East Mountain is a key birthplace of local mainstream culture. The Yangming Shrine and Immortal Cave, preserved to this day, commemorate Wang Yangming—the great Ming-dynasty philosopher, statesman, and military strategist. Rooted in this cultural context, the project seeks to revive and extend the region’s spiritual and intellectual legacy through an integrated spatial narrative.
The design establishes a dialogue—both spatial and symbolic—with the Yangming Shrine through ten thematic sites, including Life as Chess, Moon over the Sacred Summit, Seal Script Terrace, and the Unity of Knowledge and Action Platform. Together, these elements form the narrative framework of the public plaza. The three core concepts of Wang Yangming’s philosophy—the Unity of Knowledge and Action, the Extension of Innate Knowledge, and the Mind as Principle—serve as the explicit storyline, while a branching, time-based circulation path functions as a hidden narrative thread. By combining traditional Chinese narrative garden techniques with contemporary experiential spatial strategies, the project creates a scenographic public realm rich in philosophical depth and cultural resonance.
The spatial structure of the plaza recalls Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths and echoes the Chinese garden tradition of divergent pathways, where choice itself becomes meaningful. Each fork generates a new narrative possibility, allowing visitors to move through constantly shifting spatial situations and creating a labyrinthine experience in which the small reveals the vast. Fragments of history, nature, and thought intertwine, encouraging reflection on time, memory, and Wang Yangming’s ideas.
From a temporal perspective, the plaza is conceived as a design of time, structured through recollection and punctuated by evocative memory fragments. Bamboo symbolizes humanistic sentiment, plum trees evoke scholarly integrity, and pines express a distinctly Chinese spiritual ideal. Layered bluestone elements further allude to local geology and the cumulative depth of cultural inheritance over generations.
