WAY-out-of-the-box

YiXing YU Restaurant: Cloudscape Eden

2023 / Interiors

Main visual of YiXing YU Restaurant, showing the Cloudscape Eden atmosphere and the poetic scene of the lakeside restaurant.

BIANCHI PLUS Italian Restaurant

2021 / Interiors

Island Forest / Pak Pak Tang Thai Kitchen & Bar

2021 / Interiors

Overall view of the restaurant entrance, where the metal roof installation extends into the dining area and tropical planting with curved seating creates an island-forest atmosphere.

Lib-Ark / Central Park

2021 / Architecture

Aerial view over Central Park showing Lib-Ark, with mobile reading pods and landscape paths embedded between forest and lake, and the New York skyline in the distance.

S.O.E Coffee Store / Square of Eight

2021 / Interiors

Entrance interface of S.O.E Coffee Store, where black-and-white chessboard logic becomes a three-dimensional waffle structure and the coffee-bean curve shapes the store.

Seaside Station

2021 / Architecture

White organic station clusters and tropical landscape in a seaside linear park, showing the project as visitor stopover, rest, and public service nodes.

Modern Cave Dwellings

2020 / Architecture

MTG Learning Center / In the Forest

2020 / Interiors

Second-floor public area of the children’s learning center, with green furniture and tree-like lighting expressing a nature-inspired open learning space.

North Forest

2020 / Architecture

Close project

2019 / Interiors

Location: Rockbund, Shanghai, China
Program: Christmas window installation
Status: Completed, temporary installation removed
Client: moody
Area: 48.3 sqm
Design team: Zheng Tao, Fernie, Alan Hung, Li Xudong, He Jingyang
Lighting design: J Studio
Construction: Shanghai He Cheng Contracting Ltd.

Street view outside the Lyceum Building in Rockbund, Shanghai, showing the oversized yarn balls in relation to the historic facade. — 01

WAY-out-of-the-box is a Christmas window installation completed by WAY Studio for moody at the Lyceum Building in Rockbund, Shanghai. The project integrates three brand windows into one surreal spatial narrative, using oversized yarn balls, festive products, the historic facade, and the street viewing sequence to create a scene between reality and fantasy. Viewers experience the installation at different scales, from the urban street and building facade to the window surface and product display.

The Lyceum Building is a preserved historic building from 1927, carrying traces of eclectic and neoclassical architecture as well as the artistic memory of the former theatre site. The installation acts as a temporary intervention that sets the exaggerated scale of holiday decoration against the order of the historic facade. Oversized yarn balls appear to float outward from the windows and pierce the building envelope; some are hollowed out to display products for moody, Polaroid, and Tim Horton’s. The work turns a commercial window display into a temporary urban installation about desire, scale, boundary-breaking, and the act of going out of the box.