// Tsinghua · Art Installation · Urban Data · Exhibited 2025
Beijing Wonderland
Four playground installations along Beijing’s Central Axis.
Overview
How do people imagine Beijing today? Not through planning documents, but through the photos and notes they post. Beijing Wonderland (北京乐园) reads that collective image and gives it back to the city as four playful installations, each placed where its theme already belongs.
I built a “Cognition–Data–Design” workflow that combines NLP and AI generative tools: from social-media posts to themes, from themes to spatial elements, and from elements to installations on real sites along the Central Axis.
What I built
400+ social posts collected100 image–text sets analyzed4 themes4 installations on the Central Axis2 exhibitions
Method
01
From posts to a shared image of the city
I collected more than 400 social-media posts about Beijing’s urban image and selected 100 image–text sets. Images were classified, and the text was analyzed with an LDA topic model and sentiment analysis, which together surfaced four themes that dominate public attention. Each theme’s keywords were then traced back to concrete elements that a space could be built from.
Social posts400+ collected
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Image + text analysisclassification · LDA · sentiment
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4 themessemantic network
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Narrative grammarelements per theme
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Form generationcomputationally assisted
Design
02
Four themes, four sites, four rides
To stage the city’s collective image, I chose public spaces along the Central Axis with a strong “stage-like” quality and rich history, identified through archival research and site visits. Each theme was matched to a site whose genius loci already speaks to it. Every site below follows the same path: what the place has been, the design language drawn from it, and the ride that results.
Site I
I
Drum Tower → Carousel
Theme · Historical & cultural heritage
Site history
Built in 1272, the Drum Tower kept the capital’s time through the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties until 1924. Around 2008 the hutongs beneath it became home to Beijing’s livehouse and youth culture, and since 2023 it has been one of the city’s most-photographed check-in spots.
Design language
“Beijing Time” reads as both monumental history and everyday warmth. The carousel’s central column is a giant stick of tanghulu (candied hawthorn), sold by street vendors under the tower and a recurring image in winter posts about the city.
Site II
II
Jingshan Hill → Maze
Theme · Chinese dreams
Site history
From 1956, Shouhuang Hall in Jingshan Park housed the Beijing Children’s Palace for 57 years, and its “Nine Planets” climbing frame became a shared childhood memory. Today the hill, facing the Palace Museum at the heart of old Beijing, draws crowds to Wanchun Pavilion every day to look out over the city.
Design language
Posts about Beijing as a city of aspiration share one belief: that it holds an entrance to the world, with a thousand ways out and answers to many questions. That “obsession” became a maze of signposts, where getting lost is part of the play.
Site III
III
Tianqiao → Rotating airplane ride
Theme · Landscape symbols
Site history
In 1925 Tianqiao was the city’s fairground, the stage of street performers and every kind of show. That scene is gone: today the crowds have moved indoors, into the performing-arts theatres around the square.
Design language
Beijing’s online image is built from landmarks seen through a camera. A guide to the city’s most-photographed views, like tiled rooftops from above and the Gulou street sign, supplied the ride’s set pieces, and the rotating airplanes lift riders to new viewpoints.
Site IV
IV
Qianmen Street → Climbing castle
Theme · Old and new
Site history
Built in 1420 on the Central Axis, Qianmen grew into a busy commercial street by the late Qing. Since the 1960s its shops have been demolished and rebuilt several times; around 2005 they were restored from early-Republican photographs for the 2008 Olympics. Its “face” in 1910, 1980, 2008, and 2025 is different every time.
Design language
I catalogued Qianmen’s building types and abstracted their arches, frames, and add-ons into modules, then stacked them into a climbing castle where old and new forms sit side by side.
Exhibition
03
Shown in Beijing and Qingdao
The project was exhibited at the Tsinghua University Art Museum (June 7–19, 2025) and then at the Innovation Research Center in Qingdao (from September 7, 2025), with four brochures, a 1:20 model, a site map, and a letterbox for visitor responses.
50+ letterbox answers100+ letterbox comments4k+ online views160+ likes
Takeaway
Designing from the city people carry in their heads.
Social-media data made the collective image of Beijing measurable; the installations turned it back into places people can climb, ride, and get lost in.