FRAGMENTED HORIZON

They say the sea once stood here.

On the plaza of Zhuwei Fishing Harbor, a cube has risen from the ground — seven meters of bare steel, clothed in thousands of blue metal scales. Six shades of blue, layered and overlapping like the skin of some immense fish that chose, one day, to leave the water and settle on land.

By day, the scales catch the wind and the sun. They shimmer the way the sea shimmers — that restless glitter of waves, of fish turning beneath the surface. Walk closer, and the horizon fragments: through the gaps between the discs, the harbor appears in slivers — a mast, a hull, a line of water — as if the ocean itself were peering back at you.

Step inside, and the world turns blue. Light falls through the scales and scatters across the ground like sunlight through shallow water. Look up: the sky has been cut, filtered, recomposed. For a moment, you are standing at the bottom of the sea — dry, quiet, breathing.

When night comes, a single fishing lamp glows at the heart of the structure. It is the same warm light that, for generations, drew fish toward the boats of Zhuwei. Now it draws people instead. The light spills outward through the fractured blue skin, casting shifting geometric shadows across the plaza — a lighthouse turned inside out, remembering the fleets it once guided.

The steel frame is left deliberately exposed. These are the pipes of industry — the same skeleton that runs along Taoyuan's coast, carrying energy, building harbors, reshaping the shoreline. Here, they hold up the sea.

Is this a reconstruction, or a repair? Can the structures we built against nature learn, instead, to carry it? And when the horizon has been broken into a thousand blue fragments — is it lost, or simply waiting to be reassembled?

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

Dimension : L 700 x W 700 x H 700 cm
Material : steel pipes, metal discs, paint, 1000W fishing lamp
➜ 2026 Taoyuan Land Art Festival
Exhibition Date : 2026/07 – 2026/08
Location : Zhuwei Fishing Harbor Plaza, Taoyuan, Taiwan

BEHIND THE SCALES — A DIGITAL DESIGN TOOL

Before the sea could be rebuilt in steel, it was first assembled in code. We developed a custom 3D design system using Three.js, in which every one of the blue metal scales is generated, positioned, and colored through JavaScript parameters. The tool allowed us to explore countless variations of the five-blue gradient, fine-tune the overlapping "fish-scale" pattern, and preview how light would pass through the gaps — long before the first disc was cut. It then became our bridge to fabrication: the same digital model was used to track production and guide the assembly of the structure on site.

➜ Explore the design system here!