Audi City Beijing is the first collaboration between Audi and architect Ma Yansong and Audi’s second concept store after London last summer. The installation at “Oriental Plaza” in the city center of Beijing is a fusion between Audi’s sophisticated vehicles built around the latest technologies.

The work of Ma Yansong is centered on the human spirit, refashioning traditional orders of space in pursuit of enhanced communal interaction with nature. “Shanshui City,” is the first collaboration between the two; it explores a virtual city, a modern city in the ripples of the reflection, reflecting our imagination for the future and the introspection of facts. The poetic city is in the reflections and the modern city upside down on the fog screen. The sudden emotional changes through atmosphere, created by light and video, delineate scenarios in which natural elements are transforming the urban space. 

The classical cities are about the divine while typical contemporary cities are about power and capital, the functional and elementary necessities. Looking at the city of today, the future according to Ma Yansong should belong to human and human emotions, not to technological bravado to display wealth or power. The current reality of cities accumulating skyscrapers is too simple, a monument without humanity in which we busy ourselves living without spirit or joy.

Beijing is a Shanshui City, it is the traditional Chinese feelings of landscape shown at the scale of a city. How can humans and nature exist within high urban density conditions of the modern cities? This does not only mean green or public spaces, but it is the articulation of feelings. Ma Yansong treats visitors of the showroom with a peek into the future Shanshui City.