Haridwar Today

Shanghai, China – September 22, 2026 – On September 23, works from the inaugural MM·ARTech+ (Motion Magic Art Residency + Technology) make their world premiere at TANK Shanghai. Under the theme “In Shanghai,” the showcase brings together nine artworks created during the residency by 15 new media artists from eight countries, working in eight groups. For its first edition, the residency has chosen projection mapping as its central medium, turning three semicircular architectural façades at TANK Shanghai into a dazzling array of moving images. As light and color weave together, the virtual and the physical intertwine to create a new urban landscape.

Sculpting Light through Aura Landscape and Public Art

In humanity’s earliest narratives, light is the first act of creation. The history of painting with light is almost as old as art itself, yet it was not until the twentieth century that light became a material to be shaped in its own right. Between 1922 and 1930, László Moholy-Nagy, who taught at the Bauhaus, constructed his Light-Space Modulator from metal, glass, and motors, casting continually changing patterns of light and shadow across walls and space. In the United States in the 1960s, Dan Flavin used commercially available fluorescent tubes to create arrangements of pure light and color. Almost simultaneously, the Light and Space movement emerging in Southern California took light into more radical experiments in perception. Many other artists subsequently began exploring light, gradually establishing it as a sculptural material.

Projection mapping extends this lineage into the digital age. It takes light’s expressive possibilities to their limits, giving substance to the immaterial and a sense of permanence to the fleeting. Using architectural façades and spatial structures as its canvas, it brings buildings to life through light and shadow.

The decision to place projection mapping at the heart of the first MM·ARTech+ residency was deliberate. With architecture as their canvas, these works require viewers to be physically present. This emphasis on being there is integral to the theme “In Shanghai.” It first asks artists to spend enough time getting to know a city, then to create an ensemble of mapped projections across the three and a half tank façades at TANK Shanghai. Unlike a church or a heritage building offering a single projection surface, this setting asks viewers to move among the structures, encountering different aspects of the works from different angles and distances.

The challenge of viewing in turn shapes the creative process. Some works use staggered sequences: certain buildings light up while others remain dark, before illuminating in succession to the rhythm of the music. Others distribute different imagery across the various semicircular surfaces, creating a narrative that unfolds like a long scroll. This site-responsive approach prompted many artists to move away from figurative narrative toward abstraction, giving the project its experimental and contemporary character. It offers both a practical platform for ultra-high-definition audiovisual production and the digital creative industries, and a continuation of an avant-garde artistic lineage.

Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction diminished the artwork’s “here and now.” Projection mapping, by contrast, takes the physical surface of a particular building as its sole support and requires viewers to be there in person, even though that presence is made possible by infinitely reproducible digital code. Projection mapping is not a one-way act of casting images onto a surface; it is a dialogue among artists, technology, architectural space, the environment, and audiences. This resonates with Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics: contemporary art is no longer a self-contained, static object, but a catalyst. Art’s very being shifts from the object to the dynamic process of people meeting and interacting. The value of light art thus extends beyond visual form to its capacity to inspire and build new relationships, both among people and with the city. As the residency’s vision suggests, art can bring light to a city in its own distinctive way.

New Cityscapes through Air Patterns and Local Stories

If projection mapping is the medium of this residency, then stories rooted in place and shaped by cultural encounters are the shared language of its nine works. The inaugural MM·ARTech+ residency invited 15 digital artists from eight countries, working in eight groups, to take up residence at “Motion Magic Space” in Shanghai Multimedia Valley and create under the theme “In Shanghai.”

At its heart, this two-month period of creation was an exercise in seeing from two directions. The artists arrived in Shanghai carrying their own cultural perspectives, then came to know the city through everyday neighborhood life. Their works emerged where those experiences met. When an artist creates a work about Shanghai’s air, or a team brings the patterns of Taiping Chan Temple back to Pilsen, an artwork becomes a letter sent out into the world.

During the residency, the artists encountered Shanghai in the most ordinary ways. They wandered through residential neighborhoods and lanes hung with laundry, visited Yu Garden, studied the doors and windows of Shikumen houses and the decorative patterns of temples, and noted the traffic flowing past their windows and the graphic details on takeaway packaging. They also carried with them the sound of summer cicadas and the colors of the evening sky after a typhoon. Behind every work lies a small story of an encounter with the city.

For many of the artists, their first encounter with Shanghai arose from the contrast between what they expected before landing and what they experienced on arrival. RE_SPIRIA, a collaboration between visual artist Kati Katona and sound artist Natalie Szende, began with an almost counterintuitive discovery. Before coming to Shanghai, they had assumed that the air in all major global cities was poor. Walking out of the airport, however, they were surprised to find Shanghai’s air fresher than what they had experienced in Berlin and London. That led them to study a month of air-quality data from the Shanghai Meteorological Bureau. An encounter with the typhoon “White Dolphin” provided another spark, and they ultimately transformed air-quality indices into a cycle of image and sound. In each breath lies their most immediate, embodied memory of Shanghai.

Zongbo Jiang, meanwhile, transforms a sturgeon, a sea bulrush, and a hooded crane into anthropomorphic digital characters. In Climate Club, the sturgeon evokes ancient migrations between river and sea; the sea bulrush represents a plant characteristic of Shanghai’s wetlands; and the hooded crane is a seasonal migrant. Zongbo imagines Shanghai as a city of coexistence, shared by humans and other forms of life.

Antoine Contreras takes an everyday vase as the starting point for Toupie Toupie. For him, the vase is an object that transcends cultures, its silhouette instantly recognizable. In Shanghai, it repeatedly transforms, multiplies, and splits apart in projection, eventually leaving representation behind for the freedom of abstraction. Like the city itself, it brings together different cultures while remaining in constant flux. Henry Hu and Jedy Chen begin with the circular structures of TANK Shanghai. Treating the circle as a symbol of Shanghai’s openness to diverse cultures, they distill this idea into Continuum.

Gábor Szűcs weaves the buildings seen from his hotel room, dragon motifs in classical gardens, and the brilliant evening sky after a typhoon into a pulsating strand of light in Liminal Pulse. Eri Harigai incorporates the doors, windows, mailboxes, and Shikumen structures of Tianzifang and Bugao Li into Glimmering Gold. Flowing images of osmanthus move through the textures of Shanghai architecture, the intensity of summer sunlight, and the golden city at night. What stays with her is Shanghai’s light, its temperature, and the tactile experience of its streets and lanes.

Other stories begin with even smaller observations. Summer & Co Studio was captivated by the sound of cicadas during its first week in Shanghai. Following that sound, the artists learned about the insects’ long dormancy, transformation, and emergence from the earth, turning their observations into Cicada, a meditation on life. flashFLASH Studio began with the sight of people walking their dogs. Through lighthearted, humorous flights of imagination, the companions on these walks become racing cars, afternoon tea, bars, and plants, conjuring a distinctly Shanghai sense of play in which everyone is “taking their hobbies for a walk.” The Shanghai they see has room for everything.

At a deeper level, the residency is about encounters and exchanges across cultures. Many of the international artists openly acknowledged that their experience of Shanghai differed markedly from what they had seen online before arriving. Air and climate were part of that difference, as was the novelty of digitally enabled everyday life. Online shopping and food delivery, conveniences taken for granted locally, were new experiences for them.

When Czech artist Julie Tampierová’s grandfather learned that she was going to China, he made a special visit to see her off. He taught himself to use a smartphone and frequently asked her about China during video calls. He has since become the center of attention among his circle of older friends in Pilsen, all curious about what China looks like today. Through one family, a residency experience became a firsthand account of China for a small European city. As the works and their stories travel back to the artists’ home countries, they bring a tangible, lived dimension to international exchange and help build the understanding that can support Chinese art’s future journeys abroad.

These observations may seem small, but they are the substance of the artists’ lived experience during the residency. Without them, viewers see only an array of abstract patterns. The history of public art is itself a movement from monument to dialogue, and in these works of light, the artwork is only the beginning of the conversation. Nine works offer nine ways of engaging with Shanghai. Understanding a city ultimately rests in these precise, everyday details.

Art and Technology in the City’s Virtual and Physical Future

The convergence of art and technology is rewriting the definition of reality. In a real city, one can step into a virtual memory; within a passage of light art, one can feel a city’s living warmth. At the site of the projections, viewers walk among the works, enveloped in light and becoming part of the art. When the festival ends, these digital assets become part of the city’s collective memory, waiting to be illuminated again.

Yet questions remain once the excitement subsides. In a discussion during the residency, Zongbo Jiang raised a question worth considering: how can people be encouraged to linger in waterfront spaces and remain engaged with them over time? Almost every urban public art project must confront a version of this question. Once the lights go out and the festival ends, can a work still retain a place in the city’s memory? The answer may lie beyond technology itself. Tang Hao, general manager of Motion Magic and initiator of the MM·ARTech+ residency, articulated the vision behind this exploration: art can serve as a medium of exchange among diverse cultures, building bridges between cities and cultural worlds. This is the cultural vision the residency seeks to convey.

The interweaving of the virtual and the physical is opening up the city’s future. Across the illuminated surfaces of TANK Shanghai, a new play of light and color is taking shape, distinctively of our time.

About MM·ARTech+

MM·ARTech+ aims to establish an ongoing international residency platform for digital and new-media art. By bringing artists from different cultures and disciplines together in Shanghai, the program supports research, experimentation, and collaboration while building lasting connections between global creators and local cultural communities.

Media Contact
Company Name: Motion Magic
Contact Person: Enze Wang
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Country: China
Website: https://www.mmartech.art/residency.html