Sailing Castle Ren’ai | Cheng Tsung FENG Design Studio

In his Sailing Castle Ren’ai series, artist Cheng Tsung FENG reimagines the appearance of cities as if they were fleets of ships gathered at sea. Through large-scale installation art, he captures the silhouettes of surrounding buildings and transforms them into poetic impressions that weave together time, space, and memory.

Ren’ai Village in Taipei, the site of this work, is a neighborhood that flourished in the 1970s as a showcase for many of Taiwan’s leading architects. Its residential buildings reflect the influence of Bauhaus and modernist design, with clean lines and simplified forms expressed through repeating grids of windows. At the Taiwan Lantern Festival, FENG extends his Sailing Castle concept, translating the clustered urban landscape of Ren’ai Village into the vision of sails assembled across the sea.

The installation employs meticulously arranged wooden structures, layered to resemble a field of overlapping sails. These sails rise in orderly repetition, echoing the rhythm and proportion of Ren’ai Village’s mid-century apartment blocks. The interplay of vertical and horizontal elements conveys both architectural discipline and nautical motion, suggesting a cityscape that is also a fleet in waiting. By day, the installation reads as a sculptural abstraction of familiar buildings. By night, lights shimmer randomly between the sails, evoking the glow of windows that animate urban life—moments of work, leisure, solitude, and community, all flickering within the shared frame of the city.

Situated within Dunren Park, a beloved gathering place for local residents, FENG’s work functions not only as a stage-like structure but also as a communal landmark. Visitors are invited to pause, walk through, and inhabit this poetic reconstruction of their everyday surroundings. It becomes a ritual site where personal memories meet collective history, where the city’s architectural past resonates with its present rhythms.

To board the ship, to raise the sail, to meet the wind, and to set forth toward the sea—this installation speaks of both departure and return. In the glowing sails of Sailing Castle: Ren’ai, the city itself becomes a vessel, carrying its people home.

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