Dunhuang Impressions | Dialogue with the "Nine-Colored Deer" - LEGO Mosaic Version of "The Story of the Deer King" Creation Notes
Work | Dialogue with the "Nine-Colored Deer"
This LEGO mosaic mural, titled "Dialogue with the 'Nine-Colored Deer'", aims to emulate the original work with a pilgrimage heart towards Dunhuang aesthetics, leveraging the unique expressive power of the LEGO brick color system, and also using the mosaic pixel language digitally analyzed by computer software to re-narrate this soul-stirring Buddhist scripture story.
Artist, curator, and LEGO Certified Professional Hou Weiwei led the Playable design team to create this piece, using 221,184 LEGO bricks and 216 LEGO panels over two weeks. This display in the public education space of the Dunhuang Contemporary Art Museum is the first time it has been shown to the public.
The original mural of "The Story of the Deer King" is located on the west wall of Cave 257 in the Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, and dates to the Northern Wei Dynasty, measuring 96cm in height and 385cm in width; the content is based on the "Buddha Speaks the Sutra of the Nine-Colored Deer" translated by Zhi Qian.
Hou Weiwei
Hou Weiwei is the only female LEGO® Certified Professional (LEGO® CP) among the globally recognized LEGO® Certified Professionals. She is the founder and CEO of the innovative cultural communication platform Playable Design. She has received multiple awards, including "Most Influential Public Welfare Project," "Best Design Education Award," "People's Choice Award," and "Most Popular Award," and in 2015, she was honored with the UNESCO Annual Best Design Figure Award.
Ms. LCP Hou Weiwei began her journey in city architecture and design-related topics in 2006 when she curated the "One Brick One Tile Builds Asia" exhibition, where she first encountered the LEGO brick system and realized its educational and tool significance for design, architecture, and urban planning. This led to the start of Playable Design's LEGO art creative journey. Over the years, she has successfully held the "One Brick One Tile" public art interaction project in different cities with various venue partners. In 2018, "One Brick One Tile | Time Bandit" participated in the Beijing International Design Week, winning a Guinness World Record for the world's largest LEGO "sundial"; in 2019, she collaborated with the Shanghai Tower for "One Brick One Tile | Vertical City," setting another Guinness World Record for "the most people participating in building a LEGO miniature city within 8 hours."
In recent years, Playable Design has been committed to using the LEGO brick color system to "dialogue" in the form of mosaic art, recreating world-famous paintings with LEGO bricks. Among many Chinese and foreign art treasures, we found that Impressionism, Pointillism, and the color-rich Fauvism are very suitable for conversion into mosaic art. enlarging the delicate portrayal of portraits from the Renaissance period brings a novel perspective and visual effect for different aesthetic experiences. When observing traditional Chinese paintings, we also saw the potential for the mosaic conversion and reorganization of the unique green and blue landscape rhythm in the part of "Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains." These accumulated experiences have led us further on this exploratory path, gazing into the fascinating Dunhuang!
Dialogue with the "Nine-Colored Deer" - LEGO Mosaic Version of "The Story of the Deer King" Creation Notes
LEGO Art Retelling Dunhuang Stories
When it comes to Dunhuang, almost everyone understands its weight in historical culture and art. For thousands of years, diverse cultures have intertwined here, triggering our attention to related history, regions, ethnicities, and cultural ecosystems. My peers and I have all been more or less influenced by the cultural aesthetic charm of Dunhuang, among which the "Nine-Colored Deer" from the Shanghai Animation Film Studio can be said to be a derivative model from classics to classics. Therefore, when we decided to select creative materials from the treasures of the Mogao Caves, the "Story of the Deer King" in Cave 257 became the first choice with an irreplaceable "advantage." When we completed a partial segment of the co-created Nine-Colored Deer mural by the public at the LEGO art exhibition in Nanjing this year, I realized that such a great artwork should present the complete story in the form of the original's comic strip, but I also realized the creative difficulty it brought.
Controlling the Balance Between Figurative and Abstract
When recreating art with the "abstract" principle of mosaics, and the creative goal is so "figurative," we have only two choices: one is to choose a detail to see the bigger picture, such as our previous "Face" series; the second is to increase the picture size, within the objective conditions allowed, moderately allowing all pixel details in the picture to be recognizable. Our "Dialogue with Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains," "Dialogue with the Starry Sky," and "Dialogue with Monet" all belong to this category.
Regardless, when creating, we always need to control the balance between "figurative" and "abstract." Facing the Nine-Colored Deer in the Mogao Caves, we chose the more complex second method.
Scientific Assembly of the Nine-Colored Deer Mural
To express the completeness of the original painting, the workload we invested is unprecedented. Ten colleagues in the studio collaborated, completing all 216 parts of the assembly within two weeks. We have a very scientific assembly manual, and ordinary people can easily start assembling. However, large-scale creation is quite laborious. Almost everyone devoted themselves to this project, and even when all the local panels of the mural were assembled on the wall, it took two people eight hours. But compared with the painters who dedicated their lives to the Mogao Caves thousands of years ago, these are insignificant.
Color Innovation Awakens Ancient Murals
In fact, the biggest challenge in the entire project is how to use the LEGO color system to convey the atmosphere of Dunhuang colors. At first, the cracks and mottled walls after peeling in the original painting puzzled us, whether to avoid these "imperfections" or retain them. After referring to some famous copies of this painting, we decided to try to represent these traces left by the passage of time on the mosaic screen.
At the same time, we also decided to make bolder attempts in color, to brighten up the originally dark and gray tones of the painting and integrate LEGO's unique color aesthetics, allowing some "non-existent" colors to appear in this huge mosaic mural. For example, a few pink spots hidden in the gray figures, and a large number of orange particles inject a kind of "rebirth" vitality into the picture. The colors of the original Nine-Colored Deer must have been completely different from what we see today, perhaps different from what you and I imagine, but what we want to present is an aesthetic language of the present. When we finally completed this mosaic mural, we were all very satisfied with the final effect, where the sense of time of the ancient mural naturally blends with LEGO's mosaic language.
It is a great honor for my team and me to cooperate with the Dunhuang Contemporary Art Museum to present this work to the public for the first time. I believe that our journey in mosaic art has just begun!
