Museum of Shan Hai Jing final concept presentation and progressing

Hi Everyone!

This is Yiyi.I have no time to do presentation at class time, so I put all my stuff about my Museum Identity project here. Hope you guys can give useful comment! and thank you for your time.


I want use another way to explain what's Shan Hai Jing, and make the concept clearer this time.

Here are some selected page of this book, It may help you guys make sense about this book and help the critique.

The accurate translation of Shan Hai Jing is Guideway through Mountains and Seas. It's an summary of what's this book talking about. It's not an actually book of myths; It's more of a travel catalog.

This book consists of two parts, one is Guideway through the mountains

(this is the map of the World of Shan Hai Jing.It shows Western Mountain, Northern Mountain, Eastern Mountain, Southern Mountain, Inner Sea, Outer Sea, Desert)

This part is about the various mountains in ancient China,the strange creatures are may encounter there, and the various gods of these mountains. Though some gods are named, others are generic.

The description of these creatures and gods are very detailed. Most of the gods are hybrid beings(It means they have animals part)or otherwise, not normal humans. The creatures are generally hybrid, composite as well, and tend to be the omen of something terrible, or are good. Even effects if they were ate.

(the illustration of some creatures in Shan Hai Jing, the bottom one is Gorilla actually)

The description of these creatures are the most interesting and charming part, It attract people to know about this book.

for example, Di Jiang is my favorite god whose form resembles a yellow sack with a red aura like cinnabar. It knows how to sing and dance. its friends suddenly by his lack of orifices and decided to drill them for it (because human being have seven orifices) It spend seven days drilling those, but Di Jiang finally died in the seventh day, then it explored and the universe was born from its body.

another part is The Guideway through Seas, it focus more on strange people who inhabit the lands beyond the seas, and there also various gods there as well. There's also an odd category of creature known as the "corpse of so and so".

In conclusion, this is major source of Chinese mythology brings  together a treasure trove of rare data and colorful fiction about the mythical figures, rituals, medicine; natural history, and ethnic people of the ancient world.

So It's already a museum of that time's world. What I have to do is design a museum of museum.

At that time, people thought earth is the centre of the universe. The universe like a box, earth is flat and square, the sky is round and cover on earth.

The world absorb the essence and energy of sky and earth, then the human being, the mountains, the seas, the trees, the gods, the creatures were born. Everything is related, and the human being is a integral part of nature. We have to respect the world, the sky and the earth, everything, everyone, because we are equal, as same as the main idea of Taoism.

I was thinking about what the museum look like, It won't show the interest of this book if only display artworks in traditional way, I hope it's multimedial museum and full of interaction. The arrangement of the halls will follow the composition of the maps of ShanHaiJing.

There is a huge screen around each exhibit hall, the view and creatures which were written in ShanHaiJing will shown on the screen like a movie, and people can stand in front of the screen and browse them, people can tap the screen if they saw something attractive to them, then the description and pop up and tell you the information about the stuff.