AR

Browse Lily Honglei’s Augmented Reality (AR) projects

• Butterfly Lovers
• Statue of Democracy & Tank Man (in collaboration with John Craig Freeman)
• Shadow Play: Tales of Urbanization in China
• Sunken Garden
• Crystal Coffin – Virtual China Pavilion
• From Lewisburg to Silicon Valley
• Chinese Take Out
• about Manifest.AR

___________________________________PROJECTS__________________________________

Butterfly Lovers at Times Square

Credit: Painting by Lily & Honglei, Augmented Reality by John Craig Freeman, Documentation by Will Pappenheimer and John Craig Freeman
Year of Production: 2009-2011
Medium: Oil on paper, Augmented Reality application for mobile phone
Augmented Reality Installation Locations:
1) Times Square in New York, U.S.
2) Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), U.S, during Boston Cyberart Festival 2011.
3) Unseen Sculptures exhibition at Surry Hills, Sydney (as part of the Surry Hill Festival) and around the Melbourne CBD, Australia.
4) Mediating Place exhibition at Harbor Gallery, University of Massachusetts Boston, U.S.

Work Description: Derived from a popular Chinese folktale Butterfly Lovers (梁山伯与祝英台）regarded as the equivalent of Romeo and Juliet, the painted figures in traditional costumes are placed at Times Square in New York City. The site-specific Augment Reality installation addresses issues of Chinese diaspora and cultural identity, and visualizes the restless, roaming cultural spirit of the East hidden in western metropolis.

Integrating painting and mobile phone augmented-reality application, artists weave storytelling of Chinese folklore into a contemporary, global circumstance. The two layers are contradictory yet interpenetrated: while the Butterfly Lovers symbolizes perpetual repression of humanity and resistance in Chinese culture, the night scene of Times Square in Manhattan is an emblem of Americanism and consumerism. As Chinese immigrant artists, we have witnessed many tragic stories of our friends pursuing American dreams. Although being surrounded by crowds and dazzling material world, they live in isolation, and struggle to survive. Our own life experience and the fate of immigrants urge us to expose the situation through artworks. What is the real relationship between cultural spirit and material reality? This is  the question raised by Butterfly Lovers.

Butterfly Lovers AR has been exhibited around the world, recent shows including SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 in Honglei Kong.

Butterfly Lovers AR at SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 in Honglei Kong. Mobile phone screenshots by Arthur Clay.

** Launch Butterfly Lovers Layar application on mobile phone: http://www.layar.com/layers/butterflylovers

Goddess of Democracy & Tank Man at Tiananmen Square

Credit:  4gentlemen
Year of Completion: 2011
Medium: Computer 3D Models, Augmented Reality application for mobile phone
Augmented Reality Installation Locations:
1) Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China
2) Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt
3) Saint Mark Square, 2011 Venice Biennale (June 4th – November 27th), Italy
4) AR Occupy Wall Street, New York City, U.S
5) Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), U.S.

Work Description: Although it has been more than thirty years since Tiananman Protest took place in 1989, the authority persistently uses all means erasing the facts that Chinese people pursued democracy in this democratic and anti-corruption movement. In China, nowadays, young people are not aware the courageous actions, such as ‘Tank Man’ and erecting ‘Statue of Democracy’ facing Mao’s portrait on Tiananman Tower, emerged during student movement of 1989. Nonetheless, history should not be forgotten. 

Information and communication technologies have inspired people to express their thoughts freely. We as artists, taking advantages of the development  of mobile phone technology and smartphone applications, have revived the history of 1989 Tiananman Protest that  has tremendous implications waiting  for further examinations by our contemporaries. (continue reading)

[ESSAY]

Dr. Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford
Remaking Tank Man, in China (Journal of Visual Culture)

… 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.

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 Frenchising 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 street scene. 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.

Figure 15. Ai Weiwei: A Study of Perspective: Tian’anmen Square,1993–2003.

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-andwhite 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.

… …read more about Tank Man

Shadow Play: Tales of Urbanization in China (by Lily X Yang, He Li and Honglei Li)

Phase I

Commissioned by New Radio and Performing Art INC (NRPA), the AR installation of Shadow Play: Tales of Urbanization of China portrays a society undergoing an unprecedented process of urbanization. The narrative of the ‘Family of the Village Head’ is based upon a series of real-life incidents that have taken place during this time of tumult; clashes over land eviction, kidnapping of children, suicides of migrant workers, and man-made environmental catastrophes are among them.

In executing the piece, Lily & Honglei created a number of characters whose visual forms draw inspiration from traditional Chinese shadow play. Utilizing the capabilities of augmented reality technology, the audience may then experience the installation in real time and space through their mobile phones. The classically-inspired shadow-puppet characters are superimposed upon real-world locations in the rural and urbanizing regions in northern China. Through phone cameras, two layers of imagery are merged; the foreground comes to life in a digital application atop the background of reality. It is this dynamic between the new and the traditional, between modern realities and the age-old human condition that embodies the implications of the work.

Shadow Play became part of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University in 2014. For more info, please visit the project that is on view via NRPA website: http://turbulence.org/Works/shadowplay/

Phase II Shadow Play: Tales of Urbanization in China is a recipient of Creatvie Capital Awards in Visual Arts & Moving Images, please find more from the project website http://lilyhonglei.com/shadowplay2/about.html

Crystal Coffin – Virtual China Pavilion at Giardini, 54th.Venice Biennale

Credit:  Concept by Lily & Honglei, 3D modeling and augmented reality by John Craig Freeman
Year of Completion: 2011
Medium: Computer 3D Models, Augmented Reality application for mobile phone
Augmented Reality Installation Locations:
1) Gardini at Venice Biennale 2011, Italy
2) Not Here, The Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University, PA
3) Not There, ISEA 2011 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) &12th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey
4) DUMBO Art Festival 2011, Brooklyn NY

Work Description: 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’.

** Launch Crystal Coffin Layar application on mobile phone: http://www.layar.com/layers/crystalcoffin

Great Firewall of China at Great Wall

Credit:  4gentlemen
Year of Completion: 2011
Medium: Computer generated 3D Models, Augmented Reality application for mobile phone
Augmented Reality Installation Locations: Great Wall of China

Inspiration from Great Firewall in virtual world art project ‘Land of Illusion,’ by Lily & Honglei 2008

Work Description: During the Qin Dynasty, Emperor Qinshihuang began building the Great Wall to keep northern nomads out of China. In the Internet age, China has invented the Great Firewall to block free thinking, to censor messages and images which criticize government policies and draw attention to violations of human rights, and to keep this activity from circulating in the blogosphere. While the ancient Great Wall of China is regarded as a wonder of human civilizations, the Great Firewall in cyberspace becomes the most sophisticated, extensive and notorious project preventing the world’s largest population from expressing themselves with contemporary technologies. How does this invisible wall impact the lives of people within China and beyond in the information era? (continue reading)

** Launch Great Firewall of China Layar application on mobile phone: http://www.layar.com/layers/firewall

Three Wise Monkeys: ‘Hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil’

The AR work is conceptually installed at four locations in China:
– Three Wise Monkeys at Sichuan, where earthquake smashed
poorly constructed school buildings to result death of thousands of students

– Three Wise Monkeys at Aba County in Sichuan, where a Tibetan monk set himself ablaze

– Three Wise Monkeys at eastern Zhejiang Province, where the popular village head  
Qian Yunhui killed by a ‘traffic accident’

– Three Wise Monkeys at the scene subway trains crashed in Shanghai

Find images at https://fourgentlemen.blogspot.com/search?q=three+wise+monkeys

Credit:  4gentlemen
Year of Completion: 2011
Medium: Computer generated images, Augmented Reality application for mobile phone
Augmented Reality Installation Locations:
1) Sichuan, Shanghai, Tibet, Zhejiang
2) The Art Of Placebo exhibition in association with Digital Arts Weeks 2011. Victoria Canada.

Work Description: Portraying Chinese dissent artist Ai Weiwei, the work ironically refers to principles of Three Wise Monkeys: ‘hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil,’ that arguably originates from Analects of Confucius: “Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety” (非禮勿視，非禮勿聽，非禮勿言非禮勿動). Instead of reviving its original teaching of moral value, the authorities adopt Confucianism in order to constrain freedom of speech in China in the 21st century. (continue reading)

** Launch Great Firewall of China Layar application on mobile phone: http://www.layar.com/layers/threewisemonkeys

Southeast Flies the Peacock at Chinatown, Los Angles

Visualization of Southeast Flies the Peacock & Mad Drummer Mi Heng, in Chinatown Los Angles, CA

Credit:  paintings by Lily & Honglei, Augmented Reality by John Craig Freeman
Year of Completion: 2011
Medium: Computer generated images, Augmented Reality application for mobile phone
Augmented Reality Installation Locations: Chinatown in Log Angles, for College Art Association 2011, U.S

Work Description: The work assembles images of some most influential folktale of China, including Southeast Flies the Peacock, The Peony Pavilion, Lady White Snake, Death of General Yang Zaixing,and Cowherd and Weaving Maid, featuring tragic romances as well as epic heroes/heroines admired by Chinese people from generation to generation. In contrast to the the spiritual, legendary figures in the foreground, which are designed as ‘virtual sculptures’ through Augmented Reality application on mobile phone, the background is set at a highly commercial area of a metropolitan city – China Town. By comparing virtual and physical, ancient and modern, east and west, we question the longevity of Chinese culture’s spiritual traditions in the process of capitalization. (continue reading)

** Launch Great Firewall of China Layar application on mobile phone: http://www.layar.com/layers/southeastfliesthepeacock

Chinese Take Out

Credit: 4gentlemen
Year of Completion: 2012
Medium: Computer 3D Models, Augmented Reality application for mobile phone
Augmented Reality Installation Locations:
1) Presidio overlook, Golden Gate, San Francisco
2) Powell Street Cable Car Turntable at Market Street, San Francisco
3) Gates of San Francisco’s Chinatown at Bush Street and Grand Avenue, San Francisco

Find images here https://fourgentlemen.blogspot.com/2012/04/artwork-reflecting-organ-harvest-in.html

Work Description: Collaborating with John Craig Freeman, Lily & Honglei’s project Chinese Take Out is presented at ZERO1 Biennial Seeking Silicon Valley in San Francisco CA. Chinese Take Out visualizes the gruesome reality that the Chinese government has been systematically harvesting organs from imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners for profit. For more info, click here.

From Lewisburg to Silicon Valley

Credit: paintings by Lily & Honglei, Augmented Reality by John Craig Freeman
Year of Completion: 2012
Medium: Computer 3D Models, Augmented Reality application for mobile phone
Augmented Reality Installation Locations:
NYC, Lewisburg Pennsylvania, and San Francisco CA

Work Description: The connection from Lewisburg Pennsylvania to the high-tech corporate campuses of Silicon Valley can be traced in the migration of the worlds manufacturing on its never ending quest for the least expensive, least regulated labor force and the trail of economic devastation it leaves in its wake. Viewed through their own mobile device, the “From Lewisburg, PA to Silicon Valley” augmented reality public art projects asks the audience to consider their own implications in this global history. – John Craig Freeman

More info click here.

***** *****

About International Artist Collaborative ‘Manifest.AR’ 

http://www.manifestar.info

Manifest.AR is an international artists’ collective working with emergent forms of augmented reality as interventionist public art. The group sees this medium as a way of transforming public space and institutions by installing virtual objects, which respond to and overlay the configuration of located physical meaning. Utilizing this technology as artwork is an entirely new proposition and explores all that we know and experience as the mixture of the real and the hyper-real.’ Physically, nothing changes, the audience can simply download and launch an Augmented Reality Browser app on their iPhone or Android and aim the devices’ camera to view the world around them. The application uses geolocation, marker tracking and image recognition software to superimpose computer generated three-dimensional art objects, enabling the public to see the work integrated into the physical location as if it existed in the real world.’

The Manifest.AR collective and individual members have produced projects, exhibitions and interventions worldwide, including in New York, Venice, Istanbul, Beijing, Cairo, Copenhagen, Tokyo and Berlin. For more information, please visit: http://www.manifestar.info/, and http://manifestarblog.wordpress.com

Since the beginning of 2011, as associate members of Manifest.AR, a pioneer new media artist collective, we have created a series of Augmented Reality (AR) art projects concerning social and cultural issues related to China.

Some images of our Augmented Reality work are derived from our earlier videos and virtual reality projects. The images, superimposed onto physical reality by mobile phone software, now function as ‘site-specific-virtual-sculpture’ that become part of a particular environment. Perceived through the mobile phone screen, the relationships between the imagery we create and the physical surroundings generate new implications.