Golden A' Design Award Winner 2021
Li Hao's Pop Star View Platform emerges from the tradition of monumental public sculpture that seeks to transform landscape into experiential theater, creating a dialogue between geometric precision and organic environment that invites profound contemplation. The installation appears to draw upon the legacy of land art and environmental intervention, where sculptural form becomes inseparable from its natural context, while simultaneously engaging contemporary interests in chromatic experience and immersive encounter. The radial starburst configuration suggests both cosmic explosion and crystalline growth, evoking natural phenomena translated through architectural ambition into a form that seems to hover between the earthbound and the celestial. Technical achievement manifests in the sophisticated engineering required to support the cantilevered prismatic elements, each triangular plane catching and transmitting light with jewel-like intensity. The chromatic program demonstrates remarkable sensitivity to the full spectral range, with warm passages of orange, yellow, and magenta balanced against cool cerulean and violet, creating a totality that shifts continuously as atmospheric conditions and solar angle transform the viewing experience throughout the day. The golden hour capture reveals the installation at peak luminosity, when backlit panels glow with maximum chromatic saturation and the surrounding mist contributes ethereal softening to the geometric precision above. Thematically, the work may suggest themes of aspiration and transcendence, the crystalline form reaching skyward like a frozen moment of celestial emergence or spiritual flowering. The title's reference to celestial observation invites consideration of humanity's enduring fascination with stars and the cosmos, here made accessible through sculptural intervention that transforms viewers into participants in a chromatic and spatial symphony. One might pause to consider how the solitary figure's contemplation mirrors our own encounter with the work.
Pop Star is based on the geometric shape of the icosahedron. Through the deconstruction of space and the reconstruction of form, the artist finally constructed this 'monster' with a huge volume that exceeds the human visual reading scale, like an alien object flying in from another dimension of time and space. Viewers could feel the association between the Pop Star and transcendental theory that Ralph Waldo Emerson said: The world globes itself in a drop of dew, while the artist enlarges a tiny compound eye into a behemoth.