Chinese heaven video: Key takeaways
- An AI vision of Chinese heaven has found an unexpected overseas audience
- Behind it is a self-taught Chengdu creator
- The response offers a lesson for Chinese cultural exports.
Columns and staircases taper off into the sky’s soft clouds and temples hang above them. A phoenix in flight. A lone scholar. The monumental scale of it all. This is the home of the Jade Emperor, or Chinese heaven to use the internet’s term. It is also an AI creation.
The 34-second video generated over 5 million views on X in the four days after its release. Now, if you search ‘Chinese heaven’ you’ll get hits on any social media platform you can name – especially western ones, where the video has hit a strong chord.
This was unplanned. The video’s creator has no overseas social media platforms. Nor is he a professional. He runs an eyewear shop in Chengdu and makes videos in the slow periods at work.
This tells us Chinese creators don’t need to make their work more western to find a western audience
He taught himself how to do this over two years. Now he posts on Douyin under the name Qiguang (栖光), an account with more than 600,000 followers and more than 200 videos.
According to the man himself, the creative process looks like this: generate still images with Midjourney, then animate them with Kling AI (可灵) or Jimeng (即梦). Each video takes about four-five hours, depending on resolution and revision, and costs anything from a dozen to a few hundred RMB (think of that as under US $100). Cheap, for a view of heaven.
The Dao view: Why did this video do so well in the west?
The past few years have seen a few cases of Chinese culture hitting with western audiences. Black Myth Wukong probably provides the best parallel. In that case, as with this, it was a digitally realised vision of Chinese mythology that grabbed the attention of foreign audiences. It was new, unseen.
This is interesting for Chinese cultural exports. It tells us Chinese creators – be they AI producers, video game designers, writers, artists or whatever – don’t need to make their work more western to find a western audience. The very thing that appeals is its Chinese-ness.
