Huang Heshan

When cyberspace gives rise to nostalgia, a woven virtual world is about to arrive in reality. Audiences are invited by digital artist Huang Heshan to step aboard a time-traveling vessel for a poetic journey that blurs the boundaries between the virtual and the real, via the exhibition Too Rich City: The Old White Swan Passenger.

A phenomenon in China’s digital art scene, Huang first gained widespread attention through his viral Wild Design series. Since then, he has continued to build virtual civilizations, pixel by pixel. As a keen observer of contemporary urbanization and digital transformation, his work explores the tensions between personal existence and shifting environments.

Three years in the making, the Too Rich City series is Huang’s most ambitious virtual city-building project to date. The exhibition presents a brand-new chapter from this ongoing body of work.

A Cyber Hometown of Absurd and Reality

The narrative centers on a surreal voyage aboard the Old White Swan, a vintage pleasure boat that departs from Zhongshan Park after its demolition—carrying its final passenger, a sculpture of the goddess Jingyue. Through this vessel, visitors drift through the otherworldly cityscapes of Too Rich City and ultimately return to the park’s opening day, completing a temporal loop rooted in urban memory.

Huang constructs a virtual cityscape that runs on its own internal logic—chaotic, yet coherent. Employing a philosophical approach to digital architecture, he deconstructs and reconfigures social rules and cultural symbols from the real world into a new, surreal “cyber-hometown.”

Digital Rebirth of Memories

This exhibition is not only a documentation of urban transformation but also a contemplative inquiry into memory and existence. Through the language of digital art, Huang Heshan invites audiences to reconsider the evolution of cities and the fate of individuals within them. In this world built from code and imagination, lost places and memories are reborn in virtual form. And within this experience—where reality and simulation intertwine—viewers may rediscover their emotional connection to the city: reclaiming, in their minds, what was once lost in the physical world.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Huang Heshan is a digital artist and a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts at Tsinghua University. With a focus on digital media, his work critically examines the intersection of individual existence and the dramatic shifts brought about by urbanization and digitization in China. Drawing from both academic insight and avant-garde practices, Huang’s work creates a visually compelling narrative framework that combines critical analysis with philosophical inquiry.

Through his in-depth exploration of urban ecology, Huang has developed a distinctive aesthetic language, described as “Plastic Punk,” which blends grassroots design wisdom with urban transformation. His projects, such as Wild Design and Fake IKEA—Urban Village Furniture Exchange Plan, document the spontaneous, grassroots creativity that has emerged amidst China’s rapid urbanization.

Huang’s representative work, Too Rich City, reconstructs a virtual metropolis rooted in the cultural DNA of China’s urban villages. Using magical realism and digital constructs, it examines the preservation and reconfiguration of collective memory in the era of rapid technological advancement.

His works have been featured in numerous prestigious art exhibitions both domestically and internationally. Huang Heshan’s art consistently reflects a philosophical investigation into "digital existence," and he skillfully blends gamified storytelling, virtual architecture, and social experimentation to reveal the dialectical relationship between reality and fiction in the process of modernization.