Dream of Walnut Palaces (2025) is a mesmerizing ten-minute CGI animation film that offers an alternative interpretation of established historical narratives. The work explores the exchange of knowledge between Asia and Europe during the Enlightenment, as well as the encounter between Chinese and European conceptions of knowledge, visual cultures, and imperial imaginaries.
Dreams, ghosts and shadows become metaphors for history and knowledge as Wendi Yan constructs her narrative at the intersection of historical sources, imagination, and the possibilities offered by artificial intelligence. The work follows a fictional Daoist scholar on a journey from the Qing-dynasty Beijing to Paris in the 1780s, at the dawn of modern science. In his dream, the scholar travels by hot-air balloon – one of the great scientific spectacles of the eighteenth century – towards two magnetic walnuts floating above the clouds. Inside them, a world of visions reminiscent of a magic lantern show unfolds, where scientific inquiry, observation and spectacle become entangled.
The title of the film connects palaces with imagined structures of knowledge and walnuts with an allegory of the exchange of scientific and artistic images between the empires. Yan speculates on what might have happened if a Daoist master had brought his knowledge and wisdom into contact with the European thinkers of the Enlightenment. In Daoist thought, embodied experience and the senses are not positioned as opposites to knowledge, but are understood as means of acquiring it in their own right. Traditional Chinese medicine’s concept of qi, life energy, and its understanding of the relationship between human beings, nature and the cosmos likewise open up perspectives onto experiential and holistic forms of knowledge that have largely been excluded from the framework of modern Western science.
Dream of Walnut Palaces challenges the idea of a single, linear narrative of the emergence of science and modernity. It asks what our world might have become if different systems of knowledge had encountered one another as equals, and if alternative ways of knowing and understanding had been allowed to develop alongside the modern science.
The work is commissioned by THE VH AWARD, initiated by Hyundai Motor Group.
The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Heritage Agency.
Wendi Yan (b. 1999, Beijing) is an artist, writer and technologist. She uses CGI software to simulate alternative paths of scientific progress through videos and games, and writes about the history and future of scientific discovery. Her works often explore what happens when forms of knowledge that have been left behind, lost, or marginalised in the history of science are brought back into view through imagination.
