 EXHIBITOR @ EXPO 2010:
DAY SEVEN |
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| This digitized replica of Zhang Zeduan’s famous painting, "Along the River During Qingming Festival" depicts 1,068 people at work and play. At nearly 420 feet in length and 20 feet in height, it is an absolutely arresting example of high-tech wizardry bringing ancient art to life. |
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| A tram ride inside the China Pavilion takes visitors on a seven-minute journey through the complex dialogue between tradition and innovation in terms of China’s urban planning and construction. Various vignettes along the way serve as artistic commentaries on architectural forms, urban transport, urban landscaping, and urban planning. |
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| Featuring 120 projectors — more than any other pavilion at Expo 2010 — Macau creates immersive environments that transport visitors to its cities’ streets. Incorporating traditional projection, multi-planed projection surfaces, 3-D props and scenery, and holographic technology, the pavilion beautifully blurs the line between real and virtual. |
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| This vignette inside the Germany Pavilion is called “The Factory,” and comprises hundreds of wooden shipping crates, many of which serve as display cases for German-made products. The second half of the video shows how visitors are able to “x-ray” products as they move along an elevated conveyor belt to reveal information and images about the German-made items. |
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| Visitors’ last stop inside the Germany Pavilions is the three-story “Energy Source” theater, where they encounter the “Sphere of Balancity.” The sphere is a 1.2-ton orb covered with 400,000 LED lights. When the audience of roughly 600 cheers and yells, the noise and movement activates the sphere, which lights up with various images and flies in circles until it achieves balance and slowly comes to a halt. |
It's good to be king. That's why today we wore the crown of the fair — or at least, we were *in* the crowning achievement of Expo 2010: The China Pavilion. Nicknamed "The crown of the East" because it resembles the crown of ancient emperors with upper sections larger than the ones below it, it's the biggest pavilion ever at more than 200 feet tall. Its 15,800 square feet of exhibit space include a digitized replica of Zhang Zeduan’s famous painting, "Along the River During Qingming Festival" painted almost 1,000 years ago. Called "China's Mona Lisa," it's not some cheese-tastic recreation that looks like bad CGI in an even worse Syfy Channel movie, but a work of technology that starts as art and ends up as magic. Nearly 420 feet long and about 20 feet high, it depicts 1,068 people at work and play, such as shopkeepers using the abacus, and even fish swimming in the river. If you ever looked into a painting and imagined the characters in them coming to life, this is what it would look like — assuming any place with giant robot babies, machines that blow humans sky-high into the air, and countries selling diamond-studded tennis racquets can ever be called "real life."
The China pavilion is more than three times the size of any of its provinces' or Special Autonomous Regions' pavilions, but that doesn't stop Macau from almost stealing the show. Made in the shape of the rabbit lanterns used in Chinese folk festivals, the gambling paradise's pavilion is our unofficial winner for the most politically astute pavilion of Expo 2010. Topping off at 19.99 meters, the building's height is a wink to 1999, the year Macau was reabsorbed back into the mainland China — which was, not coincidentally, the Year of the Rabbit. Even better, visitors can glimpse the China Pavilion directly through the building's transparent-glass exterior, right where the rabbit's heart would be, proving to the mainland that Macau always has China in its heart.
The Germany Pavilion is as smooth a mechanism as a BMW, with faux factories, where, when new inventions concealed in plastic covers pass by high-tech "x-ray" machines, visitors can read information on, for example, robot penguins that mimic how the real flightless birds conserve energy so efficiently. Later, 600 guests at a time end up in a three-story circular room where their motion and voices compel a massive orb to create energy.
Starting our day in the far East, we ended up in the jungles of Central America, where Guatemala placed a Mayan temple in its booth and El Salvador built a floor-to-ceiling volcano. Now if only some school kid had bicarbonate of soda and vinegar ...
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