Light Firecrackers

Yuejin Harbor has always been the kind of place where you can try things that wouldn't fly anywhere else. There's a freedom to it — the scale, the openness, the willingness to let artists go big. With Light Firecrackers, we wanted to take the raw, chaotic energy of the traditional Yanshui Beehive Fireworks and see what happens when you rebuild that intensity with light and sound instead of gunpowder.

The setup was ambitious from the start: LED mesh screens arranged in a ring — readable from both inside and outside — a central laser, and fog machines all around to fill the space with mist. Getting these elements to actually work together outdoors, where wind and temperature change by the hour, was a completely different game from any indoor project.

Those days on-site were cold — really cold — and the wind never let up. Calibrating the interaction, the lasers, the visuals, and the hardware all at once was relentless work. We spent days going back and forth with the fog vendor, adjusting density in real time: too heavy and the lasers vanished into white soup; too light and you lost that dreamlike quality. Every night after dark was another round of testing.

We brought in LiDAR to make the piece interactive — your movement shifts the light and sound around you. But making sensors behave in an open field full of fog? That's a whole different level of calibration compared to a nice clean gallery.

One collaboration I'm especially glad about was with Aspeed Technology and their CUPOLA360 system. We set up outdoor 360° cameras that captured every performance live, generating a unique 360° video clip each show. Something about that felt right — this inherently fleeting experience, where every burst of light is gone the instant it happens, now has a digital echo. Each show lives on somewhere in the cloud.