Ice Blueprint: Reunified Icefield combines traditions of ice sculpture with digital fabrication to construct a cool and unfamiliar virtual landscape—a liminal space formed through the reassembly of cultural fragments, personal memory, and digital symbols.
This work was developed from Xi Li’s three-month independent residency-based field research and artistic practice in Harbin, China, from late 2024 to early 2025. During this time the artist documented the labour of ice sculptors and the public celebration and visual spectacle of Harbin Ice and Snow World.
In Ice Blueprint: Reunified Icefield cracks in ice, futuristic structures, code-like texts, snow-covered terrain, and cartographic landscapes are brought together within a virtual environment, forming an “icefield” that appears to be continuously loading, generating, and reconstructing itself. Rather than directly representing Harbin, these fragments re-encode the visual language of the ice and snow festival, urban space, and personal experience into a digital terrain situated between reality, memory, and imagination.
Through 3D modelling and digital fabrication, symbolic totems, structures drawn from personal dreams, and forms derived from ice-sculptural traditions are transformed into spatial fragments. Visual and cultural elements from different sources overlap, fracture, and recombine within the virtual environment, turning the landscape into a constructed space of memory rather than a stable geographic site.
Reunified Icefield therefore constructs a continually emerging “memory map”. It carries cultural residues left by the ice and snow festival and its urban landscape, while transforming Harbin into a simulated space regenerated through personal perception, memory, and imagination. Within this virtual icefield, geographic boundaries gradually dissolve, merging with dreams, cultural symbols, and digital systems to form an evolving psychological landscape.
