Inside the 8th Shenzhen Magic Season: Eric Chien & Pere Rafart
On 6 November 2026, the 8th Shenzhen Magic Season hosted a close-up masterclass at the Co-Creation Performance Space on the fifth floor of the Shenzhen Women and Children’s Building. Two very different schools of close-up magic shared the room: Eric Chien (Taiwan, China), the first Asian magician to win the FISM close-up world championship, and Pere Rafart (Spain), twice a FISM runner-up in card magic and co-owner of El Rei de la Màgia, the Barcelona magic shop that has traded since 1881.
The format was deliberately small — working magicians, students and serious hobbyists rather than a general audience — so that questions could be asked mid-routine and answers could be shown rather than described.
Two approaches to the same table
Pere Rafart spent his session on improvisation. Coins, napkins, keys — objects already sitting in front of the spectator — built effects on the spot, with no prepared props and no trip to the pocket. The point was practical rather than theoretical: a magician who can work with whatever is on the table is never really without an act.
Eric Chien went the other way. Clean, graphic card work, where the method stays invisible and the visual carries the whole argument. Core technique was covered, but at least as much time went to structure, framing and pacing — why the same move reads as a miracle in one sequence and as a puzzle in another.
The screen problem
Close-up magic has a structural problem in a teaching room: only the first row can see the hands. The room answered it with a live camera feed projected onto the main screen, so the whole audience watched the same pair of hands at the same magnification — every palm, every break, every moment where nothing appeared to happen.
The room watched the same pair of hands on the main screen — the detail is the lesson.
It is a small production decision that changes what a workshop can actually teach. Instead of describing a handling, the guest can simply do it and let forty people see it at once.
Part of a wider programme
The masterclass was one of several professional strands in this year’s Shenzhen Magic Season, running alongside the Golden Magic Child seeding programme, a Greater Bay Area university magician training course, and the Golden Magic Ring youth competition. The following day, Chien and Rafart stayed on to judge the 9th Golden Magic Ring competition and to work with its competitors.
The event was hosted by the Shenzhen Federation of Literary and Art Circles and organised by the Shenzhen Acrobats Association and Fantasy Forest (Shenzhen) Culture Co., with support from the Shenzhen Cultural Promotion Fund.
The official event poster (in Chinese).