P E O N Y P A V I L I O N
An Object Play
Venture into the Pavillion
Peony Pavillion Creative Concept
In the play “Peony Pavilion,” a tragicomic romance written by Tang
Xianzu in 1598, a young girl falls asleep in a garden in the waning days
of the Southern Song Dynasty. In her dream, she begins a passionate
romance that, in waking life, becomes an obsession that ultimately
consumes her. Dream and fact, the image and the real, become fatally
entangled: she leaves her self-portrait in a garden, to be picked up,
impossibly, by the lover she met in her dream.
Conjuring the imaginary world of The Peony Pavilion, this immersive
exhibition, or “object play,” creates a sequence of spaces in which
projected images, architectural components, and objects create a
world that straddles reality and illusion. The exhibition is also a re-
examination of the close relationship between Chinese theater and the
vernacular architecture of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Covered with
wood carvings of scenes from traditional dramas, Chinese vernacular
houses become a medium that blurs the boundary between theater and
life.
Drawing upon this historical interaction between architecture and
theater, explore Peony Pavilion as WE welcome YOU into
a deconstructed vernacular house in an imaginary
dimension of Chinese architecture.
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@HarvardCAMLab