On a quiet beach in Lingshui, Hainan China, a glowing geometric form now rises from the sand. It is called Pop Star – Mossdawn, and it feels less like an artwork that was placed here and more like something that arrived with the tide.
Designed by Li Hao in collaboration with One Take Architects, the installation is built around a compact geometric core known as a Johnson solid.
From that precise nucleus, translucent colored panels extend outward, catching coastal light and shifting in tone as clouds move and the sun fades.
The structure is modular and temporary, assembled from repeatable parts that can be taken apart and reconfigured elsewhere. That portability gives Mossdawn a nomadic quality, as if it belongs anywhere the sea meets the land.
Walk around it and the sculpture seems to change personality. From one angle it reads as a star.
From another, a strange mechanical flower. It balances hard geometry with a softness created entirely by light.
Built in late 2025, Mossdawn is less about permanence and more about a fleeting moment, a brief flare of color and form against the endless rhythm of the ocean.
Pop Star – Mossdawn crystallizes a moment of explosive tension into a spatial structure that the body can walk around, enter, and perceive. At its core lies a Johnson solid, which provides a clear and rational geometric order—like a highly compressed “nucleus.”
This nucleus is a structural hub, a fast-assembly, demountable system in which standardized nodes and modular members lock into place, allowing the work to be rapidly deployed, dismantled, and transported as a kit-of-parts.
Radiating from this core, coloured transparent panels extend along a steel framework, continually shifting in brightness and chromatic relationships under the influence of sea wind and light, hovering between a star, a plant, and a fragment of machinery.
Photos via Ouran, Nan Xueqian.
