The Virtual Mountain Estate is a multimodal digital project that explores the nature of subjective experience of landscape in eighteenth-century China.
Screenshot from the Virtual Mountain Estate. © Hedren Wai Yuan Sum and Stephen Whiteman .
The Virtual Mountain Estate is a multimodal digital project exploring the nature of subjective experience of landscape in eighteenth-century China through processual modelling and immersive and interactive presentation. Focusing on the Qing imperial park-palace of Bishu shanzhuang, or the Mountain Estate to Escape the Summer Heat, circa 1713, The Virtual Mountain Estate presents deeply researched immersive models of space and experience across several interconnected platforms for research, education, and exhibition audiences. In the process, it seeks to directly engage readers/users with an interpretive model of experience that reflects its multivalence, subjectivity, and ephemerality.
The Virtual Mountain Estate project emerges from the concept of ‘X-Sheds’, or ‘experience- sheds’. Building on the idea of a ‘viewshed’, which describes what is visible from a given vantage point, ‘x-sheds’ seeks to model subjective experience as defined from a particular physical, spatial, temporal, and cultural position—to understand the nature of a specific culturally mediated experience, rather than ‘experience in general’.
‘Xiling chenxia 西嶺晨霞 [Morning Mist by the Western Ridge]’, from the Kangxi emperor, Shen Yu, et al., Yuzhi bishu shanzhuang shi 《御製避暑山莊詩》 [Imperial Poems on the Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat], 1712. Chinese Rare Book Collection, Asian Division, Library of Congress.
Project Leads: Hedren Wai Yuan SUM (National University Singapore) and Stephen Whiteman (Courtauld Institute of Art)
Researchers: HSU Yung-fang (University of Oxford), HE Junyao (Courtauld Institute of Art)
Modelling: Biju Dhanapalan, Amber Chan, Vanessa Ang, Joseph Cho
Digital Production: Marni Williams and Katrina Grant (University of Sydney)
Publisher: Power Publications, University of Sydney
X-Sheds and the Virtual Mountain Estate have been made possible through the generous support of the Visual Understanding Initiative, Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, University of Sydney; Getty Foundation Digital Initiatives and the Duke University Digital Art History and Visual Culture Research Lab Visualizing Cities and Hidden Histories Workshops; and the Courtauld Institute of Art Faculty Research Fund.
‘Xiling chenxia 西嶺晨霞 [Morning Mist by the Western Ridge]’, from the Kangxi emperor, Shen Yu, et al., Yuzhi bishu shanzhuang shi 《御製避暑山莊詩》 [Imperial Poems on the Mountain Estate to Escape the Heat], 1712. Chinese Rare Book Collection, Asian Division, Library of Congress.