your office begins geographically, conceptually, and technically with the Nansha area at the very center of the Pearl River Delta, unique for its status as both a gateway and border left largely untouched despite the rampant urbanization occurring around it. Besides the elements of vernacular architecture and location, can you tell me how your practice has grown out of the development of Nansha as a so-called new town? What further work will you do with the Nansha development project?

I started working on Nansha as an in-house architect for the Hong Kong-based Fok Ying Tung Group, which approached the development project during the phase of rapid construction in the Pearl River Delta, seeing it as a blank slate to engage in. Nansha represents a certain desire for Guangzhou, which has always been a river city that nevertheless desires some relationship to the ocean, imagining itself in competition with places like Shanghai and Hong Kong. So Nansha is a container port in some ways, and Guangzhou’s maritime link to the outside world, but it is also seen as an international leisure town with many second homes for people from Hong Kong and across the Pearl River Delta. Nansha had a clear vision at the very beginning on what it would look ultimately, but the developer lacked an experience and a knowledge of “infratructure” to execute and construct a city. For many years, I was involved with the development of Nansha Fok concession, but mainly designing single buildings for them, like a museum, a bookstore and an apartment building and so on, out of the local context. Many years after, Nansha is stilll an empty city, remaining a conceptual city of utopia without any real life. That condition has made me reconsider my design practice and the way to approach architecture. I often asked myself at that time if architecture as object is a main reason and drive to make a city work. Of course the reality at that time gave me a negative answer, leaving me with a desire to understand what makes a city work and the way it could be, and what relationship architecture plays and could play in the process of making a city. So I decided to go back to school and pursue my study in urbanism. In 2008, I finshed my DDes in Harvard and came back to the region. Those few years away have given me a new perspective on my practice, especially in Nansha. In March this year, together with Shenzhen Planning Institutes, my office won the Nansha Jiaomen River Central District Urban Design Competition. It was a great win with good timing. The local government has finally come to realize that the social infrastructure and industry, along with public space, perhaps, are more important forces and elements to shape a city than a pure bedroom community or fast built-up architecture without content. And I am glad we are able to work on these issues side by side with them.

One of your recent projects is an urban planning design for Yangjiang South. Yangjiang is familiar to many outside of the Pearl River Delta solely because of one of its most famous artistic residents, Zheng Guogu. How do you see his ongoing “Empire“ piece, which illegally and somewhat virtually develops a physical proeprty on the edge of the city? How would you compare and contrast your approach to redesigning Yangjiang with his?

Zheng Guogu and I met very early on, working on the “Canton Express,” Guangzhou Triennial, and other major projects during that period when so many of the figures that have become known for their work on the Pearl River Delta were just emerging. Though we are good friends, we had some disagreements at that time, mainly because we have different ways to approach and process design. We were all young, naive, and ambitious. Perhaps we were coming from very different backgrounds. I, as an architect with formal training, tended to think more rigidly, whereas he, as an artist, comes from a rather informal but more free perspective. There was a period of little contact until recently my office was awarded a contract to design the new city of Southern Yangjiang. Yangjiang is approximately the same scale as Nansha, and we came back into contact, hitting it off right away. Especially for a portion of the design including four exisitng villages, I would like very much to work together with Guogu. The government sees villages in the path of development as a cancer of sorts, wanting to exterminate them outright, but I disagree. As an architect and urban designer, I consider respect for existing conditions always as an important stand to take. And these villages represent an important history of the place that we can not ignore and delete as if they were never there. Both the government ambition and the will of the local people l have to meet and evolve into a form of new design. I believe in process and I have great respect for Zheng Guogu’s insightful practice of many years in this region. Zheng Guogu and I of course have very different understandings of design, and his architecture is far from the urban planning in which I have been involved, but we are all working on similar and interesting problems, especially responding to the local conditions. But my idea of working with him was short-lived. The government was not interested, preferring to get the planning job done as soon as possible. They could not tell the difference and they have no time to wait, I suppose. Our many initial expectations fell short in this case due to the speed of project. We were not able to exchange ideas with the government and local people; our investigation is incomplete; and an international forum on “new city design” turned out to be a local design jury. We quickly wrapped up our master plan and possible scenarios and left the place. I don’t know when we will ever have a chance to come back again and work on the same level of work. I guess this is the typical situation of China practice today: big ambitions, but with no tangible method to guarantee the quality of the work. Being an architect in China requires a lot of negotiation with this kind of bureaucratic vocabulary and mentality, but the result is often trivial.

You have also recently completed work on the Guangxi Museum in Nanning, in addition to other art and science museums in Shenzhen and Nansha you had previously completed. What special factors must be incorporated into museum design? Hong Kong is currently preparing to choose a design for its upcoming West Kowloon Cultural district projects, with the solicited proposals made public this August. If you were given the commission to design the museum, what unique features would you bring to the project?

The Guangxi Museum was a competition project, which, as is a normal practice these days in China, gave us only two weeks. The site is prominent, and the government would like to make it an iconic object (as usual). The form-making is more important than anything else in our mind, and dominant through our design process. However, in recent years, my office has already started to shift. I have also been influenced by another process of museum design, which is more about the process of art: how is the art of today different from the past, and how does the space affect the city and its neighborhood. It eventually will reshape the form of the museum today, sometimes perhaps formless. For example, take the Times Museum, a collaborative project with Rem Koolhaas and Alain Fouraux, which we completed two years ago. It is, a branch of the Guangdong Museum of Art located in the north of Guangzhou. In that case the developers had requested an iconic design and chose a significant site in the center of their housing development, but Koolhaas resisted, complaining that he could build that kind of museum as a single object anywhere in the world, why did he have to come here? He was more interested in the nature of such a neighborhood museum, located in a typical housing development like this. It is generic enough for him to test some of his new ideas of museum making, I would guess. The concept became most important, and the form could be fluid and uncertain according to the concept. Ultimately the museum space was distributed in fragments over the “excess space” of several floors in one single residential tower, a unique model for a museum. I think a new concept like that could be interesting for West Kowloon.

Unlike many architects who begin working with interiors and only later graduate to buildings and then urban planning, especially in Hong Kong, where opportunities are few, NODE began by directly engaging with government commissions for major urban planning projects. How does this affect your relationship to building design, and what role does scale play in your practice?

As an outgrowth of Nansha development, in recent years my office has been more and more interested in the urban issues and how our design practice situated and responded to various urban conditions today in China. It was only later that NODE was officially founded as an independent practice, and we have become smaller since recently moving our main office from Nansha to Shenzhen. People often ask me why we would move now. I have to say, we did not give up Nansha. This is still a place that has great potential, and we still expect a lot of changes in the next five to ten years. Nansha, eventually, is a city to come, but not yet. The office has been detached from a normal world for a long time, and I think a design office, at least part of it, can only grow and mature out of an urban reality, not an isolated setting like Nansha currently, and we need to mature desperately. Therefore, I see the move to Shenzhen as a way to test ourselves. If my office is able to survive in a cruel reality, it means we are strong enough to be sustainable. Architecture is not only a beautiful concept, but also a social work. So I have to have an alternative place suitable for the nature of my office today. Shenzhen, perhaps, should be considered a better place for now. Named as a “Capital of Design” in 2008 by UNESCO, Shenzhen seems like the place to be. The government has been quite supportive and willing to accommodate and nurture such smaller practices like ours, compared to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, which I think are both more difficult environments right now. There is a trend that more and more employees and contracts will end up with the large and state-owned enterprises, especially in this region. The small practices like us, who wish to spend more energy on creative, avant-garde projects, will shrink. Who knows. We would like to stay small and innovative, but we also need to grow strong and competitive against bigness and monopoly. Of course, we also hope the government will be open and accommodating to practices like us, hopefully able to provide some tangible assistance. Even so, we still have our competitive edge and there are a lot of other design opportunities out there in this region and China. To me, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou form a grouping of cities in line that makes the Pearl River Delta a very interesting and dynamic system in which to work, live, and experience. This region is the root of our practice and continues to give us inspirations. We are happy to stay here and be part of its growing process.

Yaohua Wang captured the imaginations of forward-thinking sectors of the architectural world while still a student in Los Angeles, releasing a series of increasingly radical projects in terms of both politics and aesthetics, all delivered in a set of neat animations that quickly circulated through a global network focused on the architecture of emerging media. In one of these, entitled “Latent City,” Wang narrates the story of an architect who, contracted to design an industrial manufacturing district in the Chinese interior, subversively embeds the infrastructure of a city of the future within his design, recognizing that time is on the side of the built environment and awaiting the latent potential of this structure. In another, “Project Carbon,” Wang inverts the current processes of form-driven digital design, discovering new architectural styles based on the potential of an unexploited building material. Recognizing the obstacles of politically-motivated planning decisions, Wang is poised to make a difference even as he launches his career.

Where are you from originally, and where are you headed now that you’ve completed your thesis project? Your education has been split between Beijing and Los Angeles.. How do you think these two different approaches to design education have affected your work?

My hometown is in Shanxi. After studying at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCIArc), I am planing to work for one year in Los Angeles and then go to graduate school on the east coast of United States. I will be working at Eric Owen Moss’s office, who is now the director of SCIArc, and also at the office of Wes Jones, who was one of my thesis mentors. Indeed, my study at SCIArc affects my work the most. However, my studies at Beijing Jiaotong University were also important to me. I gained a fundamental understanding of architecture there, which helped me take a more critical position when I was suddenly facing the overwhelming digital trend after coming to the U.S.

Tell me about your architectural and theoretical influences. What designers do you admire, especially among those working in greater China?

The architectural theories of Rem Koolhaas and Wes Jones have exerted the greatest influence on my thought. Equally important are the influences from all of the instructors I had at SCIArc, including Peter Cook, Hernan Diaz Alonso, and Peter Testa. I also pay close attention to a range of contemporary architects like Tom Wiscombe, Patrick Schumacher, Thom Mayne, Sou Fujimoto, and so on. I can’t say that I have already decided on a certain type of architectural style yet, and I do believe that a good a student should open his eyes and keep an open mind to diverse thoughts in the world of architecture. In terms of Chinese architects, I like Ma Yansong and Wang Shu, because in China, when you stand in front of a client, it is hard to hold your own as an architect, but they manage to do that.

You say your understanding of architecture is “against capital … against constraints … against power.” Can you describe precedents for this oppositional architecture? Do you see architecture functioning this way anywhere in China today?

Maybe I should say “against the irresponsible power.” I don’t think architecture functions in this way anywhere in China, or even elsewhere in the world. This is not because Chinese architects don’t have dreams, but rather because it seems that this is the way that the world operates now: under the control of people who have the real power based on the principle of maximizing profit. Up against this rule, the architect seems powerless and can do nothing but watch irresponsible decisions being made one after another. That’s why so many utopian architectural dreams have died. That’s why the world is are still running on the same old track.

Under such conditions, some architects choose not to see reality and keep on enjoying their sweet dreams of the so-called academic utopia. Others retreat back to make beautiful object-buildings without any political attitude. But for me it make no sense to be stuck in either of these positions, which is why I really want to find a third way. That’s the moment at which the notion of latency came to my mind.

Your notion of latency seems like it can be a very powerful tool, if it can avoid the trap of delayed social responsibility. Could you describe how this concept works in the “Latent City,” and perhaps provide other hypothetical examples of how this could work in the real world?

I am certainly not the creator of the concept of latency. For example, the [rejected Miami Performing Arts Center] theater project Rem Koolhaas did in Miami, where he hid his derision of the bourgeoisie within his design, or Wes Jones’s idea of “smartness,” which require designers to find a loophole in the system use it to reverse the negative condition into a positive one. Although they haven’t mention the idea of latency outright, this attempt at the oppositional inspires me.

As the story goes, the architect has a dream of “a city with no dead end” that would have great spatial and architectural advantage, but the problem with his ambitious idea is that it would require significant investment into infrastructure without really bringing the developer more profit, so construction seems impossible. Then, he noticed shifting trends of industrial China in 2010 and made a plan to hide the infrastructural system for this new city into an energy-saving design proposal for a new industry city needed at that time. With the passage of time, after the downfall of this industry city, the architect emerges and declares his secret plan to the government, so the city with no dead end can be reborn from the ruins of the old industrial complex in 2030.

Because of this, people named the new city “Latent City.” But the hidden story that no one knew is that, at the very outset, the deal had already been made between the architect and the government. He demonstrated to the government that they could not only get a great city without any investment for infrastructure, but also could earn a great amount of money. They then set the whole plan up together and made the industrial enterprises pay the bill for the infrastructure of the new city without knowing about the the deal. This hidden agreement is the real latency behind latent city.

The notion of latency is general, but the methods must be very specific to the context, which means that I can’t provide any other hypothetical examples without doing deep research and thinking carefully. Because this was a thesis project, the most important thing for me was to make a conclusion to the end of my five years of study: that is, do I still believe that architecture is powerful? If so, how could this power work?

Much of your previous research has revolved around the rise of inland industrial districts that you believe will be made possible with the ever-expanding road and rail infrastructure coming together in China. The first wave of inland development in China occurred in the Republican period, largely with British funding and expertise, while the second wave grew out of Maoist paranoia of aerial attack on seaboard industrial areas. How does this current third wave differ from its predecessors? How do you see the design of these new industrial districts differing from the high-technology manufacturing around the Pearl River Delta and the low-end product manufacturing around the Yangtze Delta?

The current wave is happening because coastal areas like the Pearl River Delta need to upgrade their industrial bases, while conventional labor-intensive industry is moved to the inland area. For my story, the design of the new inland industrial district relocated from the coast needs to satisfy two sets of requirements. One is the infrastructural system needed for the “city with no dead end.” The other is an environmentally friendly industrial district, newly created but still containing the operations of labor intensive conventional industry. Most importantly, the first one must be hidden within the second one.

Since I got the idea of the form of the city with no dead end quite early on, much of my previous research has been about this second set of requirements. Based on that research I learned what an environmentally friendly industrial district would require. And by combining both sides, I managed to design a dual layer industrial district.

From what I understand your “Project Carbon” marks a significant technical advance, building upon the work of Peter Testa and others. What kind of new forms will this allow, and how could they differ from the parametric design that dominates the so-called avant-garde today?

It’s kind of like trying to find a new type of “box” for our time. We build the conventional box not only because it is easy to use but also because it is easy to build. This is one of the reasons that some doubt has been cast on form-driven digital architecture recently. The main concern of this digital architecture is form; only afterwards do they try to find materials to complete the building of the form. To the contrary, what I did with “Project Carbon” was to reverse this process: to find the new materials of today, in this case carbon fiber, to analyze its advantages and disadvantages, and then to find out what new forms this material can create. And contemporary robotic technology makes it possible that free-form building with carbon fiber structures can be made even easier than the process of constructing the conventional box.

My project is just one possible application of this material, which has great potential. Instead of saying that this project is different from parametric design, I prefer to say that contemporary parametric design is not yet a comprehensive concept. It still need to be supplemented. Thus I see this project as one attempt to consummate that concept from a material point of view.

Many of your major projects are presented in the form of concise, didactic, and technically proficient animations. To what extent does the cinematic mode affect your design process? How did you arrive at this form of exposition?

My idea for “Latent City” appeared in my head a long time ago, so since I was quite sure that I wanted to tell a long story and that animation might be the best way to do it, I began to accumulate the skills and experience for animation. That’s when I started to use animation as the major tool for my other presentations as well, as I found it the clearest way to explain my ideas. In the other projects, animation is mainly a tool for presentation and did not really affect my design process. But for the thesis project, it affected my design in a major way.

Where and when does your next project begin?

I am working on several competitions right now, one of which is in China, and the deadlines are all quite close, but nothing is public yet.