Night Bloom is a bold, immersive projection artwork that transforms sign language into a living digital garden of movement, light and growth. Created through deaf-led international collaboration, the work turns sign language into landscape — where hands become seeds, signs become branches, and visual language generates entire worlds.
Rooted in visual vernacular, dance and botanical imagery, Night Bloom explores cultural survival, interdependence and renewal through spectacular large-scale environments.
The project also led to The Making of Night Bloom — a behind-the-scenes documentary that premiered at Watershed and won Best Documentary at a Toronto film festival — extending the work’s reach through deaf community stories and creative process.
Designed to adapt across different architectures — from galleries to domes to public façades — each presentation of Night Bloom responds to its site, audience and community context.
Plymouth Market Hall Dome
In Plymouth’s 15-metre immersive dome, Night Bloom expanded into a full 360° experience. The circular environment allowed the digital garden to grow overhead and all around, with blooming forms, gestural sequences and animated ecosystems unfolding across the curved screen. The dome format intensified the sense of being inside the artwork — a shared visual landscape shaped by deaf expression and collective imagination.
Night Bloom Shanghai: A collaboration with Suhe Haus contemporary gallery
In Shanghai, Night Bloom developed through collaboration with deaf artists and performers in China, embedding Chinese Sign Language and local perspectives into the work. Filming and research included engagement with deaf community spaces and intergenerational participants. This version foregrounded cross-cultural deaf exchange, showing how visual language, nature symbolism and movement connect across borders.
Night Bloom London: Now showing at Vital Signs: Another World is Possible, Science Gallery until 15 May 2025
At Science Gallery London, Night Bloom was presented as an immersive moving-image environment, inviting audiences to step inside a luminous sign-language garden. Surrounded by evolving projected forms, visitors encountered deaf-led storytelling through motion, rhythm and visual poetry. The installation emphasised sensory experience and accessibility, with visual language at its core rather than spoken narration.
Commissioned by Unlimited in partnership with British Council.
Credits:
Artistic Direction: Cathy Mager
Choreography and performance: Alice Hu, An Di, Xianhe Wang
Video Design Artwork and Editing: Ben Glover
Filming: Bob Wang, Sam Zheng, Jack Chi
Illustration: Lifeng He, Music: Ngaio Anyia, mixing by James Ongley
Production: Cat Roberts
Sign Language Interpreters: Blade Tang, Freya McLuckie, Jayme Lawman