Sep–Oct 2020 Internship

Returning to the Old Summer Palace

Stage visuals and motion for Renwen Tsinghua’s lecture on the palace’s reconstruction.

The project

Renwen Tsinghua (人文清华) is Tsinghua University’s TED-style humanities lecture series. For the episode 重返圆明园 — Professor Guo Daiheng on her reconstruction of the Old Summer Palace — I designed the motion background and the lecture plates that ran behind her on three screens.

My role

Visual & Motion Designer

Status

Delivered

Design for the auditorium and the broadcast

Nothing about this project started on a canvas. It started with three LED panels on the stage of Xin Qinghua Xuetang, Tsinghua’s 2,011-seat auditorium: a center screen about 7 meters across and two side panels 2 meters wide, each 5 meters tall, behind a speaker who is 1.7 meters tall. At that scale a decorative flourish becomes a wall, and a paragraph of type is unreadable from the balcony.

The second number mattered more. In October 2020 the brief expected about 150 people in those 2,011 seats, and 97 came. Everyone else watched a camera feed. The room I was designing for was mostly a broadcast.

Photograph of the three screens at the event

Design the screen hierarchy around the room and the broadcast. The opening sequence, shown later in this case, demonstrates the delivered artwork in motion.

Why key information stayed off the side screens

From the wings of the stalls the side panels are seen at a sharp angle and partly occluded by the people in front — and on the broadcast they are often outside the frame entirely. Anything the audience had to read would have reached only part of the room, so both panels were given the same job for the whole lecture: hold the period, and stay still.

The problem

How do you bring a lost palace to the stage faithfully?

Stage 01

Source material

Secure the studio’s reconstruction drawings

Professor Guo’s studio had spent close to 20 years on the reconstruction: historical research, survey data, and digital models of buildings that are now foundations and rubble. The fast route was to illustrate the palace myself. Instead I spent about half a month negotiating access, and the studio authorized us to use the reconstruction drawings themselves.

Use the reconstruction research itself so the stage visuals support the lecture’s evidence.

Benefit: What the audience sees is the research being described — survey-derived models, ruin photography, and the Qing court’s own Yangshi Lei drawings.
Trade-off: Half a month of negotiation before a frame could be drawn, and the visual language then had to follow material I did not control.

DecisionUse the studio’s reconstruction

Preserve the visual character of the reconstruction research.

That choice shaped the visual system: the stage uses the studio’s reconstruction work, adapted for projection and broadcast.

A carved limestone scroll of the Xiyang Lou ruins against a blue sky — Cut from the element board in the project deck: what survived, what was reconstructed, how it was shown, and the drawings it all came from.

A white wireframe of a restored palace building on a teal ground — Cut from the element board in the project deck: what survived, what was reconstructed, how it was shown, and the drawings it all came from.

Stage 02

Palette

Use teal to connect research imagery with a historical setting

The theme the director and I agreed on was past and present, and the palette had to carry both halves at once. A warm heritage scheme would have made the reconstruction look like a painting; a cold technical blue would have made a Qing garden look like a CAD file. The system settled on a heavy teal-green, deep enough to sit behind a lit speaker and saturated enough to survive a camera.

COLOR STUDY / 01

Renwen Tsinghua

RENWEN TSINGHUA / Ground · #177580

Stage 03

The opening

Show the ruins and reconstruction in a 30-second opening

The sequence starts with what the audience already knows: the limestone arch of the Dashuifa fountain (大水法), the postcard image of the ruins. It holds there. Then particles gather behind the stone and the reconstructed palace resolves out of them — present, luminous, and unmistakably not a photograph. The ruins never move. The building arrives behind them and stays behind them.

The particles are the part people ask about. They are doing the honest work in the sequence: they say the building is being computed, from survey and from documents, rather than remembered. That is also the difference between this and a restoration rendering.

Stage 04

The plates

Keep lecture content on the center screen

After the opening, the center screen belongs to the lecture: the Forty Views paintings, plans, portraits, and the reconstruction models, each held on a ground that lets the original keep its own color. The side panels do not change. A viewer who looks away and back can always tell which screen to read.

A section of the Forty Views of the Old Summer Palace filling the screen, captioned in white brush type — Three plates from the center screen, one per kind of material. The side panels stayed the same behind all of them.

A portrait of the Qianlong Emperor on the teal ground, with a two-line couplet set beside it — Three plates from the center screen, one per kind of material. The side panels stayed the same behind all of them.

Working alongside the speaker’s material

Professor Guo brought her own research imagery, so the slides were not a design artifact she had to fit into. My job was a container that stayed out of the way: consistent plate margins, one caption position, and a ground per image type. Where she needed a sequence explained, I animated it.

97 people in the room, and the rest of the audience on a feed

The lecture ran on October 20, 2020, the 160th anniversary of the destruction of the garden. My own project record notes 97 people in the hall and 2,342 on the broadcast; Tsinghua’s published account of the evening puts the combined audience at close to 800,000 online and offline. The organizer and the speaker were satisfied enough to commission me for the following three lectures in the program, each with its own visual system.

The speaker and host in front of the reconstructed palace and the fountain ruins during the lecture — The speaker and host on the night. The reconstructed palace stays behind the ruins, leaving the people in the foreground.

Project overview slide: timeline, a three-person team, the brief, my responsibilities, a stage photo, and the audience numbers — My record and Tsinghua’s account were not measured the same way, so the counts are not added together.

The part I would carry forward is the sourcing, not the styling. Half a month of negotiation bought a set of images no illustration budget could have produced, and it settled the honesty question the subject raises — the audience sees the reconstruction as a reconstruction.

Watch the lecture

Bilibili · YouTube · Tsinghua University’s account of the lecture

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