Sailing Castle Hai’an
SAILING CASTLE HAI’AN
Cheng Tsung Feng Design Studio
ARCHITECTS
Cheng Tsung Feng Design Studio
LEAD ARCHITECT
Cheng Tsung Feng
DESIGN TEAM
Chan Wei Hsu, Hong Lin Liu, Kuan Wei Wu
ENGINEERING & CONSULTING > LIGHTING
Oude Light
PHOTOGRAPHS
Fixer Photographic Studio
AREA
58 m²
YEAR
2025
LOCATION
Taiwan,China
CATEGORY
Cultural Architecture
English description provided by the architects.
In his Sailing Castle series, artist Cheng Tsung FENG envisions the urban landscape as an archipelago of ships at sea, where clusters of buildings resemble vessels gathered in harbor.
Through his sculptural installations, he crystallizes the collective silhouette of cityscapes and evokes the impressions of time, creating a poetic dialogue between architecture and memory.
For this iteration, the Sailing Castle has arrived in Tainan, a city with over four centuries of Han cultural history, docking along the canals of the West Central District.
FENG drew inspiration from Tainan's extensive historical axis, selecting the distinctive outlines of iconic structures such as Fort Zeelandia, Chihkan Tower, Confucius Temple, Nankunshen Daitian Temple, and Anping Kaitai Tianhou Temple.
These architectural elements—from temple roofs to fortress walls, from tower columns to decorative gables—are transformed into sails, layered and interwoven from timber to form a complex structure that rises like a fleet of ships frozen in motion.
By day, the installation radiates vitality and light; by night, it glows and shimmers, reflecting the historic cityscape in a new, contemporary form.
Visitors can walk among the sails, pause on the seating below, feel the wind passing through the structure, and experience the Tainan cityscape as if traveling four hundred years forward in time.
Sailing Castle Hai'an raises wooden sails in staggered arrangements, interpreting the architectural heritage of the city over four centuries.
The overlapping sails evoke both the gathering of ships along the waterfront and the simultaneous anticipation of departure and the arrival of returning voyagers.
It is a place of congregation, a shared moment of unity, and a poetic reimagining of collective memory.
To ascend the ship, raise the sail, face the wind, and set out toward the open sea is to engage in a journey that is at once outward and inward.
In this space, we depart, and we return home—traversing the past and present, the physical and the symbolic, through the rhythm of wind, wood, and sail.
