Superstar: A Mobile Chinatown
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Superstar: A Mobile Chinatown

“Superstar: A Mobile China Town” was first exhibited in the “Uneternal City” 11th Venice Architecture Biennale. The Superstar is MAD’s response to the redundant and increasingly out-of-date appreciation for nature of the contemporary Chinatown. Rather than a insignificant patchwork of poor construction and nostalgia, the Superstar is a fully integrated, coherent, and above all modern upgrade of the 20th century Chinatown model. It’s a place to enjoy Chinese cuisine, quality goods and cultural events; a place to create and produce, where citizens can use workshops to study, design and realize their ideas.

Along with shopping malls, petrol stations and branches of McDonald’s, the old Chinatown renders all cities boring and alike, a kitsch image of contemporary China with no real life to speak of. It is the historical theme park that poisons the urban space. There must be a shock therapy to remedy this situation.

Equally important to what this neo-community contains is how it operates. “Superstar: A Mobile China Town” is a benevolent virus that releases energy in between unprincipled changes and principled steadiness. It may land in every corner of the world, exchanging the new Chinese energy with the environment where it stays. It’s self-sustaining: it grows its own food, requires no resources from the host city, and recycles all of its waste. It’s a living place, with authentic Chinese nature and health resorts, sports facilities and drinkable reservoirs, even a digital cemetery to remember the deceased. It’s a travelling Olympic party that can journey to the host city every four years. The Superstar is a dream that’s home to 15,000 people. No hierarchy, only a fusion of technology and nature, future and humanity.

The Superstar’s first destination would be the periphery of Rome. The Superstar will provide an unexpected, ever-changing future embedded in the eternal past.

Welcome to the Superstar, the Chinatown of today.

Work team
Directors : Ma Yansong, Dang Qun, Yosuke Hayano
Design Team : Chen Shuyu, Fu Changrui, Zhengtao, Fernie Lai, David William Nightingale, Matthias Werner Helmreich, Bryan Alan Oknyansky, Zach Hines