About The Chengdu Merchants Cube
On October 28, 2022, Chengdu Cube was officially opened to the public. The project is located in the high-tech South District, the mainstream the urban culture of Chengdu. With the innovative interpretation of local culture as the core, it forms a shopping mall that is a show field with immersive performance shopping malls and fashion trends. within the young and energetic social field.
The Chengdu Merchants Cube is located on the banks of the Fu River. It integrates the culture of Tianfu and the new urban life. It is a new comprehensive project integrating technology, fashion, entertainment, and leisure. The project covers an area of 243,000 square meters, with a total construction area of 1.12 million square meters. It accommodates diversified commercial entities with open space planning. At the same time, the surrounding traffic layout of the project highlights the convenience and accessibility of a modern high-tech city. With four integrated transportation systems of rail, bus, air, and water transportation provides citizens with the most pleasant and convenient entertainment experience. The project is adjacent to a wetland ecological park, a financial center, a high-tech district, and other diverse industries, and radiates the surrounding trillion-dollar high-end industries and practitioners with the project's own cultural and commercial charm.
Creative Inspiration
The animal figures in Hofman's oeuvre often exhibit human features, as do the figures in the fables and fiction.
"Zhaobao" is 17 meters high and stands in the center of the China Merchants Cube Square; it is a standing red panda holding a technological product. It adopts the technique of overall concave-convex forging to show the effect of hair texture. The white T-shirt on her body acts as an international common symbolic language, giving the sculpture more possibilities and ductility.
Hoffman hopes that this place is not only a place for people to interact and play, but also to strengthen the connection between urban art and people and commercial spaces, allowing the audience to enter a multi-angle observation and enter a multi-level stand open to different understandings of our relationship with Relationships and connections between cities. Why does "Zhaobao" live in this place in Sichuan? Why does "Zhaobao" hold electronic devices? All the stories of "Zhaobao" revolve around his appearance, color, posture, and other information. Whether there are red pandas in clothes in a parallel universe, perhaps as we use the convenience brought by "technology" to serve ourselves in our lives, all possible interpretations of this depend on the audience, and the audience may choose to instill with the artist. To the narrative in the work to interpret the narrative of different viewpoints. But this is exactly the purpose and effect that the artist wants to bring, hoping that the audience can gain new ideas and concepts in an ever-expanding visual culture. It will bring new public effects to the city, and finally let public art return its value to the society, return to the daily life of human beings, and affect people's value orientation and lifestyle.
Every city needs a prominent icon to present its independent existence, and Hoffman hopes that this work will become a new image of the city that the people of Sichuan like, a new landmark in the south of the city.