Perhaps many of you know this building, it is the National Aquatics Center, a sports hall built in Beijing where swimming, synchronized swimming and jumping competitions were held during the 2008 Olympic Games. Colloquially known as «Water Cube» or [H2O]3.
But surely few of you know the project that the artist Jennifer Wen Ma (and the lighting technician Zheng Jianwei) carried out in 2013. The project consisted of studying in real time the emoticons of thousands of posts on Weibo during a certain period of time, generating a mood for each day and then representing that mood by illuminating the Water Cube with lights of different colors and intensities.
For us, this representation helps us to define the complexity of the Chinese digital ecosystem as if it were the structure of an immense “Chinese box”, in which each box that we open reveals a new facet of digital China.
This idea is what has inspired the name of our agency, The Chinese Box.