Yixin Ma

Liminal explores the threshold between habitual perception and renewed sensory awareness. The project originates from a personal question: how can spatial conditions bring people back to the untrained perceptual state often associated with childhood curiosity?

As children, we encounter the world through direct bodily engagement. Space is not yet understood through function, efficiency, or social conventions. Instead, it is explored through movement, sensation, uncertainty, and imagination. In contrast, adult perception becomes increasingly automated. Architectural elements such as doors, windows, floors, and furniture are often read and used without conscious attention, guided by learned habits and functional expectations.

This project investigates how familiar spaces can be transformed into perceptual devices that interrupt these automatic patterns. Through a series of spatial interventions including scale disruption, disorientation, geometric distortion, defunctionalisation, and emotional immersion, ordinary architectural elements are altered to challenge their expected logic and use. Windows no longer offer immediate views, doors become ambiguous thresholds, floors require negotiation, and furniture extends beyond its functional boundaries into immersive environments shaped by memory

Rather than recreating childhood itself, Liminal examines how moments of uncertainty can reactivate modes of perception that are often suppressed in adult life. As spatial certainty dissolves, visitors are invited to slow down, hesitate, adjust, and rediscover their surroundings through direct sensory engagement. 

The project proposes liminality not as a destination, but as a temporary state in which familiar
structures become unstable and perception becomes active again. By transforming the familiar into something strange yet recognisable, Liminal opens a threshold toward wonder, curiosity, and embodied awareness.

Yixin Ma