With support from City Artists Corp, Lily & Honglei launched a public screening of The Butterfly Lovers Trilogy, an animated short film uniquely composed with original paintings and reflecting on many struggles in Asian American community. Through metaphors and extensive references to Asian cultural heritages, the animated film illuminates issues such as cultural identity dilemma, profound isolation and disconnect, or agonizing separations that immigrant families have to endure – from Asian immigrant’s perspective. The film screening took place on October 16, 2021 at Queens Museum, the art venue near both Latino and Asian immigrant neighborhoods that have been particularly hard-hit during the pandemic.
The Butterfly Lovers Trilogy, although extensively referencing Asian cultural heritages, is in fact reflecting on American experience from Asian immigrant’s perspective. The first part, Butterfly Lovers (F1, F2), 4’40”, symbolically depicts the profound isolation and identity dilemma experienced by Asian Americans in western metropolises. The second part, Peony Pavilion (F3), 4’35”, portrays the painful disconnect between the inner world of Asian immigrants and the hyper materialistic environment that they have to survive in. The third part, TheMilky Way (F4), 3’13”, illustrates the hopeless separation an immigrant family has to endure. Through metaphors, the work depicts Asian immigrants’ many struggles in American society from a first person perspective – largely based on our personal experiences and anecdotes in our Asian immigrant community.
The Butterfly Lovers Trilogy screening at Queens Museum, 2021. Photos courtesy of Lily Honglei Art Studio
Dr. Margaret Hillenbrand (University of Oxford) wrote article Remaking Tank Man, in China (Journal of Visual Culture) discussing extensively on Lily Honglei’s augmented reality work Tiananmen Squared and animation Forbidden City. Read excerpt below:
This notion of digital questing, and via camera-based platforms, steps up a notch in a recent work by the anonymous artistic collective 4Gentlemen (a pseudonym used by the Lily and Honglei art studio). Entitled Tian’anmen Squared, it uses the smartphone technologies of augmented reality to allow Tank Man’s spirit to return to Beijing and stalk his former haunts (4Gentlemen, 2011). More commonly associated with military or gaming applications, augmented reality has shaped up in the last few years as a potent tool for conceptual artists. Its highwater mark so far is probably Amir Badaran’s Frenchising Mona Lisa, an app which allows users to train their phones on any version of Da Vinci’s painting and watch as the enigmatic one miraculously removes her feather-light veil and wraps the Tricolore around her head as if it were a hijab. French secularism, sartorial hypocrisy (why are some scarves ok and others not?), curatorial control, the whims of iconography, and the shifting status of the artist all coalesce as targets within the frame here. Criticized by some as a self-promoting prankster, Badaranargues for the value of augmented reality as a ‘legitimate installation art medium’ (Hube, 2014). He seeks, as he puts it, to ‘bring AR-as-art into the museum’ (Hube, 2014) and his abiding gripe is, indeed, with the Louvre as a stuffily sacrosanct institution which he debunks via invasionary attacks, essentially breaking into the museum to make his mischief. These notions of appropriate space-use, and how to violate it, have been crucial to augmented reality as an art form, as interventionist installations such as Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek’s 2010 AR exhibition in MoMA showed very clearly. Over 30 artists took part in the ‘art invasion’ exhibition, showing their works all over the building and effectively annexing the museum space for any visitor who had the app installed.
Figure 13. 4Gentlemen: Tiananmen Squared, 2011.
Needless to say, this idea of spatial pranking has broader implications. Some of these have been mapped, quite literally, by 4Gentlemen, who have used the AR application Layar to invade the space of Tian’anmen Square and its surrounds with verboten memories. Once downloaded onto a smartphone, the app uses geolocation software to superimpose a computer-generated icon of Tank Man, sized to the original scale, at the exact GPS co-ordinates on Chang’an Avenue just off the square in Beijing where the face-off between man and machine took place. In keeping with the photographic nature of this enterprise, the app also allows users to take pictures of the scene in the viewfinder, with the Tank Man icon overlaid. On one level, then, the Tian’anmen Squared project shares space with the work of Baradan, Veenhof, and Skwarek, infiltrating consecrated ground with below-theradar visual messaging – but with a sharper twist. Tian’anmen Squared is not simply iconoclastic (Frenchising Mona Lisa) and anti-establishment (squatting in MoMA); it does not merely work on or alongside existing canonical works. Its impulse is also recuperative, since it reinstates at the original flashpoint of its occurrence a virtual icon of memory which state censorship has attempted to wipe from the public ‘hard drive’. Tank Man – the wraith, the disappeared, the deleted – thus stages a defiant return to the square, commandeered back from US liberalist discourse and installed once more in the highly localized site of his political agency, while also mimicking, through his hidden presence in the open air of central Beijing, the very machinations of the public secret.
Like most AR technologies, Tian’anmen Squared merges public space with sudden and clandestine computer-generated icons, but here publicness is both more municipal and more prosaic than in Franchising Mona Lisa, which takes the rarified air of the Louvre as its stage. Tian’anmen Squared, by contrast, launches from the backdrop of air pollution, traffic noise, and the locale which, more than any other in China, denotes and connotes public space as state power – and is, for that reason, highly surveilled. The app user, surrounded by a mass of vehicles, pedestrians, and sightseers, connects with the forbidden image of Tank Man in a move which echoes Chen Shaoxiong’s Ink History in its staging of the public secret, but heightens the sense of raw theatre through its outdoor performance, and the way it turns user into actor. The public secret as drama also plays out within the app’s visual field. The ambient streetscene is viewed in two planes on the smartphone until the Tank Man graphic – the secret – appears, sleekly contoured, pinpoint-sharp, and rendered along three axes so that its dimensionality ‘steps out’ from the rest of the pictorial field (Figure 13), chromatically and perspectivally compelling despite being invisible to all around, almost grail-like in its sudden onscreen materialization. Ultimately, the effect of Tian’anmen Squared is, once again, to combine the spectral and the comedic (or at least the playfully subversive) with this notion of digital quest.
Indeed, although 4Gentlemen call Tank Man reloaded a ‘virtual monument’, it might be truer to argue, as already suggested, that the project exemplifies Lev Manovich’s point that if the 1990s were about the virtual, ‘It is quite possible that this decade of the 2000s (and beyond) will turn out to be about the physical – that is physical space filled with electronic and visual information’ (Manovich, 2006). Taking Tank Man out of the ether and onto the street is, in this sense, entirely of a piece with other shifts in Chinese digital culture, which, as Michel Hockx has pointed out, is presently trialing the move from the World Wide Web to the freer climes of the app format. Hockx describes how online literary superstar Han Han has created a new app for accessing his work which makes use of ‘the functionalities of Internet connectivity [while] entirely bypassing the browser-based media of the World Wide Web’ (Hockx, 2015: 106).
Although Han Han has explicitly denied that his aim is to avoid censorship, the app format certainly opens up ‘new, independent avenues’ (Hockx, 2015: 107) for digital expressivity. Rendering Tank Man as an app fits neatly within this rationale, chasing down further the notion mooted in the ‘Directions to the Museum’ video: namely, that in the face of conspiracies to silence, which now focus near-obsessively on control of the internet (as shown by the Baidu search results for Tian’anmen), web-inflected physical space may emerge as an agile zone for the performance of what we might now rightly call rituals of revelation. The app, and to a lesser extent the video, are practices which allow users to embody in physical space and corporeal movement the keyboard commands of ‘find’ and ‘search’ – though the term ‘questing’ may indeed be more apposite here, since it captures better the extent to which the pursuit of Tank Man in contemporary China has an almost ceremonial character. Again, the point is not exposure, or even, necessarily, direct contestation. The quest can be justly called ritualistic or ceremonial because it is through the performance of looking – not via any object thus found, let alone exposed – that the lineaments of the public secret are held up for scrutiny.
In this sense, it is unsurprising that the underlying logic of Tian’anmen Squared reiterates the theme of inbetweenness that is immanent to both the public secret and the other artistic forms discussed here which seek to do it revelatory justice. The app is both web-driven and yet browser-free, digital and yet grounded in the materiality of the body as it moves. Above all, it exploits again and again the status of the repurposed photograph as an interstitial object. Using the app generates a complex mise-en-abîme, in which the security cameras record the user who scopes the street with his or her smartphone until the graphic of man and tank appears on screen, the vehicle’s guns trained telescopically on the user too. At this point, the user may decide, as mentioned earlier, to take a screenshot of man and tank superimposed over the streetscene. In short, the app enables no fewer than five separate camera/photographic operations, an emphatic profusion which begs its own set of questions. On one level, this is just an organic response to the memoryscape all around: just as power flows from the barrel of a (tank) gun, to paraphrase Mao Zedong, so is history now inescapably filtered through the lens. The augmented reality app of Tank Man performs this shift repeatedly, from original photograph to computer graphic, from computer graphic back to mixed media smartphone photograph, from virtual environment to the square, and from that physical location back to the screen.
Tank Man Redux
What’s more, the app, by its very nature, is designed to rove and roam from location to location, as we see in Figure 14, which shows Tank Man in Union Square. In so doing, these iterative journeys, from square to square and beyond, seem to parlay directly with Ai Weiwei’s well-known Studies of Perspective series (Toushi yanjiu, 1993–2003), in which the artist photographs himself flicking the bird to various landmarks of authority: the White House, the Eiffel Tower, Red Square, the basilica in the Piazza San Marco, the Reichstag, the Mona Lisa (again). In naming the series as a whole Studies of Perspective, Ai Weiwei’s main point of propaganda is to make the middle finger matter more than the monument, to undermine the icons of establishment power with an equally iconic gesture of disrespect. Yet the linchpin, the coruscating core, of the series is Studies of Perspective: Tian’anmen Square, and the power of that semi-selfie snapshot, taken only six years after the crackdown, derives from its allusive and politically aggravating geometric similarity to Tank Man (Figure 15).
Figure 14. 4Gentlemen: Tiananmen Squared, 2011.
Ai’s insurgent middle finger, at the bottom left of the foreground, stands in for the lone protestor, while the tanks become the Gate of Heavenly Peace, adorned with Mao’s huge portrait – which has been obliterated by Ai’s finger. In both images, the stand-off occurs across the same bottom-left/top-right diagonal axis, in the midst of emptied public space. But the crushing downwards momentum of Tank Man – in which the tanks have ‘advanced across mostof the pictorial field along the lines and vectors on the street indicating the forward direction of the traffic’ (Hariman and Lucaites, 2007: 217) – is reversed as Ai’s finger protrudes as an aggressive repoussoir, taking the place of the tanks and bearing down not on the protester but on the site of state power. The planed patterning of the road markings in the original Tank Man shots, which tamely follow the convoy of vehicles, is undone in Ai’s photo, which scatters these narrow white lines across the visual field.
A Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen Square is Tank Man redux, then, with a vengeance. If so, it is ultimately predictive about the remixing of icons in digital times, and in China most particularly. Already with Ai’s photograph – a gelatin silver print, and thus an analog object par excellence – we witness a process at work that revs up noticeably under digitality. Even as echoes of Tank Man ricochet left and right across Ai’s photo, Tian’anmen Square also testifies to the partial dissolution of that source image, or rather to its capacity to absorb intrusive adaptation whilst retaining its strong recognition quotient. As an über-image, Tank Man may twist and bend, yet the centre can still hold, in much the same way that an aesthetic remediation of the black-and-white photograph of the gate at Auschwitz, emblazoned with the infamous words ‘Arbeit macht frei’, could be composed of matchsticks and still refer unmissably back to its photographic point of origin. Under digitality – within the universe of memes – remakes and remixes of photographic icons have proliferated, for the obvious reason that the speed, profusion, and plasticity of the online environment vastly multiply the opportunities for reversioning. In a non-censored web, though, these repeated remediations tend, in practice, to belong quite tightly within the same genus: they are clear scions of their photographic patriarch, as we see with ‘Syrian beach boy’, whose remakes – for all their quantity – are remarkably alike. Their purpose, after all, is in large part to keep memory refreshed, so it scarcely behooves such remediations to stray too far from the master image. This ‘family resemblance’, to borrow Wittgenstein’s term, typically breaks down when Tank Man is remediated in Chinese online spaces, for the simple reason that secrecy, not forgetfulness, is the core antagonist against which the remix is battling – and battling secrecy, as discussed earlier, requires clandestine tactics.
Figure 16. Lily Honglei: Forbidden City, 2008
Lily and Honglei speak directly to this genealogical disintegration in a video work about June 4th, entitled Forbidden City (Zijincheng, 2008; Figure 16), which melds digital animation with traditional Chinese paper cuts. The piece opens with an image of an old-fashioned tea-shop window, hung with a red paper-cut decoration of the character fu, meaning prosperity and happiness. A flower has been cut out in each corner of the decoration, a face-value reference to the ‘Four Gentlemen’ of Chinese artistic and botanical tradition (plum blossom, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum) – and an encrypted allusion to the so-called ‘Four Gentlemen’ of the Tian’anmen Square protests: a quartet of activists, including Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo, who went on hunger strike in June 1989 (and after whom the conceptual art collective are, in fact, named). As a guqin plays on the soundtrack, the paper cut disintegrates into falling petals, until only five tiny red marks remain. The camera then closes in on these shapes, revealing them to be the lone protester, three tanks, and the Forbidden City itself. For the next two minutes, the tanks and the protester – the component parts of the original Tank Man photograph – abandon their assigned places to move disjointedly and at random across the screen, until the inevitable hard collision between man and machine occurs and a spectral swirl of blood is superimposed across the visual field. It drifts like a fractal for several seconds before floating away, just as the falling petals reassemble into the character fu, the swirl of blood melts into steam from a teacup, and the scene returns to the tea shop as if the bloodshed had never happened. Narratively, the animation rehearses he same interplay between spectrality and ‘see no evil’ which I have traced throughout this article, at the time as metaphorizing the idea that China’s rise since the 1990s is predicated on precisely this silent collusion with a violent order – or, as Jiang Zemin put it in his famous motto for the post-Tian’anmen era, ‘Keep your mouth shut and get rich’ (mensheng fadacai). Meanwhile on the meta-plane, via its dismemberment of the Tank Man photograph, the video acts out the process of reductionist redux, the stripping down to barest bones that icons must undergo if they are to maintain some kind of visibility in suppressive environments.
2020 has been an extremely eventful, volatile year. Most of us have experienced anxieties, worries, sleeplessness when our loved ones’ physical wellbeing is potentially at risk due to the pandemic. We as parents, children, siblings, friends have not been spared from any of these pains; as artists, we still need to fulfill our duties continuously creating works. Since the beginning of the relative isolation, we have submerged ourselves in researching, reflecting and producing, which have illuminated our inner world, connected us with the greatest minds that transcend time and space, subsequently unleashed a stream of creative vitality. This indescribable energy helps us rise above the daily life filled with uncertainty and distress by the ongoing pandemic. We are deeply grateful to the beautiful, powerful inspirations, visions and sufficient physical conditions bestowed upon us, which have been so gracefully granted by our faith as well as the wonderful free country.
SHADOW PLAY: Tales of Urbanization in China has finally reached completion. Theprojectcommenced in 2014 with the objective of digitally visualizing the artists’ investigation into a complex socio – economic reality – the process of urbanization in China. The product, which is a culmination of several years of experimentation, integrates thoroughly-researched narrative storytelling with the sensory capabilities of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies. Over the trajectory of its development, the project has grown into a multiplatform project interweaving VR, AR, painting, and Chinese folk art forms. The artists created numerous visual compositions with traditional Chinese shadow puppetry motifs and transplanted them into a 3D virtual world platform, where the main narrative – the tragic tale of the village chief’s family – unfolds. Lily Honglei subsequently produced a series of large-scale paintings that they dub postdigital fine art based on imagery in the virtual world.
Shadow Play will be presented at Renaissance 2020, a new media art exhibition held in Museum Of San Salvatore In Lauro, Rome, Italy, which also serves as the project premier supported by Creative Capital foundation in New York. Given the potential restrictions on public event during the pandemic and the digital nature of the work, the premier will be simultaneously launched on the Internet. A comprehensive preview of Shadow Play can be found on the project website:
The City of West Hollywood Presents Visual Artists Guild Creativity Dies Under Tyranny
(Photo provided courtesy of the City of West Hollywood)
Forbidden City, video art by Lily Honglei
Exhibition Opening
Sculpture piece featuring Liu Xiaobo
Exhibition Opening
Gallery view
Performance art at exhibition opening
Gallery view
ART & DEMOCRACY VI
The sixth in a series of art exhibitions by Visual Artists Guild with the theme of Art & Democracy. Our participating artists from all over the world responded with their artworks that address the issues of human rights, immigrants rights, democratic aspirations, social justice and freedom of speech and expression. This event attempts to keep alive the dialogue of Freedom and Democracy and to highlight the 30th Anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of Eastern Europe. With this exhibit, Visual Artists Guild hopes to create a space for the world to celebrate human rights, freedom of speech and democracy. Specials events include artist meet-and-greets, a Democracy Forum, and an Artists forum.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTSAlex Currie ● Andre Ajibade ● Antwon Key ● Beata Pozniak ● Bing Weng ● Catherine Bauknight ● Charles Sherman ● Chen Weiming ● Chiho Harazaki ● Di Lin ● Diana Wong ● Eliza Ortega Montilla ● Fong So ● Hugo Ruggiero ● Jared Fortunato ● Judy Lue ● Julie Li Zhu ● Madeline Hernandez ● Labkland Olfatmanesh ● Lily Honglei ● Liz Covington ● Meridith McNeal ● Nicole Jeffords ● Rachel Hebert – Kate Nicholson ● Renee Amitai ● Shaomin Li ● Sinan Leong Revell ● Stacey Gregory ● Vivian Wenhuey Chen
CURATOR: Selene Tellez
WHEN: Opening Reception September 7, 2019, from 1 to 5 p.m. WHERE: Long Hall ( inside Plummer Park).
1200 N. Vista Street, West Hollywood, Ca 90048
DATES & HOURS OPEN:
Wednesday to Sunday, Sept. 1st to Sept 25th, 2019, from 1 to 5 p.m.
SPECIAL EVENTS:
OPENINGRECEPTIONSaturday, Sept. 7th, 2019, from 1 to 5 p.m.
DEMOCRACY FORUM – HONG KONG Saturday, Sept. 14th, 2019, from 2 to 4 p.m. Door opens at 1 p.m.
Specials guests from Hong Kong Forum and Amnesty International will discuss the current situation on the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong.
Everything you want to know about Hong Kong now. The Lennon Wall of Prague and Hong Kong will be replicated. Artists and guests are invited to participate in drawing or writing on the wall.
ARTISTS FORUM Saturday, Sept. 21st, 2019, from 2 to 4 p.m. Door opens at 1 p.m.
Although remains in-progress, the artist collective has been invited to exhibit their new project at several art venues around the globe since 2015, including Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning in New York, SOMART in San Francisco, Gwangju Media Art Festival in South Korea, and Wilfrid Israel Museum in Israel. The exhibits include a dozen of large prints, and a slideshow compiled of seventy screenshots of “Shadow Play” virtual reality.
Special thanks to Dr. Anat Turbowicz, museum director, and Shir Yamaguchi, museum curator, for making this exhibition possible. Find more from museum website http://www.wilfrid.org.il/en/?p=578
Curatorial Statement
By Dr. Shoshan Brosh-Vaitz and Shir Meller-Yamaguchi. Editing by He Li
“Chinese shadow puppet theater probably began in the 6th century during the Tang dynasty as a means of disseminating religious and historical narratives, often with highlighting the value of justice and morality. Over the years, the design of the dyed leather shadow puppets became increasingly complex; delicate cutting and coloring as well as an impressive repertoire of characters and set decorations came to be developed. Due to the dramatic ideological, technological, and cultural change that took place in China during the 20th century, this art form has waned in popularity and almost become a thing of the past. The medium has been preserved primarily through the work of collectors such as Richard Hardiman, whose collection is presented in the exhibition.
“Folk art, however, is deeply rooted in cultural consciousness and has the power to revive itself when it becomes relevant to its time again. In Shadow Play by New York-based Chinese art collective Lily and Honglei, the shadow puppets reappear in a new guise within a seemingly naïve set. Originally created on a virtual reality platform, the work was adapted for screening as a slideshow presentation for the exhibition. Using the magical imagery of the traditional shadow puppets, the artists present critical commentary on the social ills shadowing over China.
“Shadow Play reflects on the radical transformations experienced by China over the past thirty years through a tragic story of a rural family. The story embodies a deplorable trend that has been taking place all over China: villages and rural neighborhoods are being razed, and people who object to it are being murdered by interested parties. Children are being abducted while migrant workers are being relocated from small villages to filthy, overcrowded underground dwellings in large cities, all the while pollution abounds and public security breaks down. Basic values such as life, freedom, and dignity are being trampled in broad daylight. Lily and Honglei sketch this grim reality as a surrealistic narrative, in which mesmerizing beauty and horror are placed side by side. Green sunlight and an enchanted moonlight of yellowish-red color become obfuscated by the shadowy predicaments of reality.
“Scenes from the traditional shadow puppet theater are presented alongside scenes from its contemporary counterpart to offer a perspective on the age-old conflict between man’s base, demonic portions-which are manifest in greed, violence and exploitation–and the beautiful, exalted facets of human existence, which dwells in harmony, cooperation, altruism, and dedication.”
For more info about “Shadow Play,” visit project website http://lilyhonglei.com/shadowplay2/about.html
“A smoggy window view looks outwards towards a bustling cityscape, where traffic, skyscrapers, and pedestrians disappear into the industrialized atmosphere. An inverted figure materializes from the haze, suspended midair. Free falling through dense smog, the body appears poised to crash on top of the urban sprawl, frozen in its ominous descent. Gray tones envelop the dystopian scene as well as the weightless industrial worker, who appears rendered in hand drawn lines, cut out and collaged into photographic space. Her final moments assume hauntingly mythological characteristics, telling one story of the suicides afflicting many migrant workers who build China’s expanding skylines.
“Lily and Honglei’s installation for Jamaica Flux, entitled, ‘Shadow Play: Tales of Urbanization of China’ and exhibited on site at the Jamaica Center of Arts and Learning, studies the many layers of China’s expansion into modernity. Employing darkly dystopian allegories that reflect individualized struggles, the narrative of a village family displaced by mass land grabbing takes on the forms of virtual and augmented realities. The overarching storyline is comprised of both research and thirty years of lived experience. Presented in four chapters, the tale details the murder of the village chief at the hands of demolition crews, his son’s subsequent abduction, and his wife’s journey into the city to search for her lost child. Featuring a synthesis between traditional Chinese shadow play puppetry and advanced three dimensional rendering technologies, the project becomes an immersive fable told through equal parts symbolism and bleak reflections of reality.
“As the mother emerges from the subterranean city beneath Beijing, home to many rural migrant workers who build the expanding urban skyline above ground, she witnesses some of the most strikingly dark imagery visible in “Shadow Play.” Images of falling workers hover over her anonymously like ghosts, dangling from wires and steel beam ledges. Speaking at the 2015 Creative Capital Artist’s Retreat, Honglei explains that the visuals of descending migrant bodies ‘specifically reflects on the worker suicide cases at Foxconn factory, the electronics manufacturer behind popular products like iPads and iPhones.’ Despite their spirit-like, evaporating qualities, one cannot separate the disappearing figures from the “modernity” achieved by rapid urbanization of China. Lily and Honglei effectively bridge disconnect from both sides of one story into potent allegorical tensions, fitting vast complexity into small shadow puppet characters inhabiting a phone or tablet’s screen. Their imagery causes audiences to question the advancement of culture, embedded directly into the technologies which enable such costly ‘progressions’ to occur continuously.”
Research presentation of Shadow Play at Jamaica Flux 2016, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, NY. Photography courtesy of Lily & Honglei
Research exhibition at Jamaica Flux 2016, JCAL. Photography courtesy of Lily & Honglei
Lily & Honglei - Asian American Artist Collaborative 