Inspired by Astoria Music Production’s recording Capriccio (Cecile Chaminade), Lily Honglei created this new video art piece by reconstructing her earlier works. The characters, emerging in traditional Chinese opera customs, roam through empty Times Square, a desolate shopping center and subway rail in New York City. The female falls into the dream realm and ascends to the azure of the sky above the metropolis, while the male character, carrying two toddlers with a shoulder pole, appears walking into the air through a bridge formed by kind-hearted magpies… when the music turns more vibrant, the characters are back to Times Square with fireworks bursting out and coalescing into the flow of vivid color and patterns embodying revivals.
Composed of a series of oil paintings on paper, the animated film starts from visualizing the rootlessness of Asian diaspora and new immigrants’ cultural dilemma, then morphs into envisioning transitions in life, resilience and hope manifested by both individual and collective conscience of a highly diversified metropolitan community. Capriccio is the fruit of collaboration between Lily Honglei and Astoria Music Production in New York City during the 2020 pandemic.
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.
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:
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
Special thanks and acknowledgement to He Li, assistant producer, researcher and artist at Lily & Honglei Art Studio.
______________________________________
2015 CREATIVE CAPITAL AWARDS FOR MOVING IMAGE AND VISUAL ARTS ANNOUNCED
Creative Capital is pleased to announce its 2015 awardees in the categories of Moving Image and Visual Arts, representing a total of 46 funded projects selected from a nationwide pool of more than 3,700 proposals. Drawing on venture-capital principles, Creative Capital seeks out artists’ projects that are bold, innovative and genre-stretching, then surrounds those artists with the tools they need to realize their visions and build sustainable careers.
The 2015 Creative Capital Artists are an incredible group of creative thinkers, representing 50 artists at all stages of their careers with an age range of 28 to 80 years old. They hail from 13 states plus Puerto Rico and Canada; more than half are women, and more than half identify as non-European American. Each funded project receives up to $50,000 in direct funding, plus additional resources and advisory services valued at $45,000, making the organization’s total 2015 investment more than $4,370,000. “We believe it is so critical to sustain a commitment to invention and experimentation, to provocation and beauty,” said Ruby Lerner, Founding President & Executive Director, Creative Capital. “This class of Creative Capital awardees does it all; these artists are engaged with the world, and the immediacy of their projects is breathtaking.”
The 2015 awardees in Moving Image are: Michael Almereyda (New York, NY) Martha Colburn (Gettysburg, PA) Cherien Dabis (Los Angeles, CA) Christopher Harris (Oviedo, FL) Lauren Kelley (New York, NY) Maryam Keshavarz (Los Angeles, CA) Klip Collective (Josh James and Ricardo Rivera) (Philadelphia, PA) Andy Kropa (Brooklyn, NY) Lily & Honglei (New Haven, CT) Shola Lynch (New York, NY) Jeff Malmberg and Chris Shellen (Los Angeles, CA) Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva (Mayer\Leyva) (Miami, FL) Lotfy Nathan (Los Angeles, CA) Pat O’Neill (Pasadena, CA) Carlo Ontal (Jersey City, NJ) Lorelei Pepi (Vancouver, Canada) Shawn Peters (Brooklyn, NY) Jennifer Reeder (Hammond, IN) Jon Rubin (Pittsburgh, PA) Ry Russo-Young (New York, NY) Lee Anne Schmitt (Altadena, CA) Dan Schneidkraut (Minneapolis, MN) Travis Wilkerson (Los Angeles, CA)
The 2015 awardees in Visual Arts are: A.K. Burns (Brooklyn, NY) Heather Cassils (Los Angeles, CA) Carolina Caycedo (Los Angeles, CA) Mike Crane (Brooklyn, NY) Danielle Dean (Houston, TX) Abigail DeVille (Bronx, NY) Maria Gaspar (Chicago, IL) Mariam Ghani (Brooklyn, NY) Eric Gottesman (Cambridge, MA) Titus Kaphar (New Haven, CT) Jon Kessler (New York, NY) Narcissister (Brooklyn, NY) Brittany Nelson (Richmond, VA) Lorraine O’Grady (New York, NY) Jeanine Oleson (Brooklyn, NY) Gala Porras-Kim (Los Angeles, CA) Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (San Juan, Puerto Rico) Carrie Schneider (Brooklyn, NY) Anna Sew Hoy (Los Angeles, CA) Amie Siegel (New York, NY) Katrin Sigurdardottir (New York, NY) Wu Tsang (Los Angeles, CA) Ivan Velez (Bronx, NY) Read more about these artists, their projects and the selection process at creative-capital.org.
Image credits (clockwise from top left): Eric Gottesman, Barbershop. A.K. Burns. Heather Cassils, Becoming an Image. Titus Kaphar, Untitled II. Jon Kessler, The Web. Cherien Dabis, still from May in the Summer. Martha Colburn, study for Western Wilds. Lily & Honglei, Shadow Play: Tales of Urbanization of China. Maryam Keshavarz, research image for The Last Harem.
About Creative Capital
Creative Capital’s pioneering approach, inspired by venture-capital principles, surrounds adventurous artists in all disciplines with the tools they need to realize their visions and build sustainable careers. Since 1999, Creative Capital’s awards program has committed more than $35 million in financial and advisory support to 465 projects representing 579 artists, including Kyle Abraham, Janine Antoni, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Theaster Gates, Meredith Monk, Laura Poitras, Rebecca Solnit and The Yes Men. Creative Capital has reached nearly 10,000 additional artists in more than 400 communities through its career-development workshops and webinars.
Creative Capital receives major support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Toby Devan Lewis, Lambent Foundation, The Theo Westenberger Estate, Booth Ferris Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Catharine & Jeffrey Soros, Paige West, Kresge Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Muriel Pollia Foundation, Clifton Foundation, Cordish Family Foundation, Sylvia Golden, Rappaport Family Foundation, Stephen Reily & Emily Bingham, Tequila Herradura, Two Sisters and a Wife Foundation, and more than 250 other institutional and individual donors.
"Shadow Play: Tales of Urbanization of China" is a 2014 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.,
for its Turbulence.org website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation.
Over the past few decades China has been urbanizing at an astounding pace. In 2013, the People’s Republic unveiled its plan to relocate 260 million people from China’s countryside to one of 21 “mega regions” by 2020 (cbsnews.com). Such a significant shift will undoubtedly transform China’s national character, which has been predominantly agrarian for millennia. Shadow Play weaves three interfaces, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Physical Reality (PR), and combines the past and present – through time-honored imagery, paint, shadow play, and new media technologies – to immerse participants in the realities of contemporary China.
Shadow Play, Chapter I. The Land: Death of the Village Head (AR Screenshot)
Shadow Play, Chapter III. The Ruins: Lost Children
Shadow Play, Chapter IV. The Maze: No Exit (AR Screenshot)
Thanks to the great support from co-directors, Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington, Shadow Play also becomes part of Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Division of Rare and Special Collections at Cornell University, NY.
Virtuale stands for Virtual Biennale and is a Festival for public space using new digital tools not only to view the artworks and to interact with them, but also to design the experience of participation itself.
The program content for Virtuale focuses on the use of public space, mobile communication technologies, and explores the types of audiences found in public space, inventing “playful” new strategies to bring the public into the exhibit as “real” visitors being offered a unique experience.
The project encompasses Artworks using Augmented Reality, Urban or Location Based Gaming, and Digital Heritage applications. It is interdisciplinary, bridging areas such as art and technology, digital heritage and tourism, as well as digital culture and art mediation.
The Butterfly Lovers – Derived from a popular Chinese folktale Butterfly Lovers, the painted figures in traditional costumes are placed at varied locations around the world. Utilizing Augmented Reality, the work addresses issues of Chinese diaspora and cultural identity, and visualizes the restless, roaming cultural spirit of the East hidden in western metropolis.
The Crystal Coffin – The augmentation is inspired by the crystal coffin displayed in Mausoleum of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Square since 1977, a year after Mao’s death. In the twenty first century, while China has been transforming itself into a modern society in many ways and gaining more influences economically and politically around the globe, Mao’s crystal coffin, the immortal-looking shell, remains exist as a symbol of authoritarian ruling system. During spring 2011, a crackdown on dissent – including detaining many intellectuals and members of religious group – followed by distinct signs of revival of Maoist policies, has left people baffled about the future direction of China. We therefore use Crystal Coffin of Mao as main body of the virtual China Pavilion topped with a tower and roof with ancient Chinese looking, as regulated by Ministry of Construction of China: architectural ‘designs must reflect traditional Chinese building styles’.
Lily & Honglei - Asian American Artist Collaborative 