Artist uses mirrors to show lines blurring between real and virtual

A photo taken at artist Deng Guoyan's Noah's Garden in Beijing. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Standing inside artist Deng Guoyuan's installation Noah's Garden, visitors see many reflections of themselves, leaving them confused, while they smell the flowers and can touch the rocks in the garden.

The 58-year-old artist has built a 53-square-meter glass garden with mirrors to create a space where people experience reality and the virtual world simultaneously.

The garden is divided into six spaces by walls of mirrors. Each space has different plants and rocks of various shapes and sizes.

The garden is named after Noah in a nod to the "great flood" referred to in the Bible, says Deng.

Zhu Qingsheng, the curator of Deng's show in Beijing's Red Brick Art Museum, says the work is an experiment in an era when people are being overcome by the deluge of information and technology.

"After the fourth industrial revolution, people's anxieties have increased as the line between reality and the virtual world. The garden is an ideal space to remind us of that," says Zhu.