URBAN FOREST
Urban Forest is a permanent large-scale metal and augmented reality sculpture at the Oh Bay Coastal Culture Park, Shenzhen, China. This work creates a contradictory and unusual juxtaposition of construction scaffolding wrapped around Mangifera Indica (Indian mango) trees. The stylized mango tree form is borrowed from a 17th century Mughal miniature painting, and placed in contemporary China to trouble our ideas about urbanism and nature while also reminding us of linkages between distant lands through trade and the global movement of plants and technologies.
A project for the Oh Bay Art Project: The Edge of Tomorrow
Urban Forest is a multifaceted new media art project. The aim of the project is to trouble our ideas of urbanism and nature by creating a fictional human-nature encounter in the form of a large-scale metal and augmented reality sculpture. The AR sculpture visualizes a heterotopia—a contradictory and unusual juxtaposition of construction scaffolding wrapped around mango trees.
Mango trees are abundant in Southern China, as the world’s second largest producer and exporter of mangoes. The diverse variety of this tree in the cosmopolitan city of Shenzhen include the exotic Mangifera Indica, which is native to India, as well as other ornamental mango tree species that line green corridors and grow along the roads and highways.
The stylized form of the mango tree in Urban Forest is borrowed from a c.1700 Indian miniature painting. The appropriation and visualization of this Indian tree in Shenzhen speaks about relations between distant lands through the global movement of food, materials, and knowledge. By looking at the history of the mango tree, we can learn something about entangled human histories.
The augmented reality in Urban Forest situates the viewer in a liminal place—a place that mixes of concrete reality and the virtual world. In real time, with the viewer’s personal device, the viewer sees the sculpture transform as the mango trees gets enwrapped in scaffolding, reminding us of rapidly growing cities and complicating our understanding of nature in the urban context. These imaginations are symbolic of the different realities that exist simultaneously within our cities.
