Wang Lei & Zheng Danqi

Transcendence: Night Revel is an immersive interactive media artwork inspired by the 10th-century Chinese handscroll. The Night Revel of Han Xizai, the original painting is often described as a silent drama, capturing a private night banquet charged with political anxiety, emotional restraint and unspoken tension.

This work does not reinterpret, dramatize, or modify the original painting. The historical image is preserved in its entirety, without altering any figures, gestures or narrative relationships. Instead, the project introduces a group of cats as historical intruders—beings that exist outside human historical time.

The cats do not belong to the painted world. They are not symbols or narrative characters. As quiet visitors from another temporal dimension, they traverse the scroll without disturbing its internal order. Their role is perceptual: by moving across the image, they redirect the viewer’s attention toward subtle expressions and restrained gestures.

The installation unfolds as a spatialized handscroll using large-scale projection, animation and sound. Audience interaction is restrained; presence subtly influences pacing and focus, encouraging slow looking. Within the framework of Celestial Dialogues, the work treats time itself as a cosmic scale and proposes intercultural dialogue through shared perception.

For this work, the celestial is not represented visually, but structurally. Time itself functions as a cosmic scale against which human behavior appears fragile, restrained and fleeting.

The night banquet becomes a threshold: a moment where private emotion, political tension, and social performance unfold under the quiet weight of time. The cats, as beings that move freely across centuries, embody a non-human temporality that gently disrupts anthropocentric viewing.

This approach allows the work to participate in Celestial Dialogues without adopting astronomical imagery or speculative fiction. Instead, it proposes an intercultural dialogue grounded in shared perceptual experience—how different cultures, across time, encode meaning into images, silence and attention.