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Travelling to the Wonderland will mark the opening of a new exhibition of Chinese art

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Chinese artist Xu Bing is creating a new sculpture for London's V&A Museum.

Called Travelling to the Wonderland the new installation will be installed in the museum's John Madejski Garden and will mark the opening of the V&A's new exhibition Masterpieces of Chinese Painting 700-1900.

Based on the Chinese fable written by the scholar Tao Qian (or Tao Yuanming, 365-427) in 421AD, about people who lead an ideal existence in harmony with nature and each other, unaware of the outside world, Xu Bing's installation is deliberately 'non-real'. 'Tao Hua Yuan is a long lost dream and we don't know if its existence is real or pure fiction,' says the artist.

The 'dream-like landscape' will be created around the central water feature of the John Madejski Garden, built up from layers of thinly-cut stones collected from five different places in China to represent mountains. Clusters of ceramic houses, each one handmade and coloured to reflect the diverse traditional styles of houses from the different provinces, will be placed among the stones. For example, rocks taken from the Tai Hu Lake in the lower Yangtze River region are accompanied by houses in Suzhou garden style. The same meticulous detailing also applies to the positioning of particular ceramic animals in relation to the type of stone.

Travelling to the Wonderland will be on show from 2 November 2013 to 2 March 2014.