This week, solar and lunar calendars conspired to give us an interesting set of concurrent celebrations. Among them was both Mardi Gras and the New Lunar Year on February 17. This coincidence sharpened my sensibility of time and place, particularly since both events are central to their perspective larger Western and Eastern cultures. it also kindled a memory from last — a revelation in some ways — that I had last year at Osaka Expo 2025. It was in the China Pavilion, and it made me see The Middle Kingdom in a new light.
I visited China in 2012, it was all new and different and much of it was shiny and impressive. it was only in Osaka where the Chinese calendar of seasons. and sense of time defined in gradients and not blocks of months enthralled me.
Entering the China Pavilion i was greeted by a giant, luminous disc. It was a screen that slowly cycled through all 24 solar terms of the traditional Chinese year. I was mesmerized by the art, the technology, the size and ancient way of knowing which was entirely new to me.
From the outside, the pavilion dominates as a giant scroll in mid‑unfurl, its bamboo‑slip façade announcing that you are about to take in both old and new. The China Pavilion had clearly become one of the Expo’s gravitational centers. Popularity is a crude metric, but in this case, it is impossible to ignore: this did not feel like one stop among many, but a place people had come specifically to see.
The 24 Solar Terms Disc sits at the heart of the pavilion. In the prelude hall, the nearly 100‑square‑meter circular LED screen is a moon removed from its orbit. I learned that it was designed by ninety‑four‑year‑old Dunhuang art master Chang Shana and animated by China Film Group. It is a time machine: the disk revolves through the seasons. But it is not then four-part staging of Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn. Instead, there are seasons within seasons, 24 in total. They came alive through vivid, simple terms and beautiful illustrations. I could almost feel the heat, rain, frost, and dew on my skin as one bucolic scene dissolved into another.
The 24 terms might have come across as quaint “Full Grain, ETC had not the animation set a pace and mood of contemplation suitable for a “knowledge system and social practice” recognized by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Ecological in practice, poetic in description, authentic in origin, these 24 solar terms underpinned traditional Chinese agriculture for 5000 years . As the giant LED oculus cycled through year, I could almost feel the frost arriving in stages, heat cresting and ebbing, rain falling in specific measures and moods. Describing the seasonal complexity of the year in just four words is like limiting descriptions of color to red, white, blue, and black. I promised myself not to forget this insight. I can’t say that I’ve done a great job looking for Slight Heat and Great Heat, White Dew and Cold Dew, Slight Cold and Great Cold, the Awakening of Insects and Pure Brightness. But this ancient Chinese wisdom and the modern presentation of it at the China Pavilion has made me more attentive to the reality of the slow and small arcs of change made by sun, animals, rain, and bugs.
From the outside, the China Pavilion — the Scroll — reads first as text and only second as a work of architecture. This envelope is a forest of vertical “slips” designed to recall ancient bamboo writing strips, at scale and fanned out to invoke an unfurling scroll.
The pavilion is the future of museums. The glass walls of vitrines and other surfaces wake under your hand. Text pops up offering context on everything from soil moisture to satellite constellations. Then it all fades back to transparent glass. It is a rhyme of visible/invisible object with visible/invisible text. Information appears at your bidding and then steps aside when it has done its work. More than any single gadget, this is what made the space feel like the future of museums—interpretation fully integrated into the architecture of the exhibition and no longer than bolted on.
At Dubai Expo 2020, China’s pavilion leaned hard into the language of trade, logistics, and opportunity. Commerce rather than culture dominated. It was like a high‑gloss chamber‑of‑commerce brochure in 3D. It was also a bore. In Osaka, it was completely different. Economic power was still implied, but screened through ecology, culture, and long historical memory. Instead of asking you to imagine supply chains, this pavilion asked you to inhabit cycles of seasons of a civilization moving from bamboo slips to lunar soil.
That shift in emphasis reads, above all, as a new level of cultural confidence. The story on offer is unapologetically civilizational, but rarely lapses into chest‑thumping. It suggests that technological achievement is simply one more branch on an older tree whose roots are environmental and aesthetic.
In April 2025, waiting under that unsettled Osaka sky, it felt like one of the Expo’s clear top three, alongside the pavilions from Japan and Saudi Arabia, both of which were also singled out in international coverage for their ambition and design.
In the months since, that early impression has been borne out. The China Pavilion went gone on to receive high‑level recognition for its exhibition design, winning the Gold Award among large self‑built pavilions, the top honor. Over the Expo’s full 184‑day run, it welcomed nearly two million visitors, setting a record for the largest total number of guests received by any national pavilion in Osaka. Seen from the vantage point of February 2026, those accolades only confirm what that April queue was already telling anyone patient enough to stand in it: this was not just a building, but a statement written in light and time, and the world had come to read it.
http://wiki.china.org.cn/index.php?title=24_Traditional_Chinese_Seasonal_Divisions
http://www.china.org.cn/2025-10/13/content_118120302.shtml
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