Sho Hsieh Interactive Experience Designer
All work

Prelude

A sphere hanging in a dark room is the first thing a visitor meets in the World Pavilion. Before any object, any caption or any map, the Hakka story is told once, all the way round, on a surface with no edges to hide behind.

The projection sphere hanging in the dark at the pavilion entrance, carrying drifting violet and white forms, beside a wall reading Local and Diverse.
The first thing in the building. Local and Diverse, on the wall opposite, is the whole pavilion's argument in three words.
Exhibit
Prelude, the spherical projection opening the World Pavilion
Exhibition
2023 World Hakka Expo, World Pavilion
Venue
Taoyuan
Run
11 Aug – 15 Oct 2023
What I did
  • The Prelude: the spherical projection that opens the World Pavilion
  • Opening film for the Expo's identity launch event, 2022
What I did not
  • The rest of the World Pavilion
  • Curation and exhibition content
  • Architectural space
  • The Expo identity and main visual
  • Spatial design and build
  • Projection hardware and calibration
Studio
23Design, one of the three exhibition-display teams on the pavilion, alongside Lin Ming-Hui and Play Design Lab
Pavilion team
  • Chief curator Wang Teng-Chong, co-curator Lin Hui-Chen
  • Architectural space, Chu Chih-Kang
  • Main visual, Asao Tokolo
  • Hakka Affairs Council and Taoyuan City Government, hosts
Recognition
  • MUSE Design Awards, Gold — Interior Design, Exhibitions, Pavilions and Displays, September 2023
  • Awarded to the World Pavilion as a whole.

Sixty seconds, before anything is explained

The World Pavilion tells the story of Hakka people who left, and where they ended up. The Prelude is what a visitor sees before any of that is written down: a sixty-second sequence on a single sphere, in the dark, on a loop.

It is built on the three words the curators gave the pavilion — leaving home, fusion, uniqueness — and it moves through them in four cuts. A point of light opens in black and spreads until it is a sun. The sun becomes the earth, settling over Asia, and lines run out from there to the rest of the world. Historical photographs are pulled apart into layers and drift. Hakka pattern is stacked over itself until it turns into something that is not quite either.

Nobody is told any of that. It is a minute of light before the reading starts.

The sphere lit orange from within, seen across the dark room with the lit gallery beyond it. The sphere carrying a violet sky, cloud and a suggestion of coastline wrapping around its lower half.

A sphere is not a screen

There is no frame to compose inside, no safe area, and no fixed place for the audience to stand. Every straight line in the source arrives on the surface as a curve, and a composition that reads from the doorway is sliding off the horizon by the time the same visitor is standing underneath it.

So nothing is authored on a sphere. It is authored flat, as two long strips that the projectors bend on: an upper band of 5880 × 1482 and a lower one of 5880 × 891, with 75 pixels of overlap where the two are blended into each other. Everything has to be composed pre-distorted, in a shape nobody will ever see.

The flat source strip: a world map in blue with migration routes fanning out from Asia across the Pacific and Indian oceans.
The upper band as it is actually drawn, flat. On the sphere this is the moment the sun becomes the earth and the routes leave Asia. On a phone this one pans sideways rather than shrinking to a stripe.
Blossom drawn flat on the source strip, evenly spread against a dark blue field. The same blossom on the sphere, gathering toward the top and thinning as the surface curves away.

The same frame, drawn and then delivered. What looks evenly spread on the flat strip crowds toward the crown of the sphere and thins out at the horizon, which is the whole reason it cannot be composed by eye.

One pass, all the way round

Cut one is the sun. From there the sphere carries drifting seed and a grey ridge, then turns into the archive: sepia photographs pulled apart into layers, documents and handwriting, figures silhouetted as if walking over the curve of the world.

The sphere as a burning sun, orange and mottled. Pale forms drifting densely across the upper half of the sphere. Blue and white forms drifting over the sphere like seed heads under water. A grey mountain ridge running across the sphere, the light almost monochrome. A sepia photograph wrapped around the sphere, figures silhouetted as if walking over the curve. Archival documents and handwriting curving around the sphere in warm brown.

What the Prelude opens into

Past the sphere, the pavilion is a field of lit fabric canopies over low tables, and a wall where the Hakka diaspora is drawn as routes across a world map. The Prelude has to set up that room in under a minute, without saying any of it in words.

The zones below are the rest of the World Pavilion, by the other teams on it. They are here for context, not as my work.

Lit fabric canopies hanging over circular display tables, visitors moving between them. The canopy field seen down its length, each one glowing pale blue above a table. A visitor in front of a wall-sized world map, migration routes drawn in light across it. The suspended ring at the pavilion entrance, panels hanging from it under warm red light.