An Exhibition Hard to Define: More Like a Two-Hour Journey Into Self-Perception

There is no fixed script and no defined exhibits — each visitor's own experience is the exhibition's subject.

In nearly 10,000 square meters of space at the Minsheng Wharf art complex on the east bank of Shanghai's Huangpu River, an exhibition spans installation, dance, theater, video, makeup, multimedia and sound art. The show, titled Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders (《戏游 2：无界之宴》), takes place at what was once Asia's largest grain storage site. The site began as the Blue Funnel Wharf, built in 1908 by the British-owned Blue Funnel Line shipping company; the large cylindrical silos beside the wharf were added by the Shanghai Port Authority in 1975.

The exhibition unfolds in four acts — "Dome," "Path," "Hearing," and "Odyssey" — staged mainly across the first, sixth and seventh floors of the Minsheng Wharf complex, and runs two hours.

Visitors are told to come dressed light. Taken up to the seventh floor by elevator in small groups, they enter an enclosed space where, as dancers move slowly and with total focus, the room's half-dome ceiling comes alive with an Interstellar-like multimedia display. This is "Dome."

After that futuristic sequence, visitors are led into a long, narrow space, where more than a dozen dancers perform a solemn "ritual" along an 80-meter corridor thick with mist. As the dancers move, the piece advances steadily down the passage. There is no stage boundary here — visitors can walk any route they like to watch, and may find themselves making eye contact with a dancer, or dancing alongside one. Further on, under a steady fall of wheat ears inside the silos, they watch a "grain rain" while listening to nanyin, the ancient musical tradition of Quanzhou. This is "Path," the section choreographed by director Zhao Liang in a stripped-down, almost purely spiritual form of baptism for the audience.

Descending a circular ramp, visitors enter four cylindrical silo spaces to hear the tick of "time," the crunch of footsteps on wheat, the scratch of a stylus on a vinyl record with no music playing, and a women's choir echoing through the entire sixth-and-seventh-floor space. People and sound reverberate through the space — this is "Hearing."

Finally, riding the building's exterior escalator, visitors descend to the ground floor. They may briefly break character here, but the view of the Huangpu River from the escalator, and the exhibition walls they pass, serve as a prelude to the next act, "Odyssey." Along the way, visitors are given headphones, and a voice triggered by the exhibition app's location tracking guides them into another space. "Odyssey" was directed by Conor Doyle, one of the creators of Sleep No More, who wanted every visitor to become the protagonist of this part.

Here, visitors pass through a hall of mirrors and other sequences before arriving at a "feast" of round tables. They can choose any table to sit at, listening to a voice in their headphones speaking directly to them. They may undergo a "hypnosis," encounter a "scarecrow," be fed by a performer (look closely, and the "Madonna" feeding them is genuinely pregnant), be touched, be looked in the eye. Where visitors go, and in what state of mind they meet these moments, is entirely up to them.

None of this is the whole experience, nor is any of it guaranteed. As an exhibition built around audience participation, every visitor's experience is unique — shaped by their vantage point, the direction they choose to move, and the state of mind they bring.

Across the four parts of the exhibition, it's hard to say exactly what it depicts, but easy to say what it makes you feel. Chief curator Cui Xiaohong told QDaily that the exhibition's central axis is "you" — "each and every person." There is no fixed script and no defined exhibits; each visitor's own experience is the exhibition's subject.

Theater Journey 1 (《戏游 1》) was staged in Beijing in 2017, but the two productions share no connection in content, venue or staging — only the immersive experience is similar. As for the name "Feast Without Borders" in Theater Journey 2, director Zhao Liang sees it as a banquet: "Here you're like the host — you open yourself up completely, and all the guests arrive one after another, and in that moment everyone enjoys what's offered to their senses." Chief curator Cui Xiaohong sees it differently: "Calling it a 'feast' is really an expression of the relationship between the exhibition and the people in it. The actual scene [on the first floor] has these big round tables, except what's being eaten is spiritual nourishment. What's consumed is feeling — the atmosphere at each table is itself something like a feast."

The venue itself plays a crucial role in Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders. Chief curator Cui Xiaohong says Minsheng Wharf feels "sacred." In "Path," Zhao Liang's choreography lends the section an air of mystery and ritual, and images and props tied to "grain" recur throughout the show. In "Odyssey," director Conor wanted the performers, in a space that once "fed" the local population, to play roles of nurturing and nourishment, offering visitors "care" and "sustenance" through every sense.

In terms of immersive experience, Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders resembles the immersive theater production Sleep No More. But Sleep No More is, at its core, a play — what audiences "immerse" themselves in is someone else's story. In Theater Journey 2, what visitors immerse themselves in is their own perception. This is most pronounced in the final "Odyssey" section, where performers act as guides leading visitors into their own perception. Headphones are used specifically in this section so visitors enter a one-on-one dialogue and are prevented from talking with the people they came with — briefly pulling them out of everyday life to truly sense their own bodies and inner voices.

In recent years, "immersive" has become a word invoked constantly. Curators are folding more performance art, music, and multimedia into their shows. Viewing an exhibition is no longer just about looking at works on a wall — the visitor's role as subject is steadily growing more central. As a result, the form of the exhibition itself is becoming harder and harder to define; curator and art critic Jiang Mei calls it "a transcendence of the audience's everyday experience."

At the April 29 forum The Boundless Exhibition (《无界的展览》), she said: "What is art? What do we carry back into our lives from the experience of being there? It's really something from another dimension — something that lets you keep feeling good, keep feeling fulfilled, something that gives you the motivation to keep living for a while."

That might explain why visitors are willing to pay for "immersive." Whatever they're looking for — something to think about, or simply two hours of escape from daily life — an exhibition built around the visitor as its subject gives them, to some degree, what they came for.

We also spoke with Conor Doyle, one of Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders's directors, and chief curator Cui Xiaohong, about the details of the exhibition and the thinking behind it.

"What You 'Eat' Is Up to You"

Q: QDaily

Cui: Cui Xiaohong, chief curator of Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders and founder of Marie Dalgar

Q: Going from the sixth floor to the first, visitors step outside the exhibition space on the escalator. Just as they've settled into the mood, they suddenly break character, and then have to gather themselves again to re-enter the exhibition's world. Was that section designed around the building's constraints, or was it deliberate?

Cui: There's a building-related reason, yes. But we actually wanted people to step outside deliberately. Early in the curation process we argued about this — about breaking character and staying in character. Theater Journey 1 was fully enclosed; inside the hotel, you couldn't see a trace of the hotel's original decor anywhere — totally wrapped. This time we also debated it, because the second half has a strong story behind it. Conor set up this scene: a Blue Funnel Line shipping company. The idea is that this Englishman sailed his ship and arrived at Shanghai's east bank.

So the headphones should go on right as you step off the sixth floor, listening as you go. That way you know the story continues downstairs — there are paintings down in the exhibition that tell the story of a British merchant in the 1930s. That makes it clearer that the river view and the story below are connected. You're wearing the headphones, listening to the story, watching the river, and arriving at the exhibition area, all at once.

Q: This exhibition is hard to define. At first it feels like an exhibition version of Sleep No More. But Sleep No More has one main storyline, even with many subplots. Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders has a lot going on, and some of it is abstract. Are you worried visitors won't know what they're looking at?

Cui: Sure, that worry is there. But everyone's experience is different. We didn't want to make another Sleep No More. Watching Sleep No More is like watching a movie — it completely wraps you up. What we wanted was to give visitors a sense of flow, a chance to think for themselves. Their own mind has to stay present. That was deliberate, from the start.

Q: The way I see it, Sleep No More pulls you into someone else's story. Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders — especially the last section — brings you back to your own perception.

Cui: Exactly. It's about preserving your independence, respecting the fact that you exist as an independent self.

Q: What role does technology play in this exhibition?

Cui: I think everything should serve us — technology, the humanities, whatever else. We brought in content from many different fields, but the point stays the same: the main thread is "you," this script belongs to "you." So we call it an open script — how it ultimately gets written depends on each person.

Watching yesterday, some people came in genuinely to experience it. They were relaxed, quiet, they'd sit down on a stool. Their experience ends up very strong. Others just want to take photos — they'll shoot the pretty spots and skip the rest. That gives you a shallower experience. It's the same with the flow of movement: once people get into that space, some head one way, some another. Not everyone sits down at every table.

So really, what we built is a platform. What you "eat" is up to you. You decide which dish to eat and which to pass on. That was a core idea in designing Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders — it belongs to "you."

Q: I only realized later that the third section invites you to explore — that you can actually walk up and step on the straw. I found it hard to break out of my own mindset; I kept feeling like I should follow the crowd, thinking, "Am I even allowed to go there? What if a performer comes over in a minute?"

Cui: That's exactly the barrier people face in experiencing life today. Many parts of the show are designed to help people truly open up. Opening yourself takes time and effort. But once you really do, it feels clear and unobstructed.

Whatever you feel — great joy, great sorrow, or just calm — it's still something gained. Take the section with the hypnotist, Anson. In everyday life we simply don't have time for that kind of conversation, a conversation with ourselves; we don't have that vantage point. But creating that vantage point within this space, even briefly, is rare. He's there to wake you up, not put you to sleep.

The first time I tested it — deciding whether to bring Anson in — I was startled myself. It turned out there was a part of me I didn't know existed, that my body was taking direction from my subconscious. So I realized there's a large part of a person that's an untapped goldmine, genuinely valuable. We defined that round table as a "round-table passage" — you look like you're just sitting down, but the moment you sit, you're actually entering another passage. That world holds a lot of energy, a lot of value, and it needs to be dug up too.

Q: In terms of experience design, are the exhibition's four acts a gradual, step-by-step progression?

Cui: Yes. It keeps circling back to "you" — from seeing, thinking, being moved, to starting to reflect, to friction, and finally to discovering something about yourself. That's how the whole flow was designed.

Q: Directors Zhao Liang and Conor bring Eastern and Western perspectives to the exhibition. Do you see their work as complementary, or as echoing each other?

Cui: The styles are very different, and that's exactly what we needed when choosing our artists. They each bring their own perspective, but thematically both come back to "feeling the essential beauty of life." Watching Zhao Liang's choreography, seeing the performers, I cried. I felt how precious life is — that upward-reaching vitality can move you. You feel that sense of striving, and today it's so precious. Zhao Liang's section leaves you with a kind of warning, but a gentle one. Then downstairs, in "Odyssey," we get to real contact, to building a real relationship. The whole process is meant to make people reconsider our relationship with the world today, and with ourselves.

Q: In choosing this venue, what mattered most to you about it?

Cui: Its sacredness. The first time I saw it, it felt like a church — sacred. It has a particular aura, and we wanted to fold that aura into the work. That's rare; very few venues can give you that kind of sacred feeling. I wanted a strong sense of character running through the setting and the space.

"For the Audience, It's More an Emotional Journey"

Q: QDaily

C: Conor Doyle, one of the directors of Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders and one of the creators of Sleep No More

Q: Why headphones instead of background music?

C: What the curators told me at the start was that they wanted visitors to really look, really listen, and be changed by what they saw and heard. So the headphones exist to give each person that unique experience.

I want visitors to feel they're truly in a conversation. I want you to feel you've become someone else — this isn't just a voice that can talk to you directly. I also wanted the headphones to stop people talking to each other. They keep you from chatting with friends, so you can listen, watch, and hear your own voice — you end up in a more focused state. You're less likely to get pulled back into reality; the aim is to create another world and, as much as possible, keep other things from pulling you out of it. That way you can relax. It's as if you're less likely to snap back to reality, because there's someone talking to you, right in your ear.

How to let technology help us connect with the people around us, help us sense more of the world around us — that was also part of our original intent. We wanted visitors, while wearing the headphones, to enter their own world and hear, and feel, a unique experience. Someone is talking to you as if speaking to you specifically, not to just anyone.

Q: The "Odyssey" section has especially strong interaction, and by the second half it almost feels like entering an amusement park. Did that section draw on Sleep No More?

C: Every human interaction is a special thing. The Sleep No More creative team understands very well how to build interaction, how to draw an audience into a performance. But that kind of immersion is a bit different from the immersion in this exhibition. In Sleep No More, the audience isn't a character — they're just present in the scene. In Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders, the audience actually plays an important role.

The form of interaction with performers is also different. In this exhibition, we wanted visitors, by the time they leave, to have seen, heard, and smelled certain things — sensory experiences. That was something we wanted to emphasize throughout the planning: for visitors to use their senses more, use their bodies more.

I want visitors to leave feeling happy, feeling joy. So I wanted the emotional arc to start low and gradually climb. The very happy part at the end is a bit like waking up your own inner child. Without that part, you'd walk out of the first floor feeling flat, or bored.

I think for the audience, this is more an emotional journey than something you take away from an external narrative. It's an exhibition about your body within your awareness, your spirit within your heart.

Q: How should we understand the "Odyssey" section — does the name refer to Odysseus? I read that you once said, "The exhibition's visitors are all like Odysseus, sailing on a ship called 'Ulysses' — Ulysses being Odysseus's Roman name."

C: For me, leaving visitors some room is important, and powerful. I think "there's no single answer" might drive Chinese audiences a little crazy. I do have a very specific answer, but I might not want to tell visitors what it is. I want them to arrive at that answer themselves.

What the curators and I especially wanted to explore was the different ways we use our brains. Our brains have a very rational part. But there's also an unconscious part that creates dreams — I find that part more confusing, but more imaginative.

I think Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders is trying to speak more to that unconscious part. We're not just cultivating intellect — we're cultivating imagination too. That's an important and wonderful gift, but one that people sometimes undervalue.

Q: You've mentioned working with a hypnosis teacher, because "we were researching how to better suggest things to the audience. Of course, no one is actually hypnotized." What is it you want to suggest to visitors?

C: The hypnotist, Anson, put it very beautifully. He said hypnosis is a bridge between the subconscious and the conscious mind. A hypnotic state is really just a way of helping you get to that place — the subconscious. So "suggestion" is an attempt to help visitors reach the part of the brain we don't usually notice. I think hypnosis and meditation are somewhat similar.

Right now I'm interested in how meditation and hypnosis can be used in theater and exhibitions. The hypnosis here isn't about tricking the audience on stage, or making them do something strange. It's about using the process of hypnosis to let a person talk with their own subconscious, so that afterward they feel a sense of joy, or a positive emotion — or a feeling of being "nourished." The theme of the second section on the first floor is exactly that: nourishment.

I was also fascinated by the building itself. It used to store grain, and I was curious how a place like this had nourished the people of this city — I wanted to bring that feeling into the work. The performers in this section all play roles of nurturing, nourishing, giving; each of them, in their own way, is trying to give visitors that feeling. Anson the hypnotist is the same — his role in this section is to nourish something in the mind, in the heart, and through a dialogue with the subconscious, ultimately give you a better experience.

Q: How would you describe Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders to someone who hasn't seen it?

C: I'd "lie" and say, "You're going to visit the East Asia Grain Museum" — the first line of narration that plays in the headphones during "Odyssey."

When someone describes something to you, you start imagining it in your head, even before you get there. If people know about a personal experience in advance, they build expectations about it. The internet is so pervasive now that it's hard to find genuine surprise anywhere in the world. So I don't want to spoil too much. If I have to describe it, Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders is a surprise.

Performers and Audience Create a Subtle Charge Between Them

(The following is drawn from the April 29 talk The Boundless Exhibition (《无界的展览》). Zhao Liang is one of the directors of Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders and a contemporary dance-theater artist.)

Zhao Liang: The first time I walked into this building, I felt the whole structure carried its own memory. And every building, in the end, is completed by the human body — I think architecture and the body correspond to each other completely, and that relationship holds from beginning to end. Walking in, I felt this space itself had nourished a generation — people got their food, their grain here. It's a place of spiritual sustenance.

We've needed this sense of ritual since ancient times, and staging a performance like this within the space — I used this exhibition to build that sense of ritual. I think it's the best way to present it; I had to build that ritual feeling to draw everyone in. Since ancient times, our lives, our whole rhythm, have been full of ritual. I wondered whether, when everyone enters the space, they could surround the performers, and the performers in turn could lift up the audience, so that everyone slowly undergoes this kind of spiritual baptism. The building itself gave us that spatial imagination.

From the moment we were discussing how to perform, we approached it in a spirit of giving, wanting everyone to participate rather than staying in a strict watching-and-performing mode. Once we're inside that field, sensing the distance and interaction with the audience — I think that's genuinely rare. Every visitor who enters, through their own participation in this performance, gets something that can affect them for a lifetime, or at least change their state in that moment.

These past two days I've also been watching how different waves of visitors bring different energies, and those different energies also stir the performers, who then feed something back to the audience. A subtle charge forms between them. We do two shows a day, but the two have completely different atmospheres — it's fascinating. As an observer, watching the different crowds and the performers' responses each day, I can see the dialogue between them, inside this building. It's remarkable to me.

It really is like a banquet — here you're like the host, opening yourself up completely, and all the guests arrive one after another, and in that moment everyone takes in what's offered to their senses, letting it seep slowly into every strand of their DNA. That feeling is wonderful.

Dance itself is a very live, in-the-moment art form. I think in the past, when people went to exhibitions, they mostly looked at still lifes, sketches, paintings — performance and exhibition were two separate directions. The future trend is that the two will gradually merge; plenty of museums abroad are already bringing performance art directly into everything that happens on site.

On the seventh floor, right as you walk in, you see a figure with a sense of the sacred, almost religious and ritualistic, wearing a mask — and the mask itself is very industrial, which gives it a religious feel. What I wanted to express is that in every era, every period, people need something to worship. We keep creating our idols and following them; sometimes we have no idea what that thing really is, but we follow it anyway, quite blindly.

I placed that figure at the start of the exhibition to ask what kind of relationship this really is — reality and the virtual, the illusory and the original, the present and the future. When everything fuses together in that one instant, that's what we're trying to express — something that can't be easily labeled or pinned down. I think it's precisely because it's ambiguous that it becomes captivating, that it becomes the direction we're chasing. That's the concept Theater Journey 2: Feast Without Borders ultimately wants to express.

(The exhibition runs from April 28 to May 7, daily from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 to 9:30 p.m.)

Unless otherwise noted, the cover image and in-text images are courtesy of MD The Art Lab.