A young man known as ‘Feng Qing Yang’ announced retirement and named ‘Xiao Yao Zi’ to be his successor. World-changing decisions are still made from the office called ‘Bright Summit Peak’. Alibaba’s view and value gradually matures from ‘Lonely Nine Swords’ to ‘Six-Pulse Excalibur’, to ‘The New Six-Pulse Excalibur’. And no matter whether you can see or not, Alibaba’s tech base – Damo Academy, will always be here.

Apsara Conference is an expo especially for technology and its application. This year, there is a special area in the main venue called ‘core area’. It is the key exhibition area for Alibaba’s most cutting-edge technology.
Besides showing Alibaba’s advanced hardware, breakthroughs of software, innovative applications, it more focuses on the driving cause of Alibaba’s innovation — technology is not only for development, but for humanity’s better future.

Time makes Alibaba, however Alibaba is still people’s Jianghu (living in Jianghu means following the own moral code). The chemistry between time and talents will make Jianghu great again in the Apsara Tech Base booth. To practice martial arts is to challenge the limit of physical body, in Damo Academy, the tech elites are challenging possibilities and breaking the limits of imagination.

VAVE has come up with the theme ‘Unifying time and talent for humanity’s benefit”, subverted the usual ‘high-tech feeling’ of the previous technology expos. We’ve re-imagined the traditional Chinese architecture signature upturned eaves to be the main visual attraction, thus creating a booth were technology meets tradition for Damo Academy at the Apsara Conference.

There are two major divisions for the booth. The ‘Damo Academy’ division shows the academy’s achievements, including X Laboratory, Machine Intelligence, Financial Technology, Robotics, and Data Computing. The ’T-Head’ division is mainly reserved for the chip innovation of T-Head.

In the ‘Damo Academy’ area, we designed a main ceiling installation with the design language of upturned eaves, which was realized with thousands of hot bend transparent acrylic plates, all to enhance the atmosphere of Jianghu. The light form of the installation represents the ‘transcendence’ of Chinese intelligent.

In the ’T-head’ area, the latest and proudest innovation of T-Head are shown. In the chip display area, we embedded the chips inside an installation of ‘sacred books’, to show the essence of T-head in a ceremonial way.

Surrounding the chip display area, we set up different scenarios to tell how the products are deeply involved in our daily lives. With the following 5 scenarios, joyous working, convenient shopping, interactive entertainment, home safely and happy life, it paints a picture of a normal IT worker’s day-to-day life, thus presenting the difficult technologies in ways people can understand easily.

The ancient Chinese elements like upturned eaves, mortise and tenon joints, stamps, and abstract Chinese landscape paintings, combining with Damo Academy’s new Chinese inventions, creates a dramatic chemistry on the booth, making it the absolute highlight of the Apsara Conference.