Chun Shao
Digital Tapestry _ ongoing project
Chinoiserie research and digital textile explore:
Continuing an interest in reviving the tradition of Chinese gardens, this digital textile experiment begins with researching the Chinoiserie. This design-based trend is a European interpretation of ancient Chinese aesthetics. The impression of gardens is transformed into the design of wallpapers, furniture, porcelain vases, and architectural spaces (see images on the right). This research uncovers templates for representing Chinese gardens on a two-dimensional surface.
Video Wallpaper
The research of Chinoiserie wallpapers provides a drawing-based archetype to reconstruct gardens as a flat surface. Expanding this compositional method, the video collage was initiated from the making of a video mask wallpaper. This mask becomes an assemblage of Internet-found footage of gardens, mostly made available by tourists. The process of creating this garden-themed video wallpaper is shown below.
Video Tapestry
When experimenting with the projection of the video wallpaper, the visual effect seemed too chaotic and overwhelming to match the delicate nature of the tulle fabrics (the projection surface). However, this process revealed an embroidery-like visual effect created by the pixelated resolution of the projector imprinted on the fabric. This inspired an exploration of videos/moving images as a layer of virtual textile, which led me to research traditional tapestries. This ancient art form provided a compositional structure for assembling a digital tapestry made out of looping videos and masked by a collage of still images.
The content of this video tapestry was inspired by a collection of Chinese erotic paintings, dated to the Ming and Qing dynasties (17th and 19th centuries). The paintings suggest a unique type of voyeurism embodied by the viewing structure of the garden window frames.
To aestheticize the voyeurism found in online videos, images of Chinese Gardens were collaged to re-frame a collection of footage of girls dancing to Korean pop music. The original videos were the result of a YouTube search using the keywords “fan cam kpop girls.”
