Magic Forest is a site-specific installation situated within an underground architectural space — the first permanent light-based art installation in a Chinese underground station. And here, Light is structural, slicing through darkness like shafts of time. The project explores how artificial ecologies can emerge through the integration of architecture, computation, and sensorial media. It constructs a fictional landscape in which light, form, and motion simulate the qualities of an open forest, reimagined in a subterranean context. At its core stands a vertical light well, surrounded by LED columns that simulate sunlight filtering through a canopy.

Developed in collaboration with architect and design director Wang Linjie, and architect Chen Lin, Magic Forest sits at the intersection of media installation and interior spatial design. Spanning a total of 158 meters in length, the installation transforms the transit corridor into an immersive atmosphere of rhythm and form. Suspended throughout the space are 2,016 of 3D-printed hollow butterflies, drifting through layers of air and light. Their forms are algorithmically constructed, forming swarms that evoke both natural migration and computational choreography. The work unfolds as a system of moving particles — part memory, part simulation.

For Jiayu, light functions as a language: coloring space, shaping perception, and generating resonance. The butterflies, meanwhile, serve as temporal markers of fragility, multiplicity, and the quiet symbiosis between the artificial and the organic. Beneath the city, Magic Forest offers a quiet proposition: that technology may yet become nature’s ally, not its opposite.

In this underground clearing of light and shadow, people are invited to step into an ecology made of code, air, memory, and hope.

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