Into the pictures
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could walk into a painting or a photograph? Directed by Huang Hsin-chien and Oready CEO Benjamin Chang, Kuo Hsueh-Hu: Three States of Home Gazing was one of the Best Immersive works in the National Winners category of the 2020 Asian Academy Creative Awards; in 2021, it was nominated for the iF Design Award and won the Entertainment, Content Creation, and Streaming Media Design category of the A’ Design Award and Competition.
“We used three of Kuo’s classic paintings—The Setting Sun by Fort Provintia, Colorful Boats on the Tan Chiang River, and Festival on South Street—to create three types of VR interactions, focusing on space, time, and physical experience, which correspond to three themes: states of mind, gazes, and longings,” Chang says. Wearing VR equipment, viewers are able to experience what it was like to be at a festival in Taipei’s Dadaocheng in 1930. The project brings together contrarieties: home and abroad, past and present, the paintings per se and viewers’ perceptions.
VR practitioners are particularly proficient at creating works that respond to existing paintings. For example, in 2019 the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts exhibited The Universe of Liu Kuo-sung, which not only included a traditional display of Liu’s Chinese paintings, but also invited viewers to “look at,” “play with,” and “enter into” Liu’s universe of art from three different thematic angles: “Genesis,” “Chessboard,” and “Earth.” This immersive approach—which animated originally static paintings—situated viewers in the midst of Liu’s subtle and robust brushwork, enabling them to enjoy the fresh immediacy of the interactive experience.
In 2017, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts collaborated with Axis 3D Technology on a VR exhibition based on Lee Ming-tse’s Lotus Pond in Zuoying, a seemingly unsophisticated naïve painting packed with theatrical details. The exhibition blended imaginary storylines inspired by Taiwan’s folk culture with the artist’s nostalgia for the past spirit of his hometown.
Garden Taipei/Formosa: Taiwan Grand Tour, an exhibition curated by Huang Hsin-chien in 2021, included a VR artwork portraying Hakka scenes: Floating Childhoods. A collaborative project between Oready and the Hakka Public Communication Foundation, it displays the simple, unadorned lifestyle of old Taiwan, and was widely praised. Based on precious old photographs of Hakka communities in the Liudui area of Pingtung and Kaohsiung, it vividly conjures up the historic area of Wugoushui in Pingtung’s Wanluan Township.