VR Meets Literature:

“It all begins with the clouded leopard skin . . .”

                —Wu Ming-yi, “The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up,” from The Land of Little Rain
 

This summer, MoNTUE’s The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up exhibition offers visitors plenty to explore.

Into a misty forest where the real and virtual meet

Wu Ming-yi traces the origin of his story “The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up” to a mysterious news item years ago: Someone had hung a clouded leopard pelt on the doorknob of the Ruisui Ecological Education Center in Hualien. The enigmatic leopard skin left ample room for imagination. In Wu’s hands, it became a spiritual journey of reconstruction through grief, healing, and searching. Remarkably, the actual pelt that linked reality and fiction now lies quietly in a second-floor display case at MoNTUE, echoing the vividly rendered clouded leopard in the VR work.

The story begins with the search by the protagonist “Guan” for an unfinished manuscript left by his late wife. Following clues about the Formosan clouded leopard and Indigenous myths, he ventures into the mountains at 2,000 meters. Director Singing Chen and her team spent two years translating the text into a fully immersive virtual experience.

Outstanding work depends on support from many fields. Guests at the opening press event included, from left: Huang Hao-jie, director of the Kaohsiung Film Archive; Tung Wei-chen, chair of Takao VC Co., Ltd.; Chung Mei-ching, representing the TSMC Education & Culture Foundation; Hu Yuan-hui, chairperson of the Taiwan Public Television Service Foundation; Deputy Minister of Culture Lee Ching-hwi; NTUE Vice President Liu Yuan-chen; MoNTUE Acting Director You Jang-shyong; film director Singing Chen; author Wu Ming-yi; exhibition producer and curator Lin Mun-lee; Hans Chiu, representing HANSCHIU; Wayne Cheng, representing AUSPIC PAPER; and Pan Wei-ting, representing GIGABYTE. 

The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up is the product of a group of people pursuing a shared dream. From left: director Singing Chen (photo by Anpis Wang, courtesy of MoNTUE), author Wu Ming-yi, geographer Hung Kuang-chi, and wildlife researcher Chiang Po-jen.

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In the VR showrooms on the third floor and basement, visitors put on a headset and enter a mobile virtual world. For example, in one scene set in Taipei’s Ximending area, Guan learns of his wife’s death, for which the team used shifts in light and color to mirror his emotional turn. To build a mist-wreathed forest, the team scanned trees on site one by one. Visual lead Huang Yu-jie explains that advanced techniques such as Gaussian splatting, together with post-production compositing, allowed the team to layer many atmospheric elements into the VR world. Technical artist Liz Lin refined its textures: For instance, a seemingly still pool is disturbed by ripples from invisible raindrops, and moss clings to a sign in the mountains. Details like these deepen viewers’ sense of presence when watching the VR work and create realistic ambiences for locations.

The mysterious clouded leopard pelt that inspired Wu Ming-yi now rests quietly in a display case at MoNTUE.

With a headset on, visitors enter a free-roaming virtual world. (photo by Anpis Wang, courtesy of MoNTUE)

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In a behind-the-scenes video shown at the exhibition, Umin Boya, who plays A-Pao, admits that acting on a green-screen stage only about three meters across was especially demanding: A single movement had to be broken into several scans. Mo Tzu-yi, who plays Guan, describes the work as an attempt “to construct moments where magic and reality intersect.” The character’s grief and sense of being lost, he adds, are deeply relatable.

As visitors hesitate before a virtual abyss or experience searching and loss in the maze and tree hollow, the work becomes more than a display of VR technology. It is a spiritual journey of self-healing taken alongside the character. The project has not only won several major international awards, the team was invited to an invitation-only seminar at the University of Arizona, underscoring the international reach of Taiwan’s VR creators.

The story begins with the search by the protagonist “Guan” for an unfinished manuscript left by his late wife. Following clues about the Formosan clouded leopard and Indigenous myths, he ventures into the mountains at 2,000 meters. (courtesy of Taiwan Public Television Service Foundation and The Walkers Films)

In the immersive VR experience, visitors follow the protagonist into a dreamlike maze, mist-wreathed mountain forests, and a tree hollow. (photo by Anpis Wang, courtesy of MoNTUE)

The technical team refined every detail to deepen viewers’ immersion. Pictured here is the wife’s room created by the team. (courtesy of Taiwan Public Television Service Foundation and The Walkers Films)

The dreamers behind the exhibition

If VR brings the text of the short story into view, the second-floor galleries reveal the paths taken by researchers in different fields as they pursued their dreams. Lin Mun-lee says the exhibition unfolds along three official axes: “Heart Turns to the Mountains,” “Body Dwells in the Mountains,” and “Soul Is the Mountains.” Visitors first encounter years of mountain-forest footage gathered by wildlife researcher Chiang Po-jen in his lifetime search for the clouded leopard. The images are paired with natural sounds collected by sound artist Yannick Dauby and a custom forest scent, evoking changing times of day and seasons in Taiwan’s mountain forests. Chiang also installed an infrared automated camera with a faint red glow in the exhibition space, echoing the “stars in the mountains” described by Wu in his story. For a researcher who has spent a lifetime looking for the clouded leopard, “Every flash that captures an animal in the mountains represents hope.”

Mountain-forest images by wildlife researcher Chiang Po-jen are paired with natural sounds collected by sound artist Yannick Dauby and a custom forest scent, evoking the alternation of day and night and the changing seasons. (photo by Anpis Wang, courtesy of MoNTUE)

A 1924 seven-meter-long “Topographic Map of Taiwan” stretches across the gallery. Its blank area—mountain forests then inaccessible to surveyors—is the setting for The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up.

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At the center of the gallery lies a seven-meter-long, 1:50,000 “Topographic Map of Taiwan,” completed in 1924 by the Imperial Japanese Army’s Land Survey Department. Geographer Hung Kuang-chi notes that the southernmost part of the Central Mountain Range—from Mt. Beinan to Mt. Beidawu—appeared as a blank on maps of the time, a terra incognita beyond the empire’s reach. But the area was not uninhabited, but rather contained a dense web of relationships among Indigenous communities and the living world. Over time, roads and logging sites filled the map’s blank space; state power entered, the forest changed, and the clouded leopard disappeared. Yet the blank land has never been truly empty. Although logging and infrastructure development left their traces behind, ecological evolution since the logging ban has gradually reclaimed and enveloped many of those trucks and roads. “At this point, people are slowly returning, and nature is slowly returning. Perhaps one day the clouded leopard will return too,” Hung says.

From a literary and ecological-historical foundation to the cross-disciplinary translation of immersive VR, The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up exhibition invites visitors to a place where mist and memory meet at 2,000 meters—to hear the mountains echo again and touch the uplands embedded within all our hearts and minds.

Exhibition Highlights of The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up

Inside Wu Ming-yi’s Creative Back Room Wu has moved part of his bookcase and creative “back room” into the exhibition space, including slides he photographed, books, illustrations, and handmade insect specimens. A computer also reveals rarely seen correspondence with experts whom he consulted while writing. These reveal the rarely exposed background to creative work.

A Double Study and a Look Behind the VR The exhibition overlaps the fictional study/library of the wife of the story’s protagonist “Guan” with Wu’s actual workspace, creating an intertextual “double space.” In a green-screen area, visitors can put on a headset and see objects appear on the desk that are not physically there and enjoy the shock caused by the intersection of the virtual and the real. At the rear of the exhibition space, the gallery becomes a VR production studio, sharing the work process of director Singing Chen and her team, including different maze designs, handwritten story-adaptation notes, audiovisual documentation, and a forest scene from the VR experience.

Traces from the Blank Land Historical documents and photographs gathered by geographer Hung Kuang-chi and his team include an insulator from the electrified fence along the Liugui Security Path, household objects from yesteryear, and original photo albums belonging to mountaineers and forestry workers—artifacts of how the blank space on the 1924 map of Taiwan was filled.

Forest Cross-Sections in Metal by innie+outie Metal artists Wang Yu-lin and Chou Chi-en handcrafted species from the Mt. Dawu region in brass, including purple crow butterflies, pinecones, and beetles. Designed with micro-actuator structures, their works translate the emotions the creators felt in the mountain forests into 3D metal relief art and capture the subtle tremors of the forests.

“Someone Said It Had Been Here”: An Audio Interview Sound artist Wang Yujun interviewed Chiang Po-jen, then re-edited the conversation with forest soundscapes and music. Through headphones, visitors can hear Chiang recount the years he spent searching and waiting for the clouded leopard.

Director Singing Chen and her creative team have openly shared the process of adapting literature into VR.

MoNTUE’s The Clouds Are Two Thousand Meters Up exhibition invites visitors to a place where mist and memory meet at 2,000 meters—to hear the mountains echo again and touch the uplands embedded within all our hearts and minds.