Painting Professor Creates First Augmented Reality Experience at Philadelphia International Airport
A group of airborne schoolgirls greets travelers in Terminal F at Philadelphia International Airport (PHL). The young women are depicted in a mural, created by Adjunct Professor of Painting Ziui Chen Vance, in various states of jumping and raising their arms. There is a palpable movement to the brightly colored piece, but there is more to it than meets the eye.
Up, Up, and Away is a 72 x 240-inch vinyl print of a 20 x 68-inch acrylic painting. The project combines painted and printed mural methodologies with digital sculpting and virtual projection, extending the two-dimensional space of a painted mural with augmented reality. When viewers scan the accompanying QR code on their phone, they will be virtually immersed in the painting. It is the first piece of art in Philadelphia International Airport created with an element of augmented reality.
Vance said that the director of guest experiences at PHL, Tyler alum Leah Douglas (BFA ’85), became familiar with her work after seeing it exhibited across Philadelphia and reached out to her directly to create an installation designed specifically for the airport. Vance is a 2022 Center for Emerging Visual Artist Fellow, a 2023 Sustainable Arts Foundation Award Winner, and an Adolph and Ester Gottlieb Foundation grant recipient. She said that her art and design work “speaks to the human body as its language, possessing infinite connection.”
Vance’s practices in augmented reality focus on depicting insecurity as a feminine quality, representing affection, and exploring women’s power dynamics—particularly in how they impact Asian diasporas.
“I am interested in challenging the issues and biases that Asian women face, internally and externally, in high-traffic spaces,” Vance explained. “In this capacity, I am creating a digital diaspora to continually reflect inwardly about my outward expression of femininity due to the number of information devices and relative networks in our lives. … I see the two, the Asian diaspora and digital diaspora, as a means to understand my affection towards other people.”
Vance says that the last two years have consisted of rebuilding her artistic pathways through a new collection of paintings, which she calls visual essays. They are inspired by her experiences “as a Chinese woman in China, then as a Chinese woman in the United States, and most recently as an Asian woman moving within the larger world of demographics.”
“Each panel celebrates a bevy of womanly encounters observed from different viewpoints and captures my life experiences as a movement across successive scenes that reveal the intricacies of life—celebrating the commotion with festive encounters and progressing through different social dynamics.”
In addition to painting, Vance also teaches courses in CAD-CAM modeling and representation at Tyler. She received her BA in studio art from Tsinghua University in Beijing and her MFA from the University of Michigan.
There are 48 girls in the mural element of Up, Up, and Away, and nearly 40 unique digital figures incrementally displayed alongside the mural and elsewhere in the airport. The installation will be on view until September 30, 2024. The original painting will be on view at Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, PA from February 17 to May 26, 2024.